Making communities more visible

[yvi]

Title:
Making communities more visible

Area:
Communities

Summary:
There are several ways in which I think communities could be promoted a bit more around Dreamwidth.

Description:
Apart from searching for interests and hoping that the community maintainers filled out the profile for a community, looking at dw_community_promo, and asking other people, it is a bit hard finding active communities on Dreamwidth. The "random community" button usually doesn't help that much if you are looking for something specific and active. I propose a few things:

* A page similar to http://www.dreamwidth.org/syn/ with the most popular communities on DW, which would be of particular interest to new users, and a link to dw_communitiy_promo . That page could also include links to a few randomly chosen communities (opt-out for maintainers the same as opting out of account creation community promo http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/69578.html )

* A link to dw_communitiy_promo after one has created a community, so that more new communities are posted there

* Split "Recently Active" on http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats into "Recently Active Personal Journals" and "Recently Active Communities". Same with "New Accounts" (though since that also includes feeds, that might be too much)

(Ultimately, I would love to have a "promo page" where community maintainers can submit their community with a nice blurb and then it gets portrayed there for a week or so. But I haven't worked that out yet.)

Poll #2488 Making communities more visible

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 54

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
41 (75.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (9.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (11.1%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (3.7%)

Comments

[goodbyebird]

* A link to dw_communitiy_promo after one has created a community, so that more new communities are posted there

I'm sure many would prefer to wait until they've finished setting the community up layout/profile/content-wise. Still, the option would also serve to make people are aware that such a community actually exists.

* Split "Recently Active" on http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats into "Recently Active Personal Journals" and "Recently Active Communities".

+1

[jana]

(Ultimately, I would love to have a "promo page" where community maintainers can submit their community with a nice blurb and then it gets portrayed there for a week or so. But I haven't worked that out yet.)

It would be nice if such a page

* would be easy to find, like http://www.dreamwidth.org/communities (which doesn't have much information at this point),
* would show portrayed communities, like you suggested (maybe the maintainers of dw_community_promo could randomly choose three communities every week and write a short 'review' - given that community maintainers have the option to opt-in/opt-out,
* would make it easy for people to find all the official communities (and the popular ones which you also mentioned),
* would allow people to find/search communities by tag/category (list/tag cloud?),
* would make all the community-related information on DW Notes visible, with a link/text box/whatever,
*...

I'm sure I can think of more, but right now that's it :) Basically, what I'd like is an 'entry page' where all community relevant content is available from one single place.

[zvi]

Not all communities are intended for the general public, there needs to be a simple and effective way for community owners to opt out of all this publicity.

[dhobikikutti]

I would love for there to be a registry of communities that can be sorted either alphabetically or according to interests. (Actually, I'd like that for RSS feeds too, since its really hard to find the non-popular ones.)

Also a way for private locked-down communities to opt out of it.

[torachan]

A community registry would be very helpful, yes.

Hmmm...

[elke_tanzer]

I keep thinking that I want a way to list out all of the DW communities there are (which would include the functionality for comm owners to be able to opt out of their comm being on the list).

I'm actively hunting for communities relevant to my interests, but sometimes, I don't realize something is relevant to my interests until I see that it already exists... so I don't know ahead of time what interests to search for. Sometimes I'd just like to scroll through a big big big list of every DW comm, and turn up some gems I would've never found otherwise.