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

[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.