Evolving your community

Over time you may need to expand your community structure and evolve your community. It's best to let data guide and inform these decisions when reviewing your community structure for expansion. Consider making new areas only if you think they'll be able to support about 5-10 new posts per day, add something critical to your community that cannot live with other content, or breaks out of existing discussions. Thinking of expanding, then consider the following best practices:

 

For building off existing boards or areas:

• Does the board have more 30 posts per day?
• Is the volume not driven by trending topics or themes, but rather is the engagement sustained over a period of time?
• Is it easy to divide this content up into two different boards?
• Would the creation of this area NOT dilute existing discussions?

If yes, you should be able to safely create a new area and seed it by moving existing content. 

 

For a brand new area, consider:

5 - 10 posts per day is a helpful rule of thumb to guide your decision making when creating a new area. This rule determines that in any given time, your community should receive no less than 5 - 10 posts per forum board, per day. Forums achieving this minimum are successful in showing signs of life and volume, and therefore more likely to grow. If your new area is unlikely to ever hit this threshold, consider shelving it until there is additional interest for it.