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Online Community Building: Staying In Touch With Membership

It seems like no one seriously considers Email anymore and a lot of times spam scripts on servers may send what you do correspond to junk thus making it difficult to stay in touch. Members have a lot of options and though they will visit they may 'forget' to. When they do get a notification of sorts: newsletter or reply notification they come back - if it doesn't go to Junk first. Many have also gone to the social giants and these giants have tapped into people's phones by being able to send them notifications in apps and and interfaces beyond Email. So my question for discussion: what are some creative ways you use to stay in touch with your site's members beyond the newsletter and their visits.

Membership Touch Staying Building Community Online

If you have their number you can text or Whatsapp them assuming they have Wahtaspp but you can always make that the pretext for getting their number.

Online Community Building: Staying In Touch With Membership Gaming Video & Issues Computer

Unless the rules of have changed, one thing that might allow members to better able stay in touch with site members is being allow to exchange contact information like emails. Sticking to PMs, if you have premium, or talking in their Introduction and other threads has actually felt frustratingly limiting in the past. Where when I left before and other roleplaying threads were closed except RoK II, and I found out later that past members I knew had tried getting a hold of me but couldn't because of such limitations.

Edited: Thomaslee on 12th Jan, 2020 - 6:17pm

Membership Touch Staying Building Community Online

Coder, I have thought about those, however sending text (SMS) has a cost attached to it that I rather not get involved with. I have thought about Whatsapp but not everyone uses it, checks it and since the API / FB connection I rather not use it.

Thomaslee, this Thread is not about how Members stay in touch with each other. This is about how site owners stay in touch with members outside of Email.

Rather off topic, but...
Rules on that will not change. People can continue to use FB / Other sites for that sort of exchange.. Spammers, trolls and leechers will take full advantage as has been our experience.

Membership Touch Staying Building Community Online

Oh, my apologies I must have misread what this thread was about. The only other thing I could think of, other than you sending us emails and newletters, is maybe setting up a Twitter or Facebook for the site. That, and in maybe finding a way of enabling PMs for you with members even if they don't have a Premium account.

Edited: Thomaslee on 12th Jan, 2020 - 7:00pm

Online Community Building: Staying In Touch With Membership

PMing Members will still be reliant on Email since you won't know about the PM until you visit the site.

We have removed the social integration from this site for many reasons one of which is the requirements / information and ability to interact with people that come from popular social networks changes all the time. It is actually a complaint a lot of other site owners have as well. A good example of that… it used to be that you could use an API to send a notification to someone on FB about your site but they changed that a couple of years ago.

One way I have thought about was to create my own mobile application that sends out notifications to a user that has the app installed. While this could be effective it will of course rely on the Member installing and using the app on their end. While on our end we would constantly need to ensure it works across all mobile operating systems.

Online Community Building Staying Touch Membership

I can see an app doing that but it will have to do more than just give a notification you will probably need to make it be able to interact with the site too like reply and view the content.

Online Community Building Staying Touch Membership Computer Issues & Video Gaming

Right again, at least that is what the user might expect unless I tie it into their browser and let the browser do the work which what was originally intended.