Monthly Community Spotlight

[PhenomGW]

TL;DR: Start a Monthly Community Spotlight - recognizing and rewarding outstanding contributions
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I'd like to suggest an initiative that aims to elevate the quality of our forum, promote user engagement, and recognize the contributions made by our talented members. The Community Spotlight will highlight the best content from the previous month, including guides, support answers, and resources. I believe that by rewarding and recognizing users for their valuable contributions, we can create a thriving community driven by excellence.

Spotlight Categories
The Monthly Community Spotlight will focus on the following categories:

• Best Guide/Tutorial: We will showcase the most informative, well-presented, and helpful guide or tutorial posted in the previous month. These resources contribute to the collective knowledge of our community.
• Best Support Answer: Recognizing the importance of support within our community, we will highlight the most useful and comprehensive responses to support questions or troubleshooting threads from the previous month. This category celebrates those who consistently provide outstanding assistance to members.
• Best Resource: We will feature the best free resource released to our community during the previous month. This can include server repacks, SQL scripts, Lua scripts, website scripts, designs, and more. These resources contribute to the growth and innovation of our community. We could split things up into subcategories if enough resources get released each month.
• Most clicked server (Find your Server functionality): In this spotlight category, we acknowledge the server that has captured the most attention/clicks within our community through our Find Your Server platform.

Perks for Highlighted Contributors
To reward highlighted contributors, there should be some exclusive perks that recognize their achievements:

• Exclusive Forum Rank: Authors of the highlighted content will receive a special forum rank, such as "Highlighted Contributor" for the duration of one month. This visually distinct rank showcases their dedication and serves as a badge of honor.
  • visually distinct could be: username color, rank image, username 'background', exclusive text color when posting etc.
• Exclusive Usergroup: Highlighted contributors, both past and present, will be invited to join an exclusive, invite-only usergroup. This privileged space allows them to connect, collaborate, and share ideas with like-minded individuals who have made significant contributions to our community.

Selecting Content for the Spotlight
We need to ensure a fair selection process. I'm unsure what the best way to go about this would be. Some thoughts/options (we could also do a combination):

• Forum Reputation System: Contributions with the highest reputation points, earned through the forum's +rep functionality, will be considered for the spotlight. This metric reflects community recognition and appreciation.
• Download Count (For downloadable content such as resources): The number of times it has been downloaded could be taken into account. This metric emphasizes the popularity of the contribution.
• Community Nomination: Encourage community members to actively participate by nominating contributions they believe deserve recognition. Their nominations play a crucial role in identifying hidden gems and ensuring diverse perspectives are considered.
• Staff Pick: Forum staff, assuming with enough expertise and knowledge, will evaluate and nominate outstanding contributions based on their judgment. Their involvement should ensures a fair and balanced selection process.
• Spotlight Committee: A dedicated committee of skilled and knowledgeable community members. Committee members themselves will not be eligible to be highlighted in the Spotlight.

Goals
The Monthly Community Spotlight initiative aims to achieve the following goals:

• Reward and Recognition: Acknowledge the hard work and dedication of contributors, providing them with a goal to work towards. The one-month exclusive forum rank creates a competitive spirit, encouraging users to continuously strive for recognition.
• Quality over Quantity: By prioritizing quality content, we aim to create a vibrant community where users have a reason to visit and keep coming back. The idea is that valuable content will attract new users.
• Advertisement: The Monthly Community Spotlight offers an indirect form of advertisement. Instead of promoting our community by claiming superiority, we showcase the incredible content available on our forum. This approach attracts users naturally, demonstrating the value and expertise of our community. The spotlight could be shared or referenced on platforms such as r/WoWservers.

The Monthly Community Spotlight aims to elevate forum to new heights. By emphasizing quality over quantity, rewarding and recognizing our contributors, and indirectly promoting our community through exceptional content, we create a vibrant and engaging space for all members.

Although I do have some experience, I am definitely not trained or an expert in PR and community management. Although I believe this suggestion could be beneficial to WoWemu, I cannot guarantee success.

 

[Ayiko]

Great idea, i like the initiative that members of the forums are taking, it shows that it's coming from both sides, staff&community that we all want the forum to thrive and grow! <3
Rewarding people with stuff might encourage them more to do indeed make more quality posts, but yeah.

How do we make NON-MEMBERS see those threads/posts? Is there a way we can add tags for seo optimizing to the threads? Like if people search "How to make a wow private server"that one of our threads gets to be displayed? in a sense that this all links up to the search engines i.e google etc, because of course we're a thriving community but the emulation scene is decreasing, and we need a little bit more growth i think!

Big rep to you my man <3


I did not use AI to structure this post, however i still hate Jens.

 

[PhenomGW]

Great idea, i like the initiative that members of the forums are taking, it shows that it's coming from both sides, staff&community that we all want the forum to thrive and grow! <3
Rewarding people with stuff might encourage them more to do indeed make more quality posts, but yeah.

How do we make NON-MEMBERS see those threads/posts? Is there a way we can add tags for seo optimizing to the threads? Like if people search "How to make a wow private server"that one of our threads gets to be displayed? in a sense that this all links up to the search engines i.e google etc, because of course we're a thriving community but the emulation scene is decreasing, and we need a little bit more growth i think!

Big rep to you my man <3


I did not use AI to structure this post, however i still hate Jens.

Thanks! I can't contribute much in regards to making and releasing actual resources, but I like the believe I'm okayish with coming up with ideas.

Good point on SEO. I must admit, that's not one of my strong points. I have some basic knowledge but for all I know that could be very outdated.
The Spotlight post would probably have a fixed format that could be used monthly. Would category descriptions and explanations help with SEO? For example:

-------

Monthly Community Spotlight: July 2023
Each beginning of the month we hand pick the best contributions from our knowledgeable and skilled community for you to check out. These contributions will help both beginners and veterans setup their server and make it more fun and unique.
Also be sure to check out the past Spotlights in our dedicated forum section. Looking for more details on what the spotlight is? Click here!

Categories
We carefully selected these contributions for the month X. According to our criteria it's the best and worth to check out bla bla.

Guides:
This month's pick: Ayiko - How to make your server public with Hamachi (with pictures)
Ayiko wrote an excellent guide which explains how to setup your own World of Warcraft Private Server in order to play with friends. It features plenty of pictures to help you do it yourself.

Resources:
This month's pick: Splicho - Teleporter NPC Lua script
Splicho wrote a new Teleporter NPC in Lua that includes all kinds of locations up till expansion pack X running patch X on Trinitycore.
--------

Obviously it'll have to look much nicer, but you get the idea

 

[splicho]

Great idea, i like the initiative that members of the forums are taking, it shows that it's coming from both sides, staff&community that we all want the forum to thrive and grow! <3
Rewarding people with stuff might encourage them more to do indeed make more quality posts, but yeah.

How do we make NON-MEMBERS see those threads/posts? Is there a way we can add tags for seo optimizing to the threads? Like if people search "How to make a wow private server"that one of our threads gets to be displayed? in a sense that this all links up to the search engines i.e google etc, because of course we're a thriving community but the emulation scene is decreasing, and we need a little bit more growth i think!

Big rep to you my man <3


I did not use AI to structure this post, however i still hate Jens.

The only solution for this would be to make a announce notice on the index page, like the one we had earlier with new shop items.
Maybe also custom title styling in the thread list - To have topic recognition

Or a complete custom addon handling all this stuff, which will cost money.
Overall I +1 this idea, sounds fire.

 

[PhenomGW]

The only solution for this would be to make a announce notice on the index page, like the one we had earlier with new shop items.
Maybe also custom title styling in the thread list - To have topic recognition

Or a complete custom addon handling all this stuff, which will cost money.
Overall I +1 this idea, sounds fire.

We could create a landing page that features the latest spotlight content. Would that help?

Below is a screenshot from some concepting I did recently but never finished. It was supposed to be a suggestion on how a homepage could look like with the focus on content, but I think it could help visualize how such a landing page could look like.

 

[PhenomGW]

We could create a landing page that features the latest spotlight content. Would that help?

Below is a screenshot from some concepting I did recently but never finished. It was supposed to be a suggestion on how a homepage could look like with the focus on content, but I think it could help visualize how such a landing page could look like.

View attachment 3448

Let's say a homepage is made, it could run on Wordpress with the free Elementor Plugin to visually build a nice page. On top of that this paid plugin could be used to bridge between Wordpress and Xenforo.

 

[Rogue]

We could create a landing page that features the latest spotlight content. Would that help?

Below is a screenshot from some concepting I did recently but never finished. It was supposed to be a suggestion on how a homepage could look like with the focus on content, but I think it could help visualize how such a landing page could look like.

View attachment 3448

this is dope i like it

 

[PhenomGW]

this is dope i like it

Thanks! I wouldn't recommend using this exact design, it's pretty bad. But it visualizes what I have in mind pretty well.
Some modifications are needed since we're no longer exclusively focused on WoW, maybe I'll make a more serious attempt at a proper design in a few weeks.

 

[Rogue]

Thanks! I wouldn't recommend using this exact design, it's pretty bad. But it visualizes what I have in mind pretty well.
Some modifications are needed since we're no longer exclusively focused on WoW, maybe I'll make a more serious attempt at a proper design in a few weeks.

Yeah i understand, its example, but i like your thinking

 

[PhenomGW]

Updated Original Post to include Find Your Server functionality as Spotlight category.