Vanilla Forums Blog

Community Management is still a relatively new profession, one that’s evolving month-after-month, year-after-year. More often than not, Community Managers learn their trade while either launching or growing their community within the corporate vision.

It’s not uncommon for a Community Manager to start their career as someone picked up from another department (often HR or Marketing) as a part-time hire or as someone given extra responsibility in parallel with their main role. And their purpose is often to prove the value of community.

After many months of development, we are very excited to unveil a new Rich Editor, an enhanced WYSIWYG  (what you see is what you get) experience. This project has been the culmination of much work amongst several developers on our team and we are so happy to finally share it with you.

(left to right: Vanilla Forums Developer, Adam Charron and  Vanilla Forums co-Founder Todd Burry chat with Head of Community, Adrian Speyer about the new rich editor)

Why even bother with a new editor?

Certainly, there are many people who will wonder why we bothered. Wasn’t our current advanced editor adequate? As with most things in Vanilla, we always strive for a better user experience and we drove to rethink the editor from the core. We paid careful attention to the kinds of editors people are now used to using, and what they have to expect.

As co-founder of Vanilla, Todd Burry noted “For most people our Advanced Editor was good enough, but we couldn’t have a true WYSIWYG experience, so we needed to move to a more modern architecture. Making this change will allow us to expand the editor for future features and projects we have planned in the not too distant future. This is only the first step, and the initial release for this project, but many exciting things are planned.”

In May 2012, Polish studio CD Projekt Red announced Cyberpunk 2077, a dystopian RPG set in the futuristic Night City. Following the success of their 2011 title, Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, expectations were enormous. When they launched a trailer in January 2013, it reached 12 million views within the first week.

“How do you keep community members engaged?” Though this is one of the most common community questions, the answer is always frustrating and unsatisfactory: “It depends.”

There may not be one singular approach to engaging all communities, but there is a framework to structure engagement for your specific community.

It’s called the Community Commitment Curve.

Many tech companies now have their own online communities for providing support to their customers as well as a place for them to hang out and share their ideas and feedback. These communities are valuable marketing assets that foster engagement and build customer loyalty.  At the same time, they also help your brand inspire the rise of advocates who will happily spread the good word about your company.