📖 Introduction
Thank you for the continuing support for our new "Community Update" format. You can read our July edition here. As we are progressing we are trying to include different topics within each community update. Happy reading for the 08/2021 edition!
For the August update, we are going to share a very interesting interview with this large Flarum powered Community. A special and big thank you to Daniele and Ahmet from UPC CH for taking their time answering questions for our Community Update!
👥 The interview
Please describe your community in 3-5 sentences.
A support community - customers helping customers on our wide range of products in the telecommunications industry.
Can you name one word that embodies the culture of your community?
Can you introduce yourself and your position at UPC CH briefly?
My name is Daniele Ladu, 45 years old and I have been a community manager at Sunrise UPC for over 2 years, managing the platform and also handling the escalation cases in our community.
What made you decide to use Flarum as your community software?
We were looking for an open source solution that is expandable, out in the box, ready for future features and also has a large community for assistance.
Which top 3 features do you like most about Flarum?
I like the customization of the tags for moving a thread, which just takes more effort in other communities.
We like the simple and fast creation of a new category, as well as the configuration of access rights.
Our customers love products with fast speed (e.g. Internet). We love this too and that's why we like the Flarum open source solution. It is very fast and intuitive compared to other communities.
With Flarum being Stable - what's the next big thing you want to see added?
Since we are in the telecommunications industry, we still have to use external tools with Flarum, for example to generate escalation emails after a service level has expired. We also have to distribute the work to the employees via the external tool.
Here I would like to see a "telecom" module / extension / feature that includes simple distributions and escalation criteria. This way more staff can work in the community with a logical distribution of requests through Flarum.
Another idea would be to ask for user skill preferences during the registration phase. As an example, you can ask the new user if he is an expert in a specific field (example mobile, internet, landline, etc.). If he ticks one, he will be automatically registered in a "Notification Group". Now other users can explicitly mention the experts, for example with an @Expert_mobile. They will then receive an e-mail with the information that their expert knowledge is being requested. In between you can add an approval by the admin.
What’s your biggest lesson learned from running Flarum?
Migrating our customers from the old community to the new solution was a big challenge. More precisely, the onboarding for existing community customers. Maybe one day there will be a migration tool that works like Synology for example. The change should be made easy. Here you could import an Excel table with previously defined criteria.
Also the multi-languages we have in Switzerland (DE, FR, IT, EN) was a big challenge.
Which Flarum extensions do you rely most on?
I use very often the extension "FoF Moderator Notes". With this extension I have the possibility to add private notes to the user account. As a use case, this would be the customer number. After the identification, this is stored in the profile of the user. After that we don't have to identify him again.
What advice would you give any community manager who just started?
Be open for new things, be interested in the technical development and report suggestions and error patterns to the Flarum community for further optimization.
Who do you look up to in regards to community management?
We access our existing community manager network for this purpose. In our group we have community managers from all areas and we meet physically several times a year for an interesting exchange.
Any final remarks you want other Flarum users, reading your interview, to know?
Live the open source idea, share your experience and developments with others, so that you too can benefit from this open culture in the long term.
📰 Other News
Users of popular Administration interfaces have now got a new way to easily get Flarum installed. In the last month Sofaculous has added Flarum to their list of Forum scripts available for easy installation. Here is a quote from their website:
From the website:
Softaculous is the leading Auto Installer for cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, InterWorx, H-Sphere. It has 404 great scripts and we are still adding more.
The announcement:
🕸️ Extension Highlights
New additions
Updated Extensions
🏁 Final words
We hope you have liked this edition of “Community Updates”. Looking forward to your comments and ideas for future updates. The next edition will focus on solutions to the spamming issue within communities. Read you in October!
