Member Avatar for happygeek

If you were in charge at DaniWeb, what would you do to stimulate growth of the community here. By which I mean the social and cultural side of DaniWeb rather than the straightforward tech Q&A stuff.

How would you encourage more social posting by the membership, and empower them with a sense of cultural belonging without detracting from the core technical support function?

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Dani AI

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The question raised by —how to grow the social and cultural side of DaniWeb without weakening the technical core—benefits from small, opt‑in design choices rather than sweeping sitewide changes. Several suggestions in the thread point the same direction: make discovery easy, let members choose to join social spaces, and give newcomers a short, friendly path into the community.

Core, immediately actionable features:

  • Interest microgroups: opt‑in groups (public or invite) that members can join by tag; lightweight group pages with a short description and a volunteer moderator.
  • Profile attribute linking: allow consenting members to add searchable tags (skills, location, hobbies) and opt into a browsable directory so connections can form without exposing private data.
  • Low‑friction icebreakers: a guided “introduce yourself” template, a weekly casual thread, and a small “first‑week missions” checklist that encourages one or two social interactions.
  • Local/offline support: a simple events calendar and “local ambassador” flag so members can organise meetups or represent the site at conferences without site admins having to run every event.

Quick mentor rollout (minimal overhead): 1) Recruit volunteer mentors and a one‑page code of conduct; 2) Offer new accounts an opt‑in “welcome buddy” during signup; 3) Auto‑match by one or two tags (area + timezone) and give mentors three template messages and a 2‑week checklist; 4) Reward mentors with a small badge and limited tools. This respects ’s mentor idea while keeping it voluntary and scalable.

Protecting Q&A: keep social spaces clearly labelled and separated, require opt‑in contact, and give moderators auto‑tools to move persistent off‑topic threads. Offline/outreach ideas raised by and are useful when run through local ambassadors or volunteers rather than forced sitewide campaigns. Small, consented features plus light volunteer moderation scale well and grow culture without diluting technical value.

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Member Avatar for 'Stein

Well outta curiosity (and I dunno whether this is taking place or not), has anybody looked into physical advertisement (ie handing out fliars or something along those lines, in a major city)?

I guess this would be easier considering Dani lives in NY...

Member Avatar for Dani

I often frequent conventions and seminars where I hand out these spiffy looking business cards. In addition, I recently purchased and sent a handful of business cards - with their names on them - to both tgreer and kc0arf to hand out in person, as well.

Member Avatar for nomax5

Interesting question and bare in mind I’ve only been here 5 mins

It’s something I’ve been thinking about in general and I think you’ve got to form subgroups almost clanism.

I think I saw you have 90,000 members when I joined that’s way to big a group for 1 person to know.

Groups within the forum form naturally, the moderator group probably know each other or at least share a sense of comradeship.

Then groups may form around physical real world location The Brits or the New Yorkers Aussies.

Or areas of expertise PHP devs, .net people, artistic peeps.

So to bind a community I think you have to encourage subgroups and label them.

Member Avatar for Dani

So far what we've done along that route is creating an off-topic Lounge forum for each category. For example, there is a Web Developer's Lounge and a separate Internet Marketer's Lounge.

I have also taken the social networking route in member profiles ... check out my profile, for example, to see what I mean.

Member Avatar for nomax5

Ahh I see yes thats good but I missed it and I havn't entered anything about me

I didn't see any point telling everyone about me..

perhaps you have to be more pushy? quid pro quo style, tell us somethingabout yourself for points or Karma or4 something

link people on their attributes and Tell them "500 members also live in the UK" "6000 members also like world of warcraft"

I can't remember where but I was reading recently about a site that forced people to make a friend and send them a message. like breaking the ice.

or assign a mentor to each new arrival!! your mentor is bob then bob contacts the new member.

Member Avatar for happygeek

I like the attribute linking idea, although to be really useful it would need to go a stage further and enable that group to contact each other.

Member Avatar for cyfm

I know their are people who specifically sign up and just post one question for help then their are others who come here for the community spirit, I think what nomax5 said is corect getting members with certain links together such as locations are good, i also think a recreational area for everyone is a great idea which allows the community to just relax and chill out, what about 'offline' events for example organising a party or conference?

Anyway those are my thoughts,

William vbrep_register("233546")

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