Hey there community success team!
Over the past few months, I have had a number of potential community members contact me via email asking if they can post an article.
I responded by asking them why they thought they needed permissions and they said that it wasn't obvious from browsing the community that anyone could create a post.
Food for thought! Obviously, most of my communities are not Dev focused so maybe that plays a part.
Take care!
L
Top comments (8)
Hey Lee,
Interesting stuff! I'll tag in our product designer @lisasy just so she's aware of this potential issue — folks browsing and not realizing that they can create articles.
That said, I do wonder, do you think that most of the people who you speak to end up becoming productive community members or do they seem more like folks that are just trying to promote themselves by getting their articles up on the site? The reason I ask is that we also often have folks write into DEV asking if they can post articles — sometimes they're generally interested in being involved in the community, in which case I encourage them to check out this post and explain that most of the articles are created by community members... that said, often, the folks who write in seem to have mass-emailed a bunch of websites in an effort to see if they can get their content posted on the site. In other words, those instances feel less genuine and I often think they don't take much time to look into how to share posts.
But still, we likely should make it easy for folks to realize that they can write on the site. I wonder if as a workaround there might be a way to solve this with a banner or display ad? Hmmm... 🤔
Ahhh I see - yes the narrative is always around promoting their article.
I like that post, I think making that sticky for the home feed for un authenticated users would be interesting, and maybe part of the post sign up workflow. Thanks for the heads up as always Michael 🤩
Not a problem, Lee!
I also love that article! I think it'd be good for most Forems to have a post like this — I think we've previously reached out to the author to see if they wouldn't mind posting it on CodeNewbie too because it's such a good resource to have. But even if it's not this specific article, it's a good idea for Forems to have a How to Post post.
Late to this conversation, but I want to reiterate Michael's insight.
We get a lot of emails from people who want to write self-promotional or SEO posts on DEV (compared to the people who really want to join our community but can't figure out how to get started). I've been freelancing as a copy writer/editor for a few years now and have noticed more emphasis recently being put on cold emails as a way to generate leads. In general, it appears to have exponentially grown since the start of the pandemic as alternative opportunities to solicit writing gigs have diminished and the number of freelancers has exploded.
The easiest ones to identify are addressed to someone who doesn't work at our company, or where the name of our site or the title of an article has been copy-pasted in a different typeface or size to the rest of the email, but pretty soon you'll get used to their tone and only get caught out sometimes...
Would the simplest solution to this not be to add a "create post" button that is still visible even if not logged in.
Then when you press that it has a modal to sign up - the only difference being that it has text to the effect of "You must create an account to write an article, don't worry it is free and only takes a second" (if applicable - I have no idea if "paid" Forem instances are a thing!)
Obviously I am sure that could be handled via a config file (knowing very little about the back end I may be over simplifying it!)
Hey Lee!
This is interesting... I'm curious if they're authenticated users, which should always have a "Write a post" button. Do you know if these users have signed up for your Forem?
Hey Casey,
Sorry, by potential members I meant unauthenticated so they don’t see a write post button.
Ah, I see! I re-read your original post and I somehow misread the potential keyword. Yeah, this is a good one to think about.