How to make users subscribe to forums? (best practices)

Welcome @Cansu !

Could you fill out your profile for us? I often look there to find the community folks ask about which makes it easier to recommend an answer.

As it so happens, I am myself, a User. :)

I think to begin with, you could try the new Email Campaigns feature to send a one-off email to everyone letting them know about the new structure and how to subscribe to the new categories. If people are interested, it’s a pretty easy way to do that without fiddling with the settings or trying to experiment with custom code.

You could also then add a few tips to the welcome emails and post forum guides that tell people how to use various features like subscribing to categories.

Those are the easiest ones I can think of if you simply fancy an out-of-the-box solution. With that being said, if you’re feeling a bit brave then I’ve got another option to show you. @timcavey has recently built himself a HTML Widget for a different purpose that you can check out via https://github.com/T-J-D-Cavey/Forum-Guidelines-Text-Box .

For the most part, you’d just have to change the text in the index(dot)html file, change where it shows up and tweak the styles(dot)css file to your liking and add it as a Sidebar Widget. Other than that… It should be basically pretty close.

When deployed correctly, you should get something like this:

That version is customised to the OVO Forum specifically, but you could use it as a skeleton and tweak it to match your own community. Just as a heads up, inSided/Gainsight can’t help you fix issues caused by custom code.

This is a tough problem to solve, as I’m not aware of anything out of the box that you can use.

A few ideas: 

1. A contest / prize raffle for those who subscribe by X date
2. Points or badges for everyone who subscribes to new forums

However, for both options, you’ll likely need to ask support to provide you a list of user subscriptions for the forums. I don’t believe there’s any way to see or pull that yourself. (Support is usually quite helpful with these types of requests)

In my perfect world, we’d be able to see these subscriptions and also there’d be a webhook available for community mangers to create custom automations (ex. awarding points or a badge when someone subscribes). Unfortunately, I don’t see any webhook events for this activity. Groups have webhook events for when someone joins, but there’s not the equivalent for categories. 

Thank you so much for the ideas :)