I did a webinar on that very topic recently with Insided:

@DannyPancratz beat me to it!

@DannyPancratz Thanks for this!

@DannyPancratz Can you add more details to what you did to prepare and/or help clean up member profiles who might not visit the community any more or read the announcement email?

Sure thing. 

The problem: Our main issue was that we had renamed username to “Full Name” and so there were thousands of users from our previous community (and first 6 months) that were using their full name as their user name. When you switch from Public to Private (or Hybrid), profile pages are exposed and there’s no way to restrict access to those. 

We wanted to do right by our users and not expose their full name as community members without their permissions. 

The solution: 

1. Proactive communication
   • An announcement on the community
   • An email to all users (active and inactive) with a clearer CTA to request an update to their username if they desired
2. Time - we allowed a month to pass with the above before we made the change
3. Anonymizing legacy users who had been inactive for x+ days (sorry, i don’t recall)
   • We did this via the API
   • We changed names like Jane Doe to Jane D
   • We removed profile avatars if they previously had one
   • We added a custom role, so we could track which users we had done this to (some have re-engaged since and are active again. None have noticed their username changed.)

#3 is the key one. If someone is active, your posts and emails are enough of an effort. They can’t say they weren't told. But if they’re inactive, you don’t know that their message reached them. So we went ahead and anonymized. Better safe than sorry. 

We chose not to erase those inactive users, because we wanted to keep their posts, points, etc in case they came back (some did). And we had 2+ years of answered questions from our previous community and first 6 months on insided, we didn’t want thousands of answered questions to be from “Anonymous User.” That sends the message that the community isn’t active or vibrant or filled with actual people. 

Note: Username was really the only publicly visible profile field other than avatar, so that was our focus. However, the public nature of profile fields has held us back from making more fields visible. There’s no way to make them visible for only logged-in community members while blocking those logged-out. I’ve given Insided the feedback that I’d like this to be improved so we can have fields like company, title, expertise, etc visible to other community members, but not the whole world. 

(Since this is marked as an answer, adding the recording of the webinar I did with Insided)
 

@DannyPancratz Thank you very much for this detailed explanation!

I agree that not being able to hide member profiles from non-logged in people is not good and needs to be addressed. 

Were any of your users concerned about their profile pages being visible to non-members?

@beth surprisingly, we had 5 or fewer people request to change their username when we said the pages would be public. (It helped that there wasn’t any other information on them and that their posts were private)

My hypothesis: in a world where social posts and other community posts like this are public and searchable, most are used to it. 

And we’ve actually had a bit of the reverse. Opening up profile pages and other ungated elements like the the leaderboard has created more interest in earning points and badges (so as to establish themselves as top users of our platform for their peers and employers). 

@DannyPancratz Thank you very much for this additional context!

Hello!

I have been gathering general ideas, concepts, information, and examples about going public/hybrid. There are several topics about this here in the Gainsight community (A general or basic guideline on this topic - all relevant info in one article - would be nice, too ).
 

@DannyPancratz, you have already provided a lot of insights and valuable information on this topic.

• Before going public with your community, did you test ev-ry-thing in your staging community? If yes, how many people were involved and for how long?
• Was there a detailed written concept in place?
• How long did it take from the initial idea of opening the community to implementing all the steps/changes?
• Was there anything after going public where you thought, Oh, I totally missed this/didn't think about it?

Also, could you kindly share the link to your webinar recording again, as it shows as “media not available”.

Thanks a lot!

We ran into some trouble with the video.

It’s hosted here now 

@Eva 

Before going public with your community, did you test ev-ry-thing in your staging community? If yes, how many people were involved and for how long?

Yes, as far as I can recall. Also tested on production a bit just to doublecheck. (switched public, tested, switched back) Testing was probably only a few days. It was pretty clear that the forums and posts would remain private after our initial testing. From there, we were testing every other piece of the platform, where we discovered things like profile pages being fully public (and the impacts I outlined above). That added a few more days of testing, but mostly a few weeks of finding the solution I share above. 
 

Was there a detailed written concept in place?

Can you please tell me a bit more about what you mean with this question? I’m not sure I follow. If your’e asking about a written strategy? Yes, I put together an internal briefing on the why and the how, aligned with stakeholders, and got buy-in before we moved forward. 

How long did it take from the initial idea of opening the community to implementing all the steps/changes?

I believe it took us about 2 months from idea to final product. Most of that was additional time to figure out the Full Name/Username and public profile issue I describe in my answer above. Without that, the execution could be done in a few days and most of the time was aligning stakeholders. 
 

Was there anything after going public where you thought, Oh, I totally missed this/didn't think about it?

For the most part, nothing major and nothing negative. The only thing that jumps out is that I think it’s a little helpful to have the community leaderboard fully public so that users can use it as a proof point in showing their contributions. 

Otherwise, there was something really specific to us that popped up: We had a lot of custom styling and weird things we were doing with redirecting links in our dropdown menu and disabling parent category links, etc. That all became even more complicated because the styling was impacted when index numbers of those elements changed for those logged in/out. But mostly that exposed how unnecessary and overly complicated our approach was, leading to undoing much of that customization a year later. 
 

Also, could you kindly share the link to your webinar recording again, as it shows as “media not available”.

@Kenneth R do you know where that webinar recording is? It was on the Insided YouTube page, which I’d guess was shut down with the rebrand to Gainsight CC. I didn’t see it on the Gainsight page; is it unlisted somewhere? 

@DannyPancratz Looks like you were typing while @revathimenon was posting the video just above. We ran into an issue with YouTube - it’s now live again on Vidyard.  I’ve also updated the original topic where we had the link before.

Thanks @DannyPancratz !
​Yes, exactly: my written concept is the same as your internal briefing for stakeholders.
I'm going to consume all of this info and work on my concept first