I'm totally in agreement, I'm trying to create a real, thriving community to give a group a source of support that doesn't exist right now. In hindsight I can see how I sounded like a marketing tool. This isn't about money at all, this is a project of passion and I'm confident it will be well received, but I've seen too many good, promising things fail because of lack of traction. I'm looking to reduce the risk of that happening as much as I can.

Hey guys,

I'm planning on launching my community on NodeBB in the next month or so and I'm wondering if anyone has had any tips for success in growing a user base and getting traction with engagement. I'm thinking about taking the How To Start An Online Community course over at FeverBee. Has anyone taken this? Is it any good?

I have little experience building online communities, but I'm a product marketer by trade so I'm well versed in things like acquisition funnels. My plan thus far is as follows:

• Create a sense of value by recruiting niche experts to commit to some level of engagement
• Announce an "invite-only" period to create a sense of scarcity. The invite list will initially be limited to current customers of my other products and those on my email list.
• Get 5-10 friends together and seed content daily.
• Promote a "waitlist" on social media and start collecting email addresses.
• Let in batches of 100 or so at a time (every 3-5 days).
• Reach out to websites in my niche, provide access as a "gift" to the user bases of those sites
• Full, public launch campaign with facebook ads, twitter promoted tweets, partnerships with similar websites, magazine ads, etc.

Once I have the users I just need a good moderator to keep the content quality high, which I can probably do initially.

Any critiques? I know this is general, but please let me know if I'm missing something crucial here.

Still exploring this, but I discovered that it seems to have been somehow related to nodebb-plugin-composer-redactor. I disabled that and went back to the default composer and was able to switch. Then I re-enabled redactor and the new theme stuck.

I just created a new nodebb site and I'm having issues switching themes. When I select a new theme, it asks me to restart nodebb. After I restart, the original theme (persona) is still selected and nothing changes on forum.

I've checked for caching, can't find anything that would cause this. I've tried restarting via the button in the admin dashboard as well as restarting the actual node process.

Some details: I'm running nodebb via pm2 behind nginx. I've tried restarting the whole stack, nothing seems to work.

Also tried actually deleting persona, but that just broke the nodebb instance all together so I reinstalled it via npm.

I'm sure it's something super simple. What am I missing?