Hi all!

I was wondering if anyone here knows of an addon that can do learning plans or tracks? Basically a group of courses that are grouped together under a single 'space'-like area where people can talk about them together?

I want it to be like a series of courses with the space acting like a 'homeroom' and for people to pay for the space with all the courses inside if, if that makes sense.

To be honest, even just an addon that does spaces with set courses would be great right now! But ideally, I would love it if it could live inside the 'courses' page on my community rather than the 'spaces' one.

If anyone has a plugin/addon like that or knows anyone who has plans to do something like that, I'm happy to pay for it and be a beta tester!

I am a UK user of pretty much the whole WPMN ecosystem, and my use case for these products means that I am directly affected by the upcoming social media ban on users under 16.

I'm sure I am not the only one who will be affected by this, especially because these bans (both in the UK and Australia) put the responsibility on the platform to make sure that children are unable to make an account, so I thought I would give a rundown of the issues and also what we could possibly do to make FluentCommunity in particular more protected against compliance issues.

Please do comment with your own thoughts and use cases! I'd love to build up a bigger picture of how we can make the platform better for users around the world, especially in light of how amazing Shahjahan Jewel and his teams were when it came to responding to the new EU withdrawal rules.

My use case

First of all, it might be useful for you to understand a little about how I actually use FluentCommunity, so that you understand how this affects me.

I am a teacher of English, History, Media Studies and Film Studies, but my ultimate aim is to switch to a more flexible working setup. I want to be able to provide group classes and asynchronous courses to as many students between the ages of 13 and 19 as possible.

The WPMN has given me almost everything I need to be able to start on this journey, to be honest!

I use spaces as subjects in school and then separate them into space groups for different school levels. Namely, I tailor to A-level and IBDP students, who are between the ages of 16 and 19, but I also have spaces for GCSE and IBMYP students (14-16), and I would like to do transitionary courses to help students prepare for each level.

That does mean that the sidebar can get quite long and unwieldy for me and I would love to be able to personalise that for each type of user and have the opportunity to filter the spaces in the dedicated page a little more, but that's for another time.

I use FluentCart to make course payments, CRM to manage mailing lists, and offer tutoring sessions through FluentBooking. The point is that because of my ADHD, I want to automate as much of the administration as possible so that I only have to worry about actually delivering the teaching and communicating with the students in the community.

This, of course, means that when the new rules come into effect next year, I will have a few options as FluentCommunity currently stands:

• Make the community 16+ only, and potentially miss out on a lot of revenue that will mean I can't really meet my goals – the total pool of reachable students would go from 2.1 million worldwide (if you combine all the different kinds of exam boards) to about 500,000 worldwide. This would also mean I'd need to find a way to verify ages, which would slow down the process of signups and drop my income significantly.
• Strip all things from the community that make it more like a social media platform, removing lots of the automation and incentives for people to stick around.
• Change to a different model completely.

That would be a real shame, because FluentCommunity is pretty much almost there as it is! With a few tweaks, FluentCommunity could probably very easily be exempt from the rules – provided that the primary purpose of the community you're setting up is educational or has a specific non-social goal like playing a particular video game or something.

So let's look into it.

How close to compliance is FluentCommunity right now?

To be honest, things aren't as far off as I originally thought! Here are some of the positives of the current setup that can help with exemption:

• The feed is not sorted by a complex algorithm that encourages you to stick around and promotes addictiveness. Instead, it's activity-based with some manual elements to it, like pinning, which means that space owners (in my case, teachers) and moderators can curate the experience to be as educational or useful for the primary purpose as possible.
• You can disable more addictive elements, such as the Leaderboards, which means quick options for compliance.
• It is possible to gate elements of the community to allow them to be usable only by certain members. For example, I don't offer social spaces to younger users.
• The notifications are not personalised to the degree of addiction. They are space-based, and the following function doesn't curate your feed.
• Moderation is useful. It means that you can ensure each space is going to be scrutinised and curated by the moderators/admins and that bad content is going to be left out.

Are there any problems currently posed by FluentCommunity for compliance?

• Members are identified by their full names and do not have the choice to be more anonymous. This is an issue, since with young people, we want to avoid them being identifiable by potentially bad actors.
• The leaderboard is based on engagement, which does align it with more addictive social media tendencies. We want to avoid things that reward people for posting because it mirrors social media too much. Improvements to the leaderboard to allow us to choose what kinds of interactions and behaviour grant points would prevent this.
• Moderation is trapped behind settings, rather than having an obvious place in the main section. It would be better if there were an obvious, visible moderation alert for people somewhere more out in the open.
• The leaderboard doesn't really do anything other than provide dopamine for users. Its sole purpose is engagement rather than rewarding community members for good contributions.
• You can't create different profile types with different levels of access. Ideally, to improve our compliance, we'd be able to have different kinds of users, some of whom can message anyone while others can't, changing which space groups they can see, etc.
• You can't edit what gets flagged for moderation and (as far as I'm aware) people don't get sent 'warning messages' or whatever when their messages get flagged too many times. Plus, we don't have a way to track how many times their posts were deleted.
• We can't moderate the private messages.

I'm going to put suggestions on how to improve in the comments underneath. Please add your own!

It would be useful to have the option to select the user profile type during registration, for example: customer, company or freelancer.

Can you please add in next update Emoji picker next to "Photo upload" icon?

Ability to hover and highlight areas so you can see where you're making changes. Also, the ability to have a 'back button'. Unless I write down every hex code, it's hard to revert to the previous/original colour as I make changes.

Generally, I find the customisation function very frustrating to use.

Dropdown bugged I guess.

I'm setting up a community with the Fluent plugin. I have an existing community that I'll be migrating. I cannot get the login to work at all. I can't invite my current members in until this works. When someone tries to make an account they get locked out. Even when someone did manage to make an account, they were reverted to the wp-admin to login which gets rejected. The user is a subscriber in the backend. I have been trying to fix this for a day and a half. Has anyone else encountered this problem, I'm not sure what to do next.

Is there a way to have custom fields that I might add to user profiles sync to fields in Fluent CRM? When I had users sign up for my Fluent Community, I collected a bunch of extra info and just stored that in Fluent CRM. Now that Fluent Community has custom fields, I'd like to add those same fields and have them sync between the two. Is that possible?

When I click on the posting option for the posts then the pinned post will be sorted into the list and looses it's pinned position.

Is there a way to create recurring posts in a Space weekly?