Fluent Community Onboarding Feature + Privacy Enhancement
I've recently seen how Circle handles two important privacy questions related to member visibility, and I found a couple of ideas that could be very useful for Fluent Community.
First, when a user joins, Circle prompts them to complete their profile on a dedicated full-page form.
That form includes two simple privacy options:
- Do you want your profile to be visible to other members?
- Do you want other members to be able to message you?
I found this approach really simple and effective.
It could be a great addition if Fluent Community eventually gets a much-needed proper onboarding feature.
Right now, "Complete your profile" feels quite optional. I think it would be much more effective if, on the user's first login, profile completion was presented as part of the onboarding process and remained more prominent until completed.
Of course, we can already recreate something similar with Fluent Forms and redirects, but having this natively integrated into Fluent Community would feel much more natural.
For public communities, this could also be very useful for consent collection and privacy preferences, especially when users haven't already accepted specific community terms as part of a purchase.
Second, Circle also allows you to display a Welcome pop-up when someone joins, with instructions or any important information for new members.
Again, I think this would fit perfectly into a broader onboarding feature.
Something like:
First login → Welcome message → Complete profile → Privacy preferences → Community introduction / next steps
That could make the initial experience much more intentional without adding much complexity for the user.
That all sounds great. I second that, and it should all be optional. There might be users that already get the profile setup through other mechanics. So the first visit of a new community member would present them just what is already set.
This would be clever. As another idea, this is what I'm doing with one of my sites...
Rather than drop straight into the feed, users are directed to their own dashboard on the portal, with various bits and pieces based on FCRM tags and WP Fusion Lite conditional shortcodes.
So if someone signs up for a course, they get a "welcome" tag, and their Dashboard will have a reminder to watch the first welcome video. When they do watch that video, the tag is removed, and the reminder disappears.
Jonathan Gwyer Very clever approach!
I do something similar, but using FCRM’s native conditional display in Gutenberg, so there’s no need for WP Fusion.
I guess another nice approach could be to automatically add a tag after a user finishes a Fluent Player video, and use that to guide them to the next onboarding step.
That said, I’d still love to see a native onboarding feature in Fluent Community.
The first few hours after a purchase or joining a community are incredibly important, so onboarding shouldn’t be overlooked. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, and I’m sure a smoother onboarding experience would have a significant impact on overall user satisfaction and engagement.
Definitely, this would be a great feature. I find it extremely important that the user can set up their privacy preferences right before starting interaction. Especially the Community Account Name, which is basically their email address exposed to everyone. Most people use Gmail, so just by adding @gmail.com or any other common email provider at the end of the username will get their emails. Shahjahan Jewel Is there any way to use maybe the first name and a random number as the Community Account Name instead of their email address? Thanks
Jose F Ross, over at FluentCommunityAddons.com, has a plugin that probably does just what you want. It allows you to specify whether members' names are firstname, lastname, firstname only, lastname only, username, display_name, nickname, etc. I also made a plugin focused on other aspects of FC's privacy, which I've offered to Ross for him to distribute freely as he wishes.
Thanks Jorge for the post, I will forward the ideas to our team for review.