FluentCommunity is now powering 3,000+ Communities 🎉

Michal Paczula sorry that you feel that way. Our last update was released around 3 weeks ago and we have an open Roadmap page about which features we are working on. Some releases take time to build, test, optimize and that's why we are taking some time for this update.

I am building products for over a decade and it's a process and I am not sure why only 22 days from the last release seems a long time!

PS: As I mentioned in the few other places: I was traveling last week so could not answer every question but our support and devs are working around the clock.

Ross H If that lack of tact refers to me, then I understand, although the facts are straightforward:

1. During the live launch, specific “no later than” dates were given for some features. To this day, there’s no concrete information about what’s going to happen.
2. Look at the number of unanswered posts in the “VIP Lounge.” You can’t tell people this is a place that receives special attention—because they believed in the product—only to turn that community space into a dead zone. I’ve counted over 100 questions left unanswered, and I didn’t feel like counting any further. Of course, a single person ( Shahjahan Jewel el ) isn’t able to handle all of that alone, but on the other hand, that’s exactly what was promised to all of us in that area.
3. Some people trusted this product enough to go live with their projects. I did that too with one of mine (luckily a smaller one). When I can’t give my clients any information about why something isn’t working, I lose real money. That’s how the world works. And here? I get told that the next release is almost ready, that it will be out next week, and then:
   I. There’s zero information that it didn’t happen—ZERO.
   II. Another week goes by (so about 10 days after it was supposed to launch), and then someone cheerfully informs us that a release is coming soon, and wonders why we’re upset xD

Unfortunately, if someone doesn’t take me seriously, it goes both ways.

And I’ll repeat: I believe in @jew good intentions and see that when he’s available, he tries to respond. BUT:

1. He’s the company’s CEO; his time is limited.
2. When he’s not around, the community goes silent.
3. The company supposedly has 140 people, they’re launching products related to communities, and yet they don’t have a single person dedicated to communication?

All this makes me gradually lose faith in the project.

Michal Paczula +1

Shahjahan Jewel congratulations on reaching 3000 sites milestone. I do wonder though, if they are like me, can't take FC live because of simple function like search course and spaces do not work. You said once FC can host 100,000 users at ease. Are you referring to customer support like this site as opposed to community site like buddyboss/buddypress? Because if you are thinking like users of buddyboss/buddpress thinking, FC simply doesn',t work for community site which has many more spaces and courses than this support site. Search function is a critical requirement. Gosh, you haven't figured this out after 3 months since launch.

What's the point of showing off your team photo if it's only you who seems to be working on the project and nothing moves when you are not around?

We all know the roadmap is not current and your upgrade doesn't largely follow that. Is your team really working on reporting dashboard of spaces and courses while user can't even find the courses and spaces he wants to enroll.

I was promised the fix will be out this week but came your announcement hitting us like impatient babies. 😩

You can do better than this even when you missed your own deadline.

Alexander Sugianto search functionality for Courses and Spaces already done on the dev branch and will be available on the next version. Not sure why you think we are not working? Our last update was 3 weeks ago.

Regarding the team photo: This community space was created long before the product made public and I have so many online friends so I wanted to share the moment. I feel sorry that you get offended with the team photo.

Michal Paczula It did not refer to you, sorry if it appeared that way.

Ross H relax, non taken ;)

Alexander Sugianto the funny thing is, to you search is critical - but the sites I'm building have absolutely no need for anything more complicated that the search function that is already available.

Jonathan Gwyer do you know the search can only search for posts, you can't search for spaces and courses?

Alexander Sugianto that's just not something we need. But if I did, I'd be doing it on the "front end" rather than portal, where we list and sell our courses.

Shahjahan Jewel Well, I think it's obviois that it's not the photo that is offensive. But showing how big your team is , it is implied that your absence should not affect the timeline of update release. But apparently, it's not the case. Anyway, anxiously waiting for your next update .

Shahjahan Jewel when releasing a community for peoples feedback people anticipate clear communication with possible timelines etc, not radio silence. This is where the confusion comes in where people give valuable time with feedback and then receive no feedback if their feedback has been seen and if it will be worked on or what ever.

Thanks for everything you do, we all appreciate it... just a reminder clear communication and consistency is a biggie when running a community like this 😉

Jonathan Gwyer are we talking about the same thing? Are you saying you can search FC course on your front end? Even Shahjahan Jewel  acknowledged the issue.

Mike R VIP Lounge? 👀

Ross H yep, but this place should extend name to Very Inconvinent People for Fluent Team ;)

Alexander Sugianto yes, we have proper sales/landing pages for our courses on the front end. That's where the searching takes place and that's why searching courses in the portal is unimportant to me.

My top priority is direct upload to bunny.net for video.

What I'm trying to say is, what you think is critical, many of us haven't even thought of.

Jonathan Gwyer how would course search on the front end work? Custom block? Shortcode? Do the results then take you to the portal or to a front end course overview page etc?

Jonathan Gwyer I think that’s not the main point of all these comments. The key point is that when you report a bug or request a feature, one of two things happens:

1. You’re ignored, and nobody responds to you.
2. You get a brief message saying, “our developers are working on it,” and then a few months go by with zero information on its status.

It’s obvious that each of us is adapting the product to the expectations of our respective industry, contacts, etc.

Ross H Just like any course catalogue, then you can purchase the course (in our case we use Surecart for this, for the time being at least) and you get given access to the course in the portal.

Michal Paczula What I'm trying to get at is this key point - one comment saying a "huge number" of people are complaining and another saying "critical" things are missing - but there are far more people not complaining and not missing things.

Are you reporting the bugs to support? Are they responding?

Jonathan Gwyer yes, I reporting and team act like I describe :)

Michal Paczula Then that is not good. If you've got a ticket you should get a response.

Michal Paczula I don't see any open ticket on your account at this moment. All tickets are resolved. if you would share the ticket ID, I could take a look.

Shahjahan Jewel man, I love what you do... I mean the vision! Right on spot. But if you jump into your clients shoes... 22 days are a very... veeeery long time. Why? Because FC woke up our ideas then months after we jumped on it... we struggle with bugs and lack of new features which are needed... Tons of roadmap ideas, tons of unanswered questions... I'm sure you work a lot, but communication is poor and we are left without updates from you guys... we even don't know if you address community ideas or no... I still believe FC will be a plugin I dream about... but for now I'm a bit mad on myself that I was too eager to use it and replace working solution just because of your live video where you shared how awesome it is and it will be (suppose to be a priority). Anyway... keep it up mate, I hope you won't screw this up :P

Morgan McArthur it would be nice to integrate an ia bot with some instructions to be able to answer many questions that are sometimes frequently asked.

Ross H 

Tom Robak I bought into the product and made a big announcement to our customers that we would be switching platforms based on the communication that the BuddyBoss integration will be ready in December. Now it's March and the integration is still full of bugs ://

Shahjahan Jewel Seriously, man, I get the impression that you only pick the posts you can respond to without addressing the criticisms (or rather the questions from people who believe in you) about:

• Terrible communication,
• The question about a community manager,
• The question of why, in a 140-person company, there’s nobody other than you who tries to talk to users,
• The question of why functionalities PROMISED LONG AGO still haven’t been delivered (people went live with their projects based on those promises).

Instead, you just keep repeating over and over that there was an update 22 days ago, so what more could we possibly want?

This approach WILL NOT SOLVE the communication issues.

As for the ticket, I never said tickets go unanswered, but if you need proof, I’ll paste links to every idea/bug in the VIP Lounge (where you promised people the HIGHEST team focus), which has gone completely unanswered. How many links would you like? 10, 20, 30, 40? ;)

Honestly, sometimes it’s enough to try to have a dialogue rather than fight with people. Right now, seeing you deliberately avoid topics you don’t want to answer only makes me more frustrated—and I’m not the only one…

Jonathan Gwyer Something like this? This is a standard wordpress page with a shortcode that gives you a search block for your FC courses. https://hoolet.uk/test/course-search/

Alexander Sugianto guys yall missed the fact that he’s had to pivot from that to restructure some under the hood code for long term needs. Why are a few of you so upset about this? It’s clear that team is doing an amazing job. Great work Shahjahan Jewel 

Curtis Marshall Jonathan Gwyer You what is even more weird and does not even solve any problem? You seem to be quite disturbed that there are paying customers get upset here. Man, we are not even complaining to you. I wonder why.

'you know'

Michal Paczula We've tried a number of 'community' and forum systems over the last 20 years, some standalone php, discourse.org , and others for Wordpress like buddyboss and peepso. None really successful and all complex, buggy, hard to manage and maintain, or users just didn't want to use them. Recently loaded the free fluent community, and so far I am VERY impressed. I appreciate that building custom communities is hard work technically and also from a marketing perspective, as there are different views from developers and users on how they should work. But I can honestly say this is the best attempt I've seen to date. There is certainly a market need for private communities like this.

Jonathan N. I did something similar with a soft-launch to my community. Unfortunately known bugs to the core functionality of the plugin have been unresolved for weeks. I'm told they're "fixed in the dev branch" but until those updates are pushed I have to use 3rd party work-arounds to do basic things like grant course access to new members. Hopefully they can use all the pre-sale funds to add more developers to this product because it has a lot of potential but it also has a lot of rough edges.

Hac Media Thanks for that.... I've only used it on a couple sites and not had major issues, although certainly been in your situation with earlier systems. Considering this product has only been out a few months, I guess we have to be patient... Reading the notes today, I forgot or didn't realize that there is integration with fluent forms that we use on hundreds of client sites, some running very complex forms into different systems. I haven't tried it, but it would suggest we can set up a fluentform and perhaps preset role and hence correct access as part of the forms signup as opposed to the generic signup forms. Maybe. Might test it overnight.

Kevin Trye I love Fluent Forms and was very happy to leave TypeForm behind. I'm also trying to switch from ActiveCampaign to Fluent CRM. The access issue I'm having is that FCommunity has the feature to link courses and spaces to CRM tags. This allows for easy enrollment based on tags which can be automated. Unfortunately this doesn't work and it's been a known bug for almost 3 weeks but no updates have been pushed. I've been able to solve this by using WPFusion which grants the same tag-linking functionality and so far works perfectly but I'm waiting until this core feature is fixed with FCRM and FC because I don't want to build more spaces and courses that rely on a 3rd party plugin when it's supposed to be a core function with native WPManage apps. You might like WPFusion and the integrations is facilitates with Forms. My primary use for forms has been a very high converting "invite funnel" using the conversational forms with WPFusion sending that data to ActiveCampaign for automations. Happy to geek out about Fluent Forms any time. Still so much untapped potential there.

Sombri Luna yes great idea! the ninja's better get a move and communicate well cause the way things are unfolding and what can be built with ai agents is impressive and moving at a rapid pace. If Fluent Community don't speed up and innovate they are going to be left behind. Gone are the old days of traditional website development.

Morgan McArthur I've also tried some AI agents. Impressive. Actually, AI tools from a design or development person can save a lot of time, although they're just a draft framework, but the time saved is impressive. I see them as useful helpers. Years back we'd often outsource specific coding work or hire another lad to do some work; now I don't need to. The area I think is more important is not the pure web development side, but managing and optimising content. Imagine a website where you don’t log in to edit. Instead, you:

Send a voice command: “Make my homepage focus on my latest blog post we built together yesterday”
Chat with an AI assistant: “Rearrange my services page to prioritise my new offerings.”
Photos to your site: “Add these 8 photos from my phone to my gallery, with captions.” Changing times.

Kevin Trye  Yeagh I am truly amazed at how AI agents are unfolding. At first I was a bit skeptical and found it too much hype, however when you actually see what is being done its very impressive.

AI agents may be a draft framework now, give it another 6 - 12 months and we will be very surprised at what they can do.

The key is not to loose touch of the human interactivity element, hence why software like FluentCommunity is great. Personally I feel FluentCommunity has to move a lot quicker to keep pace of what is unfolding out there. I truly hope they see this message cause I really would like them to do well. 😉

Ross yes, that's the kind of thing. We use FCRM tags so that we can use WPFusion to either show a link to find out more about the course and buy it, or go straight to the course if they already have it.

Jonathan Gwyer I made a feature request with Jack at wpFusion about a way to control access to specific lessons/topics based on tags. It would require fluent community to give wpFusion access specific pages, but it is possible and they are collaborating.

please upload this request if it’s something you could find useful

https://wpfusion.com/feature-requests/fluentcommunity-tag-based-lesson-visibility-control/

Hac Media Oooh, that's a nice idea. Opens up a whole area of controlling access to the next lesson based on them doing something elsewhere. I'm liking that 😀

Jonathan Gwyer There are definitely people who want to drip lessons. I have a client on Membership.io who came to me with that problem. The way he wants to drip things means the user must complete the previous video first (not just start it) and then the next lesson appears. It's a tedious process with tags to do it, but that's why I'm getting paid.

Right now, I don't see a way to drip lessons like that using FluentCommunity. Perhaps it will come.

Nicole added this to the Roadmap back in November and I just discovered it. Please upvote the idea to drip lessons. Here's the link to that issue.

https://community.wpmanageninja.com/fluentcommunity-roadmp/#/idea/406/

William Beem 

You can also upvote this integration just in case fluent community decides not to do that natively

I currently have to use WP fusion just to make tag access work because that has been broken inside of fluent community for at least 4 weeks

https://wpfusion.com/feature-requests/fluentcommunity-tag-based-lesson-visibility-control/

Michal Paczula I totally agree. The lack of acknowledgement on the accessbility and DOM bloat is something that still hasn't been acknowledge by Shahjahan Jewel or his team either. These are the basics of web design. Instead every time new gimmicks are added, instead of focusing making the core right.

Sophia S Yeah I wonder too because we are running community on dedicated server and it still slow as this one

Sophia S I have a thread regarding this:

https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/recommended-server-configuration-for-fluentcommunity

Sam Jansen Are you experiencing slow page loading in this portal?

Shahjahan Jewel This one is fine but my own is slower. I have a really fast dedicated server and the server configuration as mentioned in the post.

Sophia S I'm on litespeed enterprise, 8G ram, mariadb, cloudlinux - works like a dream (actually running 4 communities on this machine and no issues at all)

Tom Robak woow this is so great. How many users do you always have on these communities and also, which hosting provider are you using?

Sophia S I have euhost.co - using hetzner infrastructure (got a rack there) with cloudfront CDN and cloudflare DNS. At the moment the biggest community is 820 users - on average 70-90 people online - I host a community for friend and he manage that, but I monitor the performance and no issues... just classic fc problems like images rotated 90 degrees, no option to direct upload a video from computer etc - classic moaning and lack of fc features

Tom Robak that's great then. I'm wondering are you using hetzner cloud or dedicated?

Sophia S dedicated. cloud isn't an option to me. I actually have much more powerful dedicated servers with them, but for this community project I just did my own "cloud" - virtual with 8GB, 10vCPU, just because I host here few communities... for one, I'd probably go easily with 4GB, 4vCPU - and of course increase if demand would be higher

Sella Yoffe I had no idea that we would release this product. Thanks for pushing from the very first. 🫡

Wayne Miller we can’t add custom fields to user profiles in FluentCommunity yet. There is a free version of FluentCommunity that comes with the main features so you can try the product before upgrading just fyi

William Beem psst. I've shared you working solution for bunny stream - did you watch that?

Tom Robak Thanks, I replied with my issue and saw you posted a link. Unfortunately, that link never loaded for me. I'll try it again. I appreciate your continued help.

Tom Robak I'm interested to know about Bunny net.

William Beem it works with embed code, not direct link, I use even other services and they embed without issue

Tom Robak Hi, Tom. It works. The issue I had watching your video required a reboot on my laptop. When I tried it using that computer, I seemed to have the same problem.

Now I just tried it using my desktop and it works perfectly. Thank you very much for your help and patience.

Nelson Miller can you post the link ? :)

I'm not sure why I should post a link, as it's just for customers. If you are a customer, please go to your account and click the Community tab!