I have talked before about the “Auto subscribe group” plugin for Elgg community, it’s a very useful plugin for your community, it let you assign default group or more than one group for all new members to become participants to it automatically when they sign-up a new account.
This is helpful when you decide to have a help, news, support or any other default group that you would like all your new community members to get updates on one place.
This work just fine with me, because one of the good things about this plugin is to have all your members signed to one main big group, which make it easy for them to receive email notifications when ever there is new member or any other activity in this default group, and also work good when you want all members to get new update or send them community news.
Groups in Elgg has discussion forum, files, pages, and also it can have it’s own blog, You should use each one of these options the right way. Remember the purpose of this group is to provide help and updates for your community members, and take their feed back on how to improve the community, for that reason you have to use one or all it’s options some how to succeed on what you are up to on your community group.
I remember the beginning of running MY Life Thinking community, it was not easy to reply 10s of emails and private messages everyday for new members to explain to them how to brows the community, I decided to create this group and publish some useful pages with photos and open support discussions, as Elgg is some how confusing at the beginning, but when you get used to it everything will be just great.
I toke feedbacks and questions from members, and turn them to pages and answers. At the beginning I was sending the page URL that answer specific question by email or private messages. Day after day I notice that I completed some basic information explanation pages that can work as a member guide.
Now thanks to this plugin I don’t have to suffer, all members will get help in a better and much easier way than before. Be sure to read my post about the top 10 plugins for Elgg to learn more about useful plugins.
Here is an example for help group.
Just be aware if you have an active community, probably your community members will be annoyed by tons of notification emails.
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I’m glad to see this article, as I have also created an group utilizing the autosubscribe plugin as a primer, or quick tutorial on how to use the community. elgg has a little bit of curve to it, but once you know the basics it’s easy to use. I also created a community guide account and a Community Guidelines group since elgg does not have a TOS step on sign up.
Actually I am planning to write some useful posts about Elgg, thanks for your support!