How to improve the Shapr3D community platform?

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Hi all,

We established this forum back in 2015, well before Shapr3D evolved into its present form. Since then, we’ve allowed it to grow organically, but we now believe that it has reached its limits. It’s time for us to elevate the community experience to a new level. There are a few issues we’d like to address:

  1. There is a lot of obsolete content dating back over the years. We estimate that at least half of the tens of thousands of topics we have on this forum have become obsolete, as the product has significantly evolved. This will be especially true with the introduction of History-Based Parametric Modeling, which will offer much improved workflows for many of the issues our users have previously encountered. Retaining the old data could lead to considerable confusion.
  2. As Shapr3D is growing rapidly, we’re welcoming many new users to this community every day. However, we’d also like to inspire our long-standing users to actively participate in the discussions. The current setup makes this challenging, and the large number of beginner-level topics can sometimes discourage our professional users from participating in the Shapr3D community.
  3. We aim for a tighter integration with Shapr3D accounts. Currently, you’re required to maintain a separate community account and a Shapr3D account – we’re planning to merge these two for a more streamlined user experience.
  4. We are focusing on better moderation. We’re exploring AI-based moderation assistants that could check if a post aligns with our community guidelines, assist non-native English speakers in improving their posts, provide translations from other languages, and make suggestions from our manual and community knowledge base.

That being said, we would love to hear your thoughts. What improvements would you like to see in our online community? How can we enhance this space to better suit your needs?

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Nice idea Istvan. Thanks for all you guys and girls do for us.

I founded and ran a quite large web site and forum years ago and learned a lot from it, and I’ll share some observations if that’s okay.

For instance, the vast majority of forum members rarely if ever post as they just sign up to get some help from time to time.

A small percentage of members (10-25% at most) become prolific posters. A smaller number of those become very valuable and knowledgeable with the subject of the forum they joined. Those members set the atmosphere of a forum.

For moderating, it’s a good idea to have moderators from different sides of the pond, as they used to say. It ensures there are moderators online when others are asleep.

Archiving older posts and tutorials can be wiser than deleting them. It gives a forum a feeling of history, something that’s been here a long time. An archive link to older content does no harm at all.

Many members who post regularly love titles under their name, beside their posts. Titles that can be seen by everyone. Titles can be based on post count, length of time as a member, or skills. Titles give members an almost family feeling, make feeling appreciated and keeps them interested. The current system here of hidden rewards means very little, titles would be better imho.

As for video tutorials, a section of the forum with just videos for various Shapr3D help topics in an easy to find format would be great.

Thanks again.

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Adding to what Stephen said (which was all excellent), the way to deal with onramping new users like myself, is to have an extensive set of tutorials. That’s something you guys have been very good at on YouTube, but much of that content will also become dated once parametric is available.

New users will still have questions, but more tutorials are always the answer. Perhaps a bounty system could be put in place, for existing forum users to fill out a menu of feature-based tutorials as set out by yourself and the Shapr3D team.

These tutorials do not need to be 100% video based. They can be composed of screenshots and short screen recordings.

What I mean is… Set up an empty hierarchal tree of features and common tasks, each of which will have a tutorial eventually created for them. Then set a reasonable bounty price on creating a clear, detailed tutorial for each feature.

Open this to seasoned Shapr users, and for every clear concise tutorial they make for each of the established sections, pay them the bounty. It doesn’t need to be a huge sum, just enough to compensate professional users for their service to the community.

Over time, as features change, or are expanded, re-post a new bounty for that to be updated. This way you can crowdsource the best most up-to-date user manual any software package like this, has ever had.

As I say, the bounty sum doesn’t need to be huge. Perhaps for small tutorials you could have some Shapr collectable merchandise which you could award to people who fill in the empty slots of the online manual.

Full videos have their place, but an online repository of tutorials can be followed at your own pace more easily, and allows forum users to link the specific tutorial, when answering questions on the forum.

Small prizes like merch also allow this to be somewhat gamified. If someone thinks they can make a better version of an existing tutorial, let them submit an update. If it’s actually better, send them a T-shirt or a mug, or a voucher for one month off their subscription, or something.

Eventually, once the tree is filled out, it will become a rare opportunity to score a Shapr3D hat, or something, and you’ll find a few people competing for the opportunity to provide the best tutorials for new features.

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I think I’m a little new to comment, but in some things yes

For example, I try to write everything in English and if I write a lot, I have to go to another program or window to translate. Perhaps a translator integrated into the forum will help encourage others to participate much more.

I think that joining the accounts into one would be great so that with a single account you can access everything.

For the rest I am very happy with the new changes that shapr3d is making to improve everything.

I can’t comment on old posts because it wouldn’t be fair on my part.

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That’s an interesting suggestion. We could look into translators for sure. Maybe with the new LLM technologies we could provide better context specific translations for CAD.

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This is a great idea. Also we plan to have weekly speedmodeling competitions, and give away Shapr3D swags every week for the winners :slight_smile:

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Thanks Istvan :slightly_smiling_face: :+1:

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I look forward to the changes. I have been tempted a few times to bring all the forum content into an LLM to make it easy to ask questions and get answers, but it has not been a painful enough experience to cross the threshold of actually doing it. I could for sure see it has a great benefit to new users. I’ve done several projects in this space recently, and the results have been surprisingly good. ChatGPT plugins are very easy to create so that could be an option too.

For Shapr3D content, it will be interesting to see how well it can be applied. I tend to find the most helpful information from folks like Chayne and, of course, TigerMike and many of the others who are quick with a video demonstration. That in itself may not translate super well into LLM unless it just links back to those videos.

I don’t frequent the forum as much as I used to, but that has a lot to do with not hitting as many roadblocks as I used to.

I am 1000% behind removing outdated video and content as the UX has evolved a lot through the years.

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