Thanks for the reply Tobias!
One thing I’ve learned from kickstarting a local community is that QR codes are an extremely powerful tool for sharing the forums with others.
I set up my forums so that they’re invite-only and inaccessible to users that aren’t logged in.
In order to onboard people, I just create an invite code, turn it into a QR code, and share that with people directly.
Works really great for parties and other in-person gatherings.
This also allows me to straight up bypass the problem of bots and spam accounts - the people behind these accounts (usually foreigners in other countries) are almost certainly never going to be physically present at an in-person gathering.
One other question Tobias: do most of your neighbors still check their email?
I’m facing the problem that pretty much nobody in my community really uses their email anymore. They have an email and they check it for 2FA codes, but that’s it.
They don’t see any of the notifications generated by Discourse and they’re not coming back.
I’m trying to work around this by explicitly instructing people to turn on live notifications, and this works really well for Android users but not iPhone users.