Other context, but where my community currently is (Facebook… I’m preparing for us to jump ship and come over to Discourse) we have a mega “tell us about yourself” thread. We did it that way over there because Facebook doesn’t allow any kind of structure inside the group, all the posts are lumped up together, so having each person present themselves in a busy support forum means those presentations will get lost. They do usually introduce themselves in their first post, but the nice thing with the mega-thread is that you can hop on at any time and go and read all the presentations of various people you’ve been interacting with. We share the thread once a month in the group, in a post with no comments allowed, inviting people to go and add their presentation to the collection.
I was thinking of doing it differently on Discourse, but now I’ve seen this topic I’m second-guessing myself.
I think there is a difference between what people write depending on the context:
- I’ve just arrived and I’m going to tell all these strangers a bit about myself (and in my support group, people are not in a good emotional place when they arrive)
- I’ve been around here for a bit, made some friends, helped and been helped, and yeah, I’d love to know more about the people I connect with every day and them about me, so let me write up a proper bio/life story for them!
In the case of my community, clearly the mega-thread belongs to the second scenario. People love it when it comes up and sometimes read through the whole hundreds of comment-bios in it 