WTS Forum Intent - Recommendations (teaser)

Hey Guys,

I've been working hard on setting up a new forum add-on shop that specializes on driving the forum industry further. My specific area of interest in in the realm of intelligence and data analysis. This is a big topic, so I'm just going to focus on the product closest to launch.

The product is called Recommendations, and it's a recommendation engine.

The Problem

Forums contain a lot of noise. It's frustrating to continually refresh the new posts page trying to find interesting content. There is great content hidden in there, but it takes some effort to find. For those of us who can't pound refresh all day, we tend to give up and don't come back very often.

We also have individual interests and peers that we like to interact with. These are not always mapped to forums, and content that may be featured may be completely uninteresting to us. Popular threads can be an indicator, but it could also mean two members are trolling each other, driving the thread activity off the road into the ditch.

The Solution

Recommendations analyzes your community and starts to build profiles for each of your users. It identifies things they are interested in, who they like to engage with, whose posts they enjoy reading, and also who enjoys reading their posts. This, among with dozens of other data points, provides us with a clear picture of what sort of content they want.

As new posts are made, we match that criteria against each user's preferences. Based on the relevancy, we can highlight threads inline, put them into a sidebar/widget, or even directly alert them.

While they are desperately scanning your thread list, make the threads that should actually interest them stand-out. This should be an easy investment for the professional admins out there, but even for the passionate hobbyists, it sure makes browsing a forum more pleasant.

I can't even count the hundreds of hours I've spent on forums navigating through new posts lists, usually coming up dry. Posts that do interest me I usually stumble upon by fluke. The signs are all there, they are just being ignored by old technology. Let's fix that.

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The product, and the Forum Intent site launch, is about a week off its big debut. It'll be available for XenForo out of the gate, hopefully followed by a vBulletin 3.8 plugin very shortly after. I'm setting the introductory price at $50 or so, and will likely raise it once it gets a chance to go through a strong feedback cycle from a few dozen sites.

I'll be sure to keep you guys in the loop as things progress. Let me know what you guys think about the concept, and if you have any questions.

Thanks!

 

Demo/screenshots would be helpful :8

 

I'm doing some beta testing right now, but I'll definitely include some screenshots and more information when it's available.

It's a little hard to demo, because it's purely a background service. Showing a picture of a threads widget doesn't look any different than the latest posts widget you see on most sites. The difference though, is those threads should actually be relevant to you.

Cheers