Into The Forrst

On the Forrst invite system.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just launched a substantial update to Forrst’s invite system.

We’ve employed an invite-only model since the early days of the site with a nice degree of success; it’s helped keep the community highly-focused, and ensured that only developers and designers are able to gain access. It’s also helped maintain our growth at a healthy rate.

Something we haven’t handled so well, however, has been our constantly growing waiting list — now over 13,000 strong. Folks who should be in the community have been subjected to increasingly unreasonable waits — sometimes up to a few months. We think that sucks, so to that end, we’ve re-imagined the way invites work on Forrst.

The new system

The new system is based on votes. Everyone starts the day with 5 votes, and may use those votes to say “I think this person should be invited”. You’re essentially vouching for them as a developer or designer. Once the prospective user receives 2 votes (a number we may tweak as we watch usage), they’ll receive an invite.

This is a major departure from the way invites currently work, where users’ reputations are linked to that of the users they invite. We felt that the accountability we were enforcing tended to be a bit overreaching, causing most users to feel uneasy about using their invites on strangers. With the new system, we’re spreading out the responsibility to multiple members.

Of course, you’ll still be able to instantly invite colleagues and friends via email, and that system has not changed — invites are still earned through awesome interaction with the community and maintaining a reputation in the 92nd percentile or higher.

Another thing you’ll notice is that we’ve stopped confusingly referencing requesting an invite as “applying”. To us, inviting new users should be entirely based on their passion for development and design, and not how talented or known they are in their respective industries. Forrst is a great place for getting honest critique and feedback, and any legitimate developer or designer is welcome to join; keeping this in mind when voting for new users is important to the process.

Speaking of critique, there’s an important new element to the invite request: feedback. When you request an invitation, you’re given the opportunity to leave feedback on one of our member’s posts; we think this is a great way to show the community that you’re ready, willing, and able to add to the discussions happening on Forrst. When you do receive your invitation to join, your feedback will be automatically added to that user’s post. We’re really excited about this new twist and we think our community will be, too.

If you’re ready to start voting on users, head on over here: http://forrst.com/people/list/invite/ (or access this page from People > Invite New Members at any time). We’re converting over many of the 13,000 existing requests, so bear with us as you may not see that many requests over the next 24 hours.

If you’ve recently requested an invite, we’ll be sending out an email with instructions on updating your request. Please expect it shortly (hopefully in the next 24-48 hours).

The Leaderboard

As part of this new system, we’ve also launched the Forrst Leaderboard. It’s intended to be an up-to-date snapshot of which members have been the most engaged and helpful within Forrst. While your reputation plays a very tiny part in your ranking, the majority of your ranking comes from having your comments starred by Forrst staff or marked helpful by other users; you’ll also get credit for inviting in new users who also start contributing to the community. This marks the first of many initiatives at Forrst to help reward our members for their helpfulness and incredible contributions, both to the community and each other.

One more thing

While I have your attention (hopefully!), there’s one more tiny* thing I’d like to announce: we’ve also launched Notifications. Gone will be the days of Forrst email overload — there’s now a notifications page that alerts you to new comments on your posts or posts you’ve subscribed to, new follows, and any mention of your username within posts and comments (we’ve got more notification events coming shortly). Check it out for yourself: http://forrst.com/feed — Note that it’s only collecting data from now going forward, so it may be a few moments before you start seeing alerts. As part of this feature, you’ll see an unviewed notification count next to the Forrst logo and in the page title, so you’ll have almost instant notification anytime there’s something new to check out.

* Okay, maybe not so tiny

That’s all folks.

I’m really excited about the things we’ve released today, and incredibly proud of Keith, Zack, and Mike for their hard work in getting this stuff looking and working solidly. I’m also really looking forward to what’s in store over the next year. We’re definitely just getting started.

If you’ve got any questions or feedback at all, please don’t hesitate to contact hello AT forrst.com.

Cheers,
Kyle Bragger
Founder