Threadloom Blog

Curating community content.

Introducing Primary Login – secure, passwordless login for forums

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Earlier this summer, Paul shared the results from our first two Product Stories experiments.  We’ll have more to share from follow-up experiments soon, but today, we wanted to share a new feature with you – secure, passwordless login for forums.

Login help requests make up 20% of Threadloom Newsletter replies.  Many of these requests come from users who want to reply to a post in the newsletter, but are having trouble logging in or resetting their password.  We believed that if we could bridge this gap, we could address a pain point for admins and users, and drive more engagement with Newsletter.

Using technology from Google Cloud and Auth0, a trusted authentication provider, we created a secure, passwordless login option designed to make it easier for forum users to stay logged in.  The feature is called Primary Login, and you can see it live on The Admin Zone.

  • Primary Login on The Admin Zone on desktop
  • Primary Login on The Admin Zone on mobile

Primary Login enables users to transition seamlessly from Newsletter to your forum so they can participate in conversations without struggling with a login form.  When a user clicks on the Primary Login button, they’re prompted to enter their email address, where we send them a confirmation email.  Once the user clicks on the confirmation link in the email, they’re logged in to the forum.  That’s it – no fumbling through password managers or trying to remember forgotten passwords.

In addition, users who don’t already have a forum account can register for a new forum account, with their email address pre-filled in, and without needing to generate a password.  Every new forum account is created in the forum database and controlled by the forum admin.  We invite you to take it for a test spin on The Admin Zone.

Primary Login is currently in beta.  We’re measuring the impact of Primary Login on post activity and reactivating lapsed forum users.  Stay tuned for an update on this soon.  We’re also developing assets to make Primary Login easier for forum users to identify.  In the meantime, if you have questions or are curious if this might work for your forum, feel free to drop me a line at chris at threadloom dot com.

Product Stories: The second experiment

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In last week’s blog post, I shared about an experiment that we ran last year with AZBilliards, Home Theater Forum, TalkBass, and Windsor Peak Press.  To recap, we created a new site called Product Stories with a product-focused presentation of forum discussions.  The initial results were promising, but were left with two questions:

  • What if we made the products the focal point, instead of the original post?
  • What if instead of including full post text, we only displayed a post snippet and forwarded clicks to the original forum thread?

To answer these questions, we designed a second experiment with Tesla Motors Club, Tortoise Forum, and WDWMAGIC.  First, we highlighted a specific product, then attached related posts from various forum threads.  Second, we included a brief snippet that linked back to the original forum post.

We also explained to visitors how the affiliate model on the site worked.

As with our first experiment, we generated traffic through Facebook ads, and again targeted non-forum, passive users.  

The overall engagement rate was 23%, softer than our first experiment.  Amongst those sessions, however, there were three interesting results:

  1. The purchase conversion rate improved to 3%, compared to 1% in our first experiment.
  2. Participation was more action-oriented.  In the first experiment, 53% of engaged sessions clicked on a post or product.  In this experiment, that figure was 76%.
  3. About half of these clicks went directly to the original forum post, while the rest went to the retail affiliate link.  The percentage going to the original forum post was much higher than we expected, especially considering that the retail link included a large image above the posts, and a big button below the posts.

The results convinced us that there was a compelling model here, and that Product Stories was worth building out.  But it also gave us insight into something broader.

When we saw that half of the Product Stories clicks went back to the forum, we put those results alongside the retention figures from the first experiment.  We realized that with some elbow grease and luck, we might be able to create a model with a positive click multiplier for forums.  In other words, a single session from Product Stories could, over time, produce more than one click to the forum.

We also noticed something else in the retention data.  We had run a series of early experiments in parallel alongside this Product Stories experiment, testing various presentations of non-product forum stories.  It turned out that users who visited both non-product forum stories and Product Stories were much more likely to return than users who visited just one or the other.

That led us to our second takeaway: By extending the Product Stories model to non-product forum stories, we might be able to further multiply the number of clicks referred to forums.  In other words, it might be possible to finally convert passive drive-by visitors into repeat visitors.

Since wrapping up this second experiment, we’ve run a number of additional experiments to test this hypothesis.  We still have much more work to do, but I’m happy to share that in partnership with our customers, we are getting closer to the goal, and I hope to share more about those results soon.

Product Stories: Exploring new ways to present forum content

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Beyond our Search and Newsletter products, we are continually exploring how to better connect non-forum users with our customers’ communities.  Over the past year, we’ve partnered with several customers to test new ways of presenting forum content to increase engagement while also generating revenue.  Since nearly every forum includes discussions about products, we decided to see if we could make these stories more relevant to people outside of these communities.

For our first experiment, we partnered with AZBilliards, Home Theater Forum, TalkBass, and Windsor Peak Press.  Using a set of recent threads, we extracted canonical products, linked them to retailers, and grouped posts around each product.  This was a one-time effort (in other words, we didn’t update products or posts at all during the experiment).

We set up a site called Product Stories and generated traffic through Facebook ads.  We targeted non-forum, passive users, similar to what a forum might see from organic search.  Over the course of one week, we sent about 9K sessions to a product story on the site.

About 13% of sessions clicked on a product link, of which, about 1% purchased a product (Fig. 1).  The click-through rate was higher than we had targeted, but the conversion rate was lower. So an ok set of results – not stellar, not terrible.

However, we were much more interested in engagement and retention.  A low purchase conversion rate paired with high engagement and retention rates is more sustainable than the inverse.  Fortunately, the Product Stories engagement numbers were more interesting.  The bounce rate was 69% and average time on page was 4:22, both much higher than we had targeted.

Fig. 1: Percentage of sessions that engaged with the site

Exploring a Product story38%
Expanding a forum post40%
Clicking on a product link13%

Fig. 2: Google Analytics overview

More importantly, retention was significantly higher than average forum retention rates, both in the aggregate and at the individual forum level.

Fig. 3: Google Analytics retention data

The initial Product Stories results were encouraging, but also raised more questions:

  • What would happen if we promoted the products as the focal point (instead of the original post)?
  • In this experiment, we had included the full post text on https://threadloom.shop.  What would happen if we only displayed a snippet, and forwarded “more” clicks to the original forum thread?

In my next post, I’ll talk about our second Product Stories experiment, and what we learned.

Announcing Threadloom plug-in updates with dual-search option

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Threadloom Search is now available as a supplemental option to native forum search

We’re happy to share that earlier this week, we released updated versions of our plug-ins for vBulletin 3 and 4, and XenForo 1.5 and 2.  As before, one plug-in gives you access to Threadloom Search, Newsletter, and/or List Builder for your forum.

In addition to various fixes and improvements, this update includes a new feature that lets your forum members choose (and save) Threadloom Search or your native forum search engine as their default search engine.  You no longer have to choose between the two – your members can have both. As an admin, however, you are able to set either option as the default search engine for new visitors to your forum.

Dual-search option with savable user preference
Dual-search option with savable user preference
Link from XenForo search results to Threadloom Search results
Link from XenForo search results to Threadloom Search results
Link from Threadloom Search results to XenForo search results
Link from Threadloom Search results to XenForo search results
User preference confirmation
User preference confirmation

This feature can be helpful for forum members who have grown used to the native forum search engine.  At the same time, it gives you the flexibility of simultaneously offering a powerful alternative to other members and new visitors.  Threadloom Search gives your forum a fast, modern search engine with image search, spell correction, and blog search. It is 10x faster than vBulletin search, and returns 10x as many results as XenForo search.  Whereas the click-through rate of most native forum search engines is often less than 10%, the search click-through rate for Threadloom Search is over 40%.

The following Help Center articles provide more information about the new feature:

We’re excited to help your visitors find your best content.  We hope that this update makes it easier for both long-time members as well new visitors to search in a way that is comfortable for them.

Threadloom Search speed upgrade

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Last month, we completed an infrastructure upgrade to Threadloom Search, which now searches over billions of forum posts.  Search speeds are significantly faster, especially for larger forums. We’re excited to help visitors find your best content even faster.

As before, Threadloom Search continues to return all relevant results in your forum (not just the top 500 results), and includes spell correction and image search.  Because Threadloom is cloud-based, you can offload resource-intensive search queries from your servers and focus on growing your community instead of your server budget.

Threadloom Search is available for vBulletin and XenForo, and free for forums with up to 10 million posts.  No credit card is required. You can sign up and download the plug-in here.

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