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  • Should your community have a casual chat or off-topic discussion channel?

    Paula Derrenger

    Member

    Updated: Apr 14, 2025
    Views: 412

    Curious to hear thoughts on adding an off-topic, casual chat channel in your community. Do you think it helps improve engagement and conversations among community members?

    I ask because in one of the communities, 90% of the discussions were routed to off-topic channel. Most of our members wanted to engage in discussions not related to the main theme of the community.

    Let me know your experience about off-topic channels in your community. How’d you handle situation where majority of discussions are off-topic?

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  • Kaustubh Katdare

    Founder • 4d

    Great question, Paula. You should not have a casual or off-topic discussion channel in your community in the early days. However, you may introduce it after your community has gained some traction.

    The off-topic discussion channels will create a distraction. If you are a public community, then the off-topic discussions will confuse the search-engines as well.

    In the initial days of starting a community; it's essential to keep the number of channels to bare minimum. Lesser number of channels means lesser confusion for the members.

    We learned it the hard way. In one of the communities I managed, we started off by introducing 5 channels focused on core-topics; but added a 'Coffee Room' channel for casual discussions. That channel got all the spammy, low-value content from members who had very limited interest in the main theme of the community.

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