I’m building a new community, unrelated to SketchUp, and always enjoyed my time at the helm here.
I’m curious about what it is that brings you back everyday, or what keeps you going?
Have you joined other communities and abandoned ship quickly?
How recently have you looked into joining another community, and did you do it?
You should answer the stuff above first, my thoughts might spoil your answer.
I have my own answers for this, as I was constantly asked at Google how to help other teams get an equally engaged community. Trimble groups asked a couple of times as well.
I always laughed because there was nothing at Google that was creative, nor at Trimble, so I attributed the primary success that got it started was the ability to explore things in a creative manner. Then stick around because you’ve made friends.
That being said, I did also get to talk to Sages on a regular basis, and a popular answer was “helping people get better at SketchUp made ME better at SketchUp.”
When I first had a SketchUp question I no doubt found the Google forums, and while I was there I read other people’s questions. Some were interesting questions, and I would work out the answer, and reply. Some amount of time later I was a Top Contributor with Google, and migrated to be a Sage when the forums were eventually on sketchup.com.
If I wasn’t coming back for work reasons, I probably would still come back. Not sure if it’s an addiction or an affliction. I can’t stop myself from trying to help.
I have joined plenty of communities. Not fully sure why they don’t get me to come back a lot. Reddit and Discourse are examples, where I’m in no hurry to go back and check.
I am signed up for Threads and BlueSky. They are early days, and I was never a huge Twitter or Messenger participant. Not sure if I will use them much.
The SketchUp forum is by far the best forum I have ever participated in. I first came here 2 decades ago because of some problem I had with modeling and was pleasantly surprised by the quick and thorough responses. I learned a lot here on the forum (even more from reading than from asking) and wanted to give back to the community. That’s when I started to help others who came here for help. And as you said, I did indeed learn a lot about SketchUp by trying to solve other people’s problems…
I read the forums for years without an account as a lot of the problems I was having as a learner were the same others were having. Its only recently I created an account and got more involved in order to give the kind of support I had. I’m also always interested in seeing the content people put in the galleries as you get to see how different industries are using Sketchup and how they are solving problems.
I use the Lumion Forum as well but I really tailed of using it once the version I was using stopped being current and the general discussions became less relevant. Its also a lot quieter and feels less populated.