Ranks & Leaderboards
You can automatically assign your members into ranks. Each forum has it's own stats page, viewable to all members, which includes stats on new members, popular posts, and high ranking members.
Badges
A custom badge is available for each member, that shows their posting history and rank within the forum. These badges can be added to any website, from blogs to social networking sites. The badges automatically include a member's avatar and automatically show real-time stats.
Quickly find 'New Replies'
When a member returns to your forum, if there are any categories with new topics or replies, a 'new' icon will notify them. Within the topic listing, topics are color coded to indicate new replies or unread posts. Lefora will remember just where a person left off and include a 'View Marker' to take them straight to the last read post. Saving them time and ensuring they keep the conversation on-topic.
Chatbox
You members can take advantage of a chatroom on your forum's sidebar. Just add the Chantago chatbox in your admin panel.
Are your members on twitter? You can embed a twitter widget on your sidebar that can display your latest tweets to the whole forum, or embed a search feed that shows all people twittering about your forum.
Members in your forum can choose to link their forum profile with their facebook profile, allowing them to send updates to their facebook network when they post new topics in the forum.
Avatars
It's important for a community to be 'social'. That's why Lefora displays member's avatars next to their names around your forum, from the recently online list, to the stats page. The member directory is purely photo based and members can choose different ways to sort the member list.
Members have multiple options for uploading an avatar. They can select a photo from their computer, link to one on another website, or choose from our clipart library. Our free avatar library ensures that 90% of your members have a picture next to their name. We even remind them to add an avatar if they haven't done so already. More members with avatars makes your forum more active.
Dynamic Member Profiles
Not only can a member write their own profile and embed multimedia, but a profile is automatically created from a member's posts within a forum. Each profile is a mini-blog of what a member has been saying in the forum, and it predominately features highly rated posts at the top of the profile.
RSS
If you know what RSS is, you know that your members will love the ability to subscribe to new posts within your forum. Members can subscribe to new posts across the whole forum, or just replies within one topic. They can even subscribe to the posting activity of another member.
Add Video and Photos in just one click
Embded photos or videos into a topic is a snap for your members. No need to fiddle with complicated code or tags, just take the URL of the photo or youtube video and paste it into the post box. When you hit the <ENTER> key Lefora will automatically recognize the media and embed it in your post. It's that SIMPLE!
Hottest Topics
We measure popularity and freshness, to highlight the hottest topics in your forum. Featured on your headlines page and as an optional 'widget' on your sidebar. There's even a visitor view count at the topic of each topic so your members know how popular a topic is, regardless of replies.
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
Our rich text posting editor makes it simple for your members to know what their post will look like. When they make a word bold, it appears bold, if they insert an emoticon, they see it in the post, it's just like typing in Microsoft Word.
VIP Status Badges
Your members can choose to upgrade to VIP status which will place a special badge next to their name. VIPs get exclusive previews of new Lefora features, ad removal, 24x7 support over email, and optimized page loads.
Fast....
Your members will appreciate how fast our forums are. We have our servers spread across the United States and across the globe. This ensures that your members are connecting to the closet server for the fasted speeds. And if your forum experiences a spike in activity, don't worry, we have you covered. Our cloud computing infrastructure dynamically load balances spikes across hundreds of servers - admins don't have to lift a finger.
More than one way to read a forum.
Not all members have the same preferences for reading a forum. On Lefora, members can choose to browse the forum by:
- individual category
- all topics across all categories
- all replies across all categories, most recent first
Super Simple Registration
Membership sign-ups take less than 10 seconds! We allow members to quickly join a forum without requiring lengthy forms split across multiple pages. After signup, we remind members to fill out additional profile information. And we automatically detect the timezone of your members so they don't have to enter that.
And because your forum is on the 'Lefora Platform', if a new member already has a Lefora profile from another forum, they don't need to recreate a user account, all of that information is automatically imported into your forum and they can even choose a different username.
Games
You can add games to your forum so that your members have another reason to stick around and hangout. Any Flash based game will work on Lefora.
Email Notifications
Lefora automatically sends out email notifications to your members to remind them to come back to your forum (from welcome emails to private message notifications). Additionally, Lefora is the only forum software with an special 'Daily Digest' notification - a brief 'digest' of all unread replies to your members each morning. Members have the option of opting out of this notification.
Private Messages
When members send private messages to each other, their be able to take advantage of our advanced posting editor and easily embed photos and videos. We send the full message to the receivers email inbox with a link back to your forum in order to reply.
And much more...
We could keep going with all the features available to your members. From interesting emoticons, to the ability to thumb up & down a post. And if there's anything you're still unsure about - then please ask us and we'll be sure to get back to you and update our features page.
