to make it easier thus more realistic for aptera employees to find out most popular customer/fan concerns, demands, informing more people of news updates, and mining for creative potential improvements to the product, and to the current model of multiple people saying the same things in multiple emails, thus email queries are summarized.) also to advertise aftermarket products that support the value of the product, allow some co-development, and to profit from advertising 3rd party stuff: https://www.aptera.us/forum/aptera-design-discussion/small-business-and-hobbyist-open-source-program
these features are especially helpful when the forum and growing customer/fan community grows larger than currently is.
PROFESSIONAL VERIFICATION PING:
maybe you could also verify if somone is a professional to let them into the forum teh same way other companies verify industrial certificates, to identify potential new employees or hobbyist developers who are passionate enough about the product to be on teh forum. a passionate developer works better than somone who just wants the paycheck. teh forum also can be the place to get creative ideas from enthusiast to find out what people want, and get creative ideas there can be a voting system for a communication thread to make the popular stuff get more attention, a way to find out creative good ideas and popular consumer demands they might have not thought of. and allow third party people to communicate with hobbyist pros for feature development.https://www.aptera.us/forum/aptera-design-discussion/small-business-and-hobbyist-open-source-program.
HASHTAGS:
organize ideas under so sub categories besides design, tech, general etc by means of modules called "hashtags." for making topic hashtags, users search for hashtag and software matches closest letter match and/or synonyms in the bank of already existing hashtags that will be listed, so users pick the already existing ones instead of make another one if there already is a exiting hashtag. this same thing is already similar to searching for forums posts here at aptera forum but there isn't the reminder above the forums to use the search bar to prevent repetitive posts, to keep all related ideas in a single post and comment thread.
a post can be under multiple categories for ex. a post on "structure proportions" can be in the categories that are mentioned in it such as "safety" and "aerodynamics." this is like Twitter hashtags. such can be used to ping professionals of different professions to help put on a single matter.
ARCHIVE:
Each hashtag has a archive chat thread where users summarize the conclusions of discussions and upvote other peoples conclusions, this would have people word search using the search bar for a suggestion like theirs, so they post their idea in the right discussion thread to help aptera keep track of what people want, and to prevent repetition of ideas and to help build on previous ideas rather than make ideas from scratch.
encourage users to refer to other ideas with links to the post/comment rather than filling teh chat space with a retype of their whole idea. this makes conversations easier to scan for relevant info. links should bring users to a specific range of lines in the post/comment in case the reference is to just a specific part of a long post. this can be done by highlighting a text then a small option square pops up to create a link to the highlighted text when the finger leaves the screen or the click of mouse is released after being pressed.
MAKE MOST LIKED COMMENTS/POSTS EASIER TO FIND
also how about putting the posts with teh most "likes" up at top of post lists b/c given it has a lot of likes its probably something people care more about, which is good for aptera to check out what people care about more concerning the priority list. even in the unusual cases (given the features in this post) where 2 posts express teh same idea the post that is easier to understand will get more votes and be rerembered more than the one that is considerably more difficult to understand with this system: if a person references another pot/comment to explain it better(in considerably simpler language, in less text, with more relatable analogies etc) the person can option in a hashtag called "rephrase" which is a special hashtag which integrates a link to the rephrasing comment in the original post/comment, so if people dont understand the original comment they can click on the rephrasing links to better understand rather than scan the whole thread for a better explanation, and this will incentivize people to be more clear and succinct b/c it exposes people for bad explanations and makes correcting them have more utility b/c more people see the correction. naturally, need for this will become more rare and one will only will to correct if the explanation is very difficult to understand and valued in the first place. if the alternative explanation post with the special hashtag gets voted more than the original post by a large margin, the original post is deleted, and such would only happen if the alternative explanation post accurately represents the original post as determined by votes(if original post is difficult to understand some data may be lost b/c people cant tell if the alternative explanation fully represents the original post, but these cases would be rare and the value of such data less likely valuable vs higher quality forum content and more forum activity, increasing productivity potential.
this makes reading thus communication much easier thus its more appealing to put more effort in meaningful quality in contributing to the forum.
"SLOWMODE":
"slowmode" like in social media platform called "Discord": to dis incentivize reactionary chat filling.
reactionary chat filling is when people small talk b/c they are having fun reacting to things and getting a response as soon as possible, this fills teh chat with useless info and that makes it harder for aptera and others to find out what people want/ practical ideas and visions/ aptera news. slowmode forces users to not be able to enter a message in the forum for minute or for reactions to be slow while they can get faster reactions from other social media places, incentivizing them to not small talk. this is especially helpful in archive threads.
given that small talk maybe valuable for building community good customer/fan/3rd party marketing relations, there can be a separate chat place for that stuff, maybe a 3rd party social media website.
PING SUMMARY VIA EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION
also email notifications of pings including pings of news from aptera, forum pings and type of pings they want based on profession or hashtag can be email notified about every weekend or every whatever time users set it to.
FORUM HOUSEKEEPING REMINDER
for some features, the fact they exist should be explained above the forum post list to remind people to use them properly, for ex, currently lot of people dont post stuff relevant to a already existing thread in the thread via post search box, they instead start a new thread and dont realize the thread system, making all data disorganized thus harder to analyze related ideas together, people dont search through all posts of teh same topic to consider all ideas for the topic, so its better to have all ideas of a single topic in a single place. reminders should be a pop ups so its not easily ignored when swiping through website.
also people often ignore idealistic ideas and this should be reminded against above the main forum page b/c such although ideas seem unrealistic given current state of technology or the nature of the market, it could become practical for people of different ability or for later time as things change (for ex. aptera maybe cant improve their car at the moment b/c of teh nature of the market (it needs to secure trust of investors by paying its debts, make enough profit, and secure the trust of potential customers actually selling the product) after winning trust and having profits, they can apply ideas from before into a improved car.
GROWING USER BASE
such a forum can be advertised to all customers and on other social media platforms, for ex. teh CEO can make excuse to mention the internet link of teh forum on twitter, so enthusiast would click on teh link to contribute to teh forum.
about making best use of third party assistance to teh company (such as measuring user demand and mining for product ideas etc): https://www.aptera.us/forum/aptera-design-discussion/small-business-and-hobbyist-open-source-program this might be useful: https://rocket.chat/ its open source
have multipurpose text threads and/or voice video call(b/c its easier to talk things out than text for most people, and video can communicate thing like for ex. the apperance of some damage on a car in a conversation about how to fic it) rooms called "room 1", "room 2" etc, . this way instead of 5 different conversations happening in one channel about "forms of government", people can have different sub topics of discussion in separate rooms to prevent confusion between different sub topics being discussed at once. the naming of the discussion rooms are titled by users and a voting system allows people to poll vote who is to be teh moderator and name the channel so people outside the channel dont have to figure out whats being discussed there much plus its a reminder of the orginal goal to keep debate on topic. such poll system can also replace moderator if moderator is unwanted b/c he betrayed the agreement to serve as the majoirty wanted.