One of the most overlooked areas of a site is the site phrase section. With SocialEngine PHP, you have a very powerful tool in the Language Manager phrase system. This is not just for multi-language sites. It's for every site. One of the first things you should do is edit phrases to suit your niche.

Phrases help with email delivery

These days, anti-spam filters are aggressive, resulting in most new sites (and some old sites) having their emails arrive in the spam box or not at all. Most ISPs filter email before it even arrives in the inbox, blocking anything they deem suspicious. Gmail and some others have tools for users to set as to what goes to spam, this is true, but they also filter some things before they even get that far. It does help if you tell your users to whitelist your domain in their email settings.

However, even with that your emails can arrive in spam if you don't do this one simple thing - change the email template phrases. The good thing for this is that those phrases are all in the mail template section. Go through all of them. Make as many as you can unique for your site. It will make a difference.

How phrases can help with spam

Spam. Not the canned variety, the internet pest variety. We had to change this community to invite only after we had tens of thousands of spam overnight one night. This site is a different sort of target for spam though as some of our competition is brutal in some regards. Your site, however, can also be a target of normal spam. How do they find you? Default phrases. If you don't change the default phrases for your site, you will get targeted by spammers.

For example, just check our demo.socialengine.com and you will see default phrases on the front and throughout the site. Get to work making those phrases as unique as you can to fit your niche. It will not only help with spam, but with the overall site feel for your users.

How phrases help with user navigation and usability

The SocialEngine platform is built to be a building block for many different types of communities. As such, there could be default phrases that just won't work for your own community. For example, this site has "First Name" changed to Display Name as this suits our site better. On some sites, "like" is not needed but something else suits better, such as approve or pray or bark, etc. You get the idea?

I'm sure you can find many other things to improve with phrases on your site. Feel free to ask questions or post your own tip for how changing phrases has helped your community!