One good way to engage and retain users in a community is to give people the opportunity to adjust the environment in which they interact with one another. When users can discuss an issue, come to a consensus and then somehow get that consensus implemented they get the sense of ownership over the community. Users begin to feel complicity, identify themselves with the community and care about its future.
The more settings a community platform has and the more often you change them to meet the specific needs of the community, the greater the engagement of the users in the community.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.