Elfsight: How a Wishlist Category Shaped 700 Feature Releases

Elfsight builds no-code website widgets used by over two million website owners. Reviews, social feeds, forms, countdown timers, chat tools and calculators. The product library runs deep, which means customer questions run deeper.

The Elfsight Community on Discourse started as a support space. Customers came with setup questions, troubleshooting issues and configuration requests. That part still works. But over time, the forum turned into something the team hadn't planned for: a structured feedback system that directly shapes what gets built next.

"The community plays a central support and engagement role," says Helga Razinkova, Community Manager at Elfsight. "It gives customers a public space to ask questions, request features, share ideas and follow product updates." The shift happened when individual support conversations started compounding into shared knowledge. A question answered once became a reference point for hundreds of future visitors.

Growth that shows up in comments, not pageviews

The community's growth over the past year goes beyond passive readership. People are coming back and contributing.

Yearly engaged users grew from 8,887 to 11,969. Topics created rose from 4,800 to 5,350. User-generated comments jumped from 15,700 to 21,000. That last number matters most because it signals that users aren't reading answers to their own problems and leaving. They're participating in discussions, voting on ideas and following up on threads they care about.

"Users don't consume information passively," Helga says. "They contribute ideas, follow discussions and return to track feature updates."

How the wishlist works

The standout category in the Elfsight Community is the Wishlist. It's a public feature request board where users suggest new capabilities, vote on existing ideas and track progress as requests move through development stages.

Custom voting buttons make participation easy: users click once to signal support, no lengthy comments required. Behind the scenes, this runs on a Topic Voting plugin that tallies interest and surfaces the most-requested features automatically.

Status tags show where each request sits in the pipeline: planned, in progress, released, and everything in between. These are standard Discourse tags with custom styling applied to make them visually distinct, so users scanning the board can instantly read the state of any request without opening it.

When a status changes, the team posts an update. Users who voted or commented on a request get visibility into what happened to their feedback. Staff updates use the Add Staff Color feature - a special highlight that separates official responses from community discussion, so no one has to dig through a thread wondering which reply is the real answer.

The Wishlist feeds directly into product roadmap discussions. Requests are prioritized based on community demand through votes and engagement, strategic value and technical complexity. Developer KPIs are partially tied to feature releases driven by community votes. That detail is worth pausing on. The team has wired community input into how they measure engineering output.

Over four years, Elfsight has released more than 700 features that originated as community Wishlist requests. Some of the most popular requests have attracted hundreds of votes and thousands of views, with sustained interest from initial suggestion through release.

After a feature ships

When a requested feature goes live, the team  announces it in a dedicated Changelog category. User reactions vary. Some threads fill with enthusiastic responses. Others see measurable view counts without much discussion. What comes after is more interesting: users who asked for a feature return with follow-up feedback, refinement suggestions or edge cases the team hadn't anticipated.

"In several cases, this immediate community response helped us quickly iterate and adjust features after release," Helga notes. "Users see that their input is acknowledged, visible and acted on."

That feedback loop, from request to release to refinement, is hard to replicate through traditional support channels. In a ticketing system, the conversation ends when the ticket closes. In a community, the conversation continues and builds on itself.

Product intelligence the team can't get elsewhere

The structured, public nature of the forum gives the Elfsight team ambient product intelligence that's difficult to get any other way. Because discussions are searchable and organized by category, patterns emerge across users rather than surfacing one ticket at a time.

"The open forum gives our team direct visibility into customer pain points, recurring friction and emerging use cases," Helga explains. "It's easier to identify patterns across users than to react to isolated support tickets."

This visibility helps the team validate feature demand early, spot areas of the product where the UX creates confusion and discover use cases they hadn't anticipated across different industries. Community conversations frequently influence both roadmap prioritization and how the team positions the product.

Answers that stick around

One of the benefits of running the community on Discourse is how individual answers become permanent resources. Elfsight  doesn't formally track onboarding metrics tied to the forum, but the qualitative signals are consistent.

Users regularly mention fast, detailed responses from the team. They reference CSS snippets and customization tips shared by other community members. Feature announcements and changelog updates give existing customers a reason to return and new users a sense of how actively the product is developing.

Because answers are structured and searchable, new customers can resolve setup questions by finding existing discussions, without generating a support ticket at all.

What's working

The Elfsight Community shows what happens when a forum is designed around participation rather than deflection. The Wishlist category turns feature requests into a transparent, measurable process. Public discussions give the product team visibility they couldn't get from support tickets alone, and every conversation stays searchable, so the community's value compounds over time.

For a company with 90+ widgets and millions of users, the alternative would be scattered requests across email, chat and social media, with no way to aggregate demand or communicate progress. The community solves that while also building customer loyalty: users who can see their feedback acknowledged, tracked and eventually shipped have a reason to stay engaged.

Nearly 12,000 engaged users, ovver 21,000 comments in a year and 700 features that started as a community suggestion.