Hey man, I saw the forum on XF and I'm pretty excited for you, so I thought I'd join and make some suggestions straight away.
I was pretty excited watching the LA Auto Show stuff. And to be honest, I was even more excited to have an opportunity to be the first to create a forum for something brand new; finally a forum that would technically have no competitors. I didn't create one though, but you did, so that's cool.
Here are some suggestions for now:
I could be wrong about this, but I believe it is always best to have a .com domain to get the most traffic to your site/for SEO purposes/it just looks cleaner. I know there are exceptions nowadays, but I still believe in this age old rule. It's really not too late to switch to a .com! rivianautoclub.com, rivianforum.com, rivianowners.com - etc. I would be way more inclined to join.
Along with the URL, I think your sub-directory would look more professional as /forum instead of /xf. And that's only if you intend to ever create a homepage in the future. If you know you always want to the forum to be the homepage/main purpose of the website, I would just move the whole forum to the home directory.
I don't see Rivian writing it as RIVIAN except on the emblem on the vehicle. You also use Rivian throughout the site. So, maybe for consistency, change the forum title to Rivian Auto Club instead of RIVIAN Auto Club. That said, I don't know if I would personally use that name since your main "competitor" (I know it is a totally different brand) uses that name (Tesla Motors Club).
The simplicity of the forum categories is good. No need to have extra forums that won't have many posts in them yet. But I would change the name of the main category to something that isn't default XenForo and also rewrite the description of the Community forum, which feels a little weird when reading it. Also, maybe add at least one off-topic forum, though I could understand why you may not want one.
The sidebar on the right is much longer than the list of forums. You could move some of that around to display under the forums list, like the social media one, members online, and stats. That would even things out a bit for now.
Lastly, your skin works. Simple is good. But if you want to become THE Rivian forum as the company starts to become more popular, a professionally made skin is always better.
I'm very interested in seeing what you do with the forum since it is the first of its kind which is usually a good thing!
Wow, great suggestions, all.
I'm torn on the .com name. Yeah, I chose the .club name partly because it's cute, but also because it's a shorter name. I'm hoping that a .club name is different enough to be memorable, so that people can remember the domain, should they lose a link to it. Just in case, and while I'm thinking about it, I just did register rivianautoclub.com. If nothing else, it's a way of protecting the Rivian Auto Club "trademark".
Again I chose xf instead of forum because it makes URLs shorter, and frankly, no one else other then XenForo sysadmins would care/notice.
But I am tempted to have it be at the root level since I don't have any ambitions to have a landing page separate from the forum. TMC has one, and I dare say no one visits it.
You are 100% right on RIVIAN. I was copying their logo, but even they don't use it in print. I'll change it to Rivian when I use it in print.
I don't see the connection between Tesla Motors Club and Rivian Auto Club. I use Auto (as in Rivian Automotive), they use Motors (Tesla used to be called Tesla Motors). The only similarity is Club. And I found the .club domain name, so that pretty much sealed it for me. I wasn't actually trying to copy TMC. I think Rivian Auto Club is fine.
Any suggestions for a new name for the Main Category? And for the Community description? I may add an off-topic forum, or I may just nuke poisonous off topic discussions like anything to do with politics, haven't decided yet. I think TMC gets more political debate than it should because it tolerates off topic discussions too much, has a forum for it, etc. But TMC is actually trying to make money, so the more posters, messages and debates the better for them. I have zero interest in trying to monetize this site, so I'd rather the mission be 100% useful for Rivian and related technologies when we get bigger (like other EVs, EV tech in general, etc.).
Your formatting suggestions are great, I will look into that pronto.
I'm a utilitarian at heart. I will add some nice touches here and there (hey, I added photos on the title bar!), but it'll be light.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback.