Forum Restructuring Timeline and Updates!
Hello everyone.
As you may already know, the site and the forums have been undergoing changes for the last few months to make it easier to use. Throughout the next 6 weeks, we will be providing updates to the community to ensure that everyone is well informed about the next phase of changes.
The goal of all this work is to make navigation and usage of the forum easier for everyone. And, in particular, make it easier for newbies to get involved. How many times do we see someone start a post with “I’m not sure if this is the right place but…”!
The good news is that the changes are working and as a community we’ve nearly doubled the amount of posts we make and hearts/upvotes we give in the last 10 months!
Truthfully, change is always uncomfortable. Even when the change is something positive, adjusting to something new takes time and requires adaptation. We hope the changes benefit as many of you as possible. But it’s inevitable that some will not like these changes.
When you haven’t experienced a specific change, like the forum restructuring, there’s no way to predict what will happen. This is something new that we’re taking on as individuals and as a community, so this is a learning process for us all. There will be bugs, delays and other issues as we progress through this, but we will continue to work on them to improve and not revert back to the old changes.
Main changes
The layout (template) of each (sub) community homepage (e.g. 35+ community) will be upgraded to fit with the structure and style you see today on the dashboard (7cups.com/dashboard) and the main community page (7cups.com/home).
The sub-forum layer to each community will be removed so that you go straight into posts and threads when you go into a community. This happens today when you go to a (sub) community and sort by “New” or “Popular” and see posts rather than sub-forums.
Many popular sub-forums will be elevated into becoming their own communities. This is to balance out the problem created by removing the sub-forum layer - that the top level communities are too broad and general (e.g. “Hobbies”).
When we checked earlier this year we had 30+ communities and over 600+ sub-forums! Finding the right sub-forum to post in is tricky for newer users because the topic you want could be hidden in any of the 30+ communities. One of the many areas where we need your help is to finalise the names of the new communities.
The timeline we’re working towards is to gradually release and test these changes over the coming 6 weeks. If we encounter technical issues, it could take longer.
To our community leaders, we know how hard you have been at work in your various roles and communities and we are truly appreciative of your support. With the forum restructuring, we have to make some necessary changes to how you carry out your roles and responsibilities. This means there will be changes to how we track your monthly quotas, how communities are laid out in the communities and how tasks will be delegated to everyone fairly and equally. There will be an increased number of communities that will be introduced to the site and we will need leadership coverage to ensure that they are being properly managed. Through the next few weeks, we will be sharing proposed communities with you to gather feedback and assign coverage to them. There will also be an increase in recruitment and changes to our leadership applications as mentioned in a recent update that was given over the weekend.
I know that you have questions now and will in the coming weeks and we will ensure that there are several opportunities for you to share them and you will be provided with clear and concise responses. The first opportunity will be an AMA in the forums where you can ask questions and they will be answered by Head of Product and myself next week.
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@CheeryMango
Will enjoy seeing the new changes. It hopefully will let me understand things better
Okay thank you @cheerymango
Looking forward to these changes, thank you for the updates and keeping us posted, Mango!~
@CheeryMango
Oof, this sounds like a really big change!
I can see how this will help with forum use. I'm trying to wrap my mind around how this will work with finding older threads though.
Questions that come to mind (mostly wanting to jot them down, if there are answers ready now though, great!):
- Sorting. The sorting labels do not make much sense to me (brought this up previously and there was a change that didn't stick). Popular is actually newest thread. Recent is most recent post within a thread. Needs Reply is good. Top is most upvotes.
- Subcommunity features. Will all the non-forum stuff stay as is.
- Q&As. These are connected to subcommunities, with a bunch of new ones how will this work.
- Pinned posts - will these still be a thing? Where do we see them? Seems like this could be a lot without the subforum structure although this could be something where leaders need to edit them down and create master threads and not pin the threads that are linked within that.
- Coverage - what's the plan? Will the limits to number of areas stay the same.
- Subcommunities overall. The idea of a subcommunity was to bring together the different features. Q&A, forum, chatroom, feed (when we had it), now there are also growth paths. With creating a bunch of new ones how do we tie this all in.
- Community grouping. We have this now, I like it. If we create a bunch of new ones I think this will need work. Wondering about the plan for this.
How a subcommunity functions in general. Will it make sense to have things that aren't connected with a topic. Ie. Games and icebreakers in a support topic? I actually think this could be a good change, having icebreakers throughout the forums was a bit of an annoyance to me.
Thread groupings. Something like the inclusivity diaries - makes sense to have it all together. Are tags an option? I guess this is where masterposts would help too. Can we maybe have an archived site or something for a while so leaders can make these lists? This could be a fairly big project for some areas.
A better search tool - is this coming? I feel like some good but not necessarily popular resources may be harder to find losing the current structure. Being able to search title vs. OP, vs other posts could be really helpful for finding things. Plus a search feature that works the way most do. If I type in Self Care I do not want all threads that have Self and all threads with Care, I want threads that have both. Ie. more words without use of 'or' should equate to less hits, not more.
@cheerymango thank you for the hard work on this front and this very comprehensive post! I appreciate the focus on making it easier to navigate and huge kudos on the doubling of posts. 
@CheeryMango Thanks for the updates.
@CheeryMango
Thank you Mango for your extensive and detailed post on such an important issue.
The Communities are an amazing space of belonging, of Members sharing information and supporting each other, of feeling you are not alone, but you are in the company of others with the same issues.
A powerful healing space.
Unfortunately, many Members that come for 1-to-1 chats, or even group chats, that would enjoy and benefit from the Communities Forums and group support, don't join them.
Making the content of the 7 Cups' Communities more transparent and accessible to Members will be a huge achievement.
Many, many more Members will join the Communities the more the Communities are visible and transparent to them.
A step forward was given by setting up a menu by categories like Fun, Health "Topics", 7 Cups, etc while before, they were a long uniform list, that made it very difficult for a Member to find their specific condition or interest.
Even with the new menu, some issues are located in not obvious places, like OCD in both Support Plus and Personality Disorders, ADHD in the latter, "Bullying" and "Attachment problems" in Trauma Support, to name a few.
Some might be misplaced, like Bipolar, more akin to Depression than to Schizophrenia & Psychosis.
For many issues and conditions, Members might know their name, but not the category they belong to.
I have met many members that had checked the Communities but didn't know, and were surprised, that there was a Forum specific to their issue.
Now that the Communities Menu is divided into sections, there is the opportunity to move up Forums to SubCommunity level making them directly visible at first glance.
That will help hugely for Members to find what they are looking for.
My only caveat is that in some SubCommunities I know, people with different issues like to mingle in the Forums and Checkins.
Sometimes there are also groups of conditions that go together. So if your main issue is A, you might also have B and C, that are included in the same SubCommunity.
For example, different kinds of Anxiety, like GAD, Social Anxiety, Phobias and Panick Attacks (Anxiety Subcom), Loneliness, SAS and Depression (Depression SubCom), Abuse, PTSD and DID (Trauma Support), might go together.
Of course, we can, and we do, participate in many subcommunities at the same time.
In any case, these are "the kind of problems we want to have".
Even if some sacrifices must be done along the way. making the Communities transparent and accessible to Members, (so many, many more Members join), must be the main goal, and the highest priority.
Eagerly look forward to the changes and updates !!!
@CheeryMango
Thank you for this information and putting so much effort into it to make the use of this site easier.
Thank you for the announcement! @CheeryMango
If anyone needs any help with organizing threads / information / descriptions / resources of their communities better for the time being, please feel free to message (working on this front)!