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 I appreciate the advance notice, it really helps with pulling together some information before we lose our current organization. Thanks!
I do think this sounds great for new threads that will be created after the change. It's making the old stuff fit within the new format with systems that work well for users that's my concern.
@CheeryMango
Amazing amount of work for you thank you!
@CheeryMango
One thought/concern/idea.
With the removal of sub-forums, a lot of topics may get very broad and people will want to be able to search posts more easily, I know the current search is extremely ineffective and I actually find things faster by wading through all the forums and sub-forums which is by no means fast. But it makes me wonder if we couldn't add some form of 'tagging' feature to posts (that may emulate some of the current sub-forum specificity) where if I were to post something in LGBTQ+ for example, I might be able to tag it with "LGBTQ+, Lesbian, Coming Out" So that people could then search for "Coming Out" or "Lesbian" topics and find that post. You could limit the tags allowed per post, but it would also reduce some of the trouble with cross-posting where a topic fits into multiple areas.
Also if tagging were created - potentially all posts within sub-forums at present could then be tagged with an appropriate tag related to that sub-forum heading. Sort of to preserve that kind of information without having to preserve sub-forums.
@EmotionsListener Yes! That's what I was thinking of when I mentioned tags.
