Feature Update: A new community page
The most important thing about 7 Cups is the community - all of you. This community of listeners, members and therapists helping each other is rather special. But we still receive feedback that it can be hard to navigate the community or to find your place in it. There are many aspects to this (better search please!) and we can't solve it all at once. An improvement that we've been working on is exploring how to elevate the most important aspects of the community and make it easier to dive into.
This has lead us to the development of a new community page for the website that will replace the forum homepage. This community page keeps all the forum elements that were there already (lists of communities, feeds of content, guidelines, search) and sprinkles in a few more things that have been requested.
For members, the additions are a carousel highlighting the browse listeners page (how many times have you recommended that page to a newbie that didn't know about it?), a new route into the chat queue (with info on wait times), a live updating list of facilitated group discussions and the recently developed community updates module.
For listeners, many of the same elements plus a carousel highlighting available mentors. Increased visibility of the mentor programme is something that has been widely discussed.
Change is never easy, and I'm sure this will be no different for some of you. If you'd like to take the new page for a test run before it goes live in the next few days, feel free to PM me.
Just a little more context here too. Jon shared this with the team and the ambassadors and the feedback was really strong. I'm hoping you all like it too!
ohh this sounds like a great addition. i look forward to this being implemented. well done team 😀
Thanks for the heads up, Jon.
And definitely take advantage of Jon's PM invitation to give it a test, everybody!
@Heather225
I've tried it, It is amazing 🤩
Thank you for letting us know. I will take up on Jon's invite and give it a test 😄
Change for the better is the best type of change. Looking forward to seeing what the new layout will be like. Thanks for all your hard work!~
Sounds amazing looking forward to seeing it in action … 🙌🙌💕💕
@Jon7Cups
It is wonderful, I saw it and I don't have words describe how good is it!
Amazing job! :)
Another update to disorient us longtime members for a while...great.
Somehow, when I read "a new route into the chat queue" the first thing that comes to mind is the next time I go to log into the Sharing Circle the room will be full, no one else will be admitted until someone inside logs out & I will be issued a serial number/code for that day with an approximate (& wildly optimistic) waiting time...
@Jon7Cups These sound like useful additions, hope it will help achieve the goals you had when implementing this!
To make highlighting the 'Browse listeners' page more helpful for users, I'd like to suggest an option for listeners to check when they are not accepting new members. This would reduce one of the biggest sources of frustration when browsing listeners.
That is such a good idea @cloudySummer I second this.
Members don't often check bios to see if a listener is taking new chats or on break or something and it gets hectic to redirect every new member to the browse listeners page. It also feels like I'm letting them down and makes me feel slightly guilty so this might be a welcome addition.
And just to clarify, I don't mean to blame members. Often, listeners also don't put availability info in their bios. So this can help both parties.
@Mahad2804 I do check them, but roughly every 2nd verified listener doesn't accept new members, as they have additional roles on here or are busy with life, which is what makes it frustrating from the member side.
I didn't know it's also a problem for listeners, thought they would just ignore the member.
That makes it even more useful!
