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.
@Jon7Cups
All those ideas seem valuable improvements.
Can't wait to see them implemented!
@HealingTalk
agreed! <3 hehe
@Jon7Cups
I would like to request on behalf of several members of the community, for the option to opt-out or opt-in of having forum threads visible on profile pages. Thank you.
Y'all did it again 😞 every time I get things figured out a new change is made. Not that it matters but I don't like this one. It's too busy 😞
@mytwistedsoul
I agree. The forums look so much more crowded now. The ‘Browse Listeners’ thing might be helpful for new members, but… everything looks so much more… crowded and confusing. It feels a bit overwhelming 😞
@jon7cups I find it looks mostly good, with the additional info.
Only the 'Browser listeners' section with the photos is something I'd make close-able (and it should remember that I've closed it, surviving private browser window logouts).
I don't like to see those photos of listeners that are irrelevant to me in that huge size there, reminds me of a dating site, lol. They capture and divert too much attention.
@Jon7cups Oh, and the wait time amount is usually missing. Once it said '1 minute', but all the other times I visited the page, it only said 'on average' with no time in front.
@Jon7Cups
I'm terrible with change. :/
Are forums working? I can only access one page and not sure if the lists are even updating.
@AffyAvo You mentioned the same thing :) it didn't click for me until now lol
@mytwistedsoul Goodto hear it's not just me.
@AffyAvo Hopefully they get this fixed pretty quick because it potentially impacts a lot of people
There's no see more button? We used to be able to scroll farther. Now there's just 12 threads and no way to see more
@mytwistedsoul Wow, that would be a big improvement. 'Infinite scroll' is a nasty dark development pattern that I think should not be used for any purpose, not even to make people waste their time on mental health websites. It still exists on the main page, though.
@cloudySummer Isn't access more important? I can only see 12 threads for new posts (popular) and new threads. I think a lot can go missed this way.
@cloudySummer I know scrolling gets a lot of hate but I have to agree with @AffyAvo on this. I don't see it as a waste of time in this case. It would take more time searching for new threads
@mytwistedsoul I'd rather suggest a paginated page *just* for moderators.
Where you can access a specific page and do not have to start from the first message again after a reload, for example.
(pasting often inserts outside of text field, there must be some JS error...)
@cloudySummer That would mean to mod 13th, 14th, etc newest threads I need to go community by community. Considering the number of communities that seems really time consuming.
@AffyAvo Yes, if it's about moderating, another 'overview page' is needed for moderators that only shows a 'new posts' queue.
(I didn't know members could have moderation permissions)
@cloudySummer I don't really understand why not just have them all for everyone. Pages, scrolling, whatever. Seems silly to have popular and new for 24 threads max total.
Is this update both for members and listeners
@Hopeandjoy12
Yes it is.
Sounds very good.