Forums are far to complicated (too many subforums, subforums constantly being created and deleted)
I don't know about anyone else but I find the forum to be massively user-unfriendly, simply because there are far too many subforums, and also because it can be difficult to keep track of forum posts as forms are constantly moved, renamed, deleted and created.
For me, my frustration at the moment is that I had a really important post in the General Support subforum, I poured my heart out over a period of days and engaged in a really useful conversation with a kind person who took the time to read what I had written. I have a notification saying I have a new response in that forum, but the link goes nowhere because the General Support subforum is gone.
I don't know what happened to it, whether it has been moved, renamed or deleted, or what happens to the threads inside a subforum when this changes, but it makes me anxious to know that someone reached out to me and I cannot know what they said, or that I put so much effort into putting my thoughts out there, and that was potentially a waste of time if the thread has now just been lost amidst the shifting sands of the 7cups forum.
Besides my problem I think there are some general issues with having too many subforums, that could apply to any forum but especially to one where the users are desperate to be helped and may have issues dealing with complexity such as anxiety, or short attention spans, and can easily become disheartened if the process of seeking help proves too difficult.
- Over-categorising things can make it harder to work out which subforum a post belongs in. Say, for example someone has a question about autism. Rather than just posting in the autism subforum, they have to decide which of the six autism subforums is the most appropriate.
- Trying to create a specific subforum for every concievable type of post means that the forums are general enough in scope, everything is too specific and it becomes too difficult to find the appropriate forum for a more general or unusual post.
- On the other hand, you can end up with overlap between the purposes of subforums, leaving someone with a difficult choice between two subforums, both of which seem appropriate for thier request but have different people using them.
- Too many subforums spreads the community too thinly. Instead of having well-used forums with lots of people contributing to a single discussion on a general topic, you get lots of seldom-used forums which have maybe only had a handful of posts in their entire existence. A problem made even harded by the fact that any given subforum can disappear at a moments notice.
- Changing the structure of the forum creates lots of broken links with notifications, it really is frustrating to know that someone responded to a post of yours but you can't see it because the forum is gone.
I do get that the reasoning behind all the subforums is that mental health is a broad subject area with many very different issues people area facing, and 7cups is trying to bring people as close as possible with others who can empathise. However I don't think we should exclude people from empathising just because of a small difference between their condition and ours. Does we really need different forums under the anxiety heading for each different cause of anxiety, social/performance/health etc. All of these people are experiencing anxiety, the fact they're experiencing it for different reasons doesn't mean they can't help each other. Similar with depression having a specific subforum for seasonal affected disorder, and autism having a specific subforum for autism in literature. Is there really any need for threads on those topics to be placed in a separate subforum away from the rest of the discussion?
My suggestion would be please pretty please, create a smaller selection of more generalised subforums (e.g. Autism spectrum / eating disorders / anxiety and depression / psychosis) and stick to that list and stop having weekly reviews (so it seems) where everything is changed around.
After a bit of using the search tool, and knowing the title of my thread it appears that is it gone. Not because a mod decided it was inappropriate (I presume) just simply lost in the rearrangement of the forum.
To be honest, if this is how the forum is going to work then I'm done with it, no matter how well-intentioned its organisers are, the implementation is so shambolic as to render the entire thing pointless. It takes a lot of effort for some people to get their thoughts in order and pour them out on the forum. Why bother when someone on a whim the very next day could decide to reorganise the forum, deleting your post in the process?
Google lists more than one deleted thread you've posted in: Indigopineapple site:7cups.com inurl:forum
Things do seem to disappear from these forums more than from any forums I've ever known, and it's particularly inappropriate at 7 Cups, where people come with painful subjects in mind, hoping to be heard, only to end up, for whatever reason, being invalidated in this way.
One of your recent threads (still there for all to see in Google's cache) included a word that is known to make some influential people here upset, although the last time I looked there wasn't any rule forbidding it. I'm thinking that maybe someone found the word upsetting and decided to delete it, but ended up deleting the whole thread by mistake.
I agree with you that the way the forums are organized is very complicated. Maybe it was done that way to allow people to subscribe to subforums, but I don't think I've ever seen a way to subscribe to subforums.
@Indigopineapple @Amelia
@RarelyCharlie
Well it appears to have been the entire subforum that was deleted. Get Support > General Entries none of those Google results are showing up as cached on my search, but also none of them are the thread I was specifically looking for,
I'm sorry if I've used a banned word and had my thread deleted as a result. Unfortunately I guess the reason you haven't said it yourself it because it is banned... meaning there is nothing you can do to let me know which word is banned and therefore nothing to stop me accidentally using it again.
I have never seen any actual ban. It's just that some words upset people, apparently and some of the people who get upset can delete stuff or have others delete stuff. I didn't use the word myself in case that happened to this thread too. I believe the upsetting words may include the names of certain substances, some of them legal and some of them illegal.
@Indigopineapple
@RarelyCharlie
Ah OK, well I try to be careful, if this happens at least a polite explanation would be an idea, it only so that it doesn't happen again. That said I can't remember ever discussing drugs on a thread, however in this case I'm pretty sure it's just been lost because the forum it was on was deleted, rather than my particular thread being targeted. I know other posts in the same forum are all gone too.
Just one final thing, I did notice that a number of the other threads in this forum are along the lines of 'we need a forum for xxx'.
While this may be seen as an argument for more and more subforums, I personally see it as an argument for fewer. If you set out to try and create a subforum for every single specific diagnosis and even for different types of issues within the same diagnosis then the result is that people's needs can only be met if a subforum is created speficically for them, whereas they may be much better met in a more general forum that caters to the challenges they face and the type of mental health issue they face, rather than the specific diagnosis.
I think related to your observations is something I notice is that even if you know a thread is still there that if you search for it....the search often pulls up 100 other titles that are not clearly related before getting to the one you know is there that you wanted. I mean if you type in the first two or three words of the title of the thread you want it doesn't seem to help the search engine narrow it down at all. Bookmarking threads sometimes helps and/or if you know someone who you know knows the link they can sometimes give it to you.
Anyway, my perception is that the search engine is somehow not set up in such a way that it is super speedy in linking you with the thread you want when you search for it. Unlike Google or Amazon which basically bird dog right in on what you type for search terms....if I type the words. For example I typed "Criminal chats" because sometimes listeners want to know what to do if there is a chat where someone reveals a criminal action and there are a few threads that are meant to help out on guidelines on what to do in that case. The search engine pulls up the first topics to the search term "criminal chats" with
1. Get to know your amazing ambassadors
2. Supporting particuarly sensative users
3. BDSM and fetish chats, a guide for listeners
4. Listener Support Guide Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD)
5. Back 7 cups Part 1 of making 7cups sustainable
The 7th topic listed by the search engine is "What to do if a member commits a crime." Which actually was amazing for the 7cups search engine to pull up something relevant within the first try. There is an actual thread somewhere that is more like the terms I typed in but that might take a while to pull up.
What often happens is that it is pages and pages of seemingly unrelated posts until I hit the one I was desperately looking for, usually in trying to help a fellow listener on a topic. So I guess you see...it's like the 7cups search engine is like a bird dog that retrieves field mice, road kill, and the chicken ma was cooking before it finally points out the duck you wanted it to fetch in the first place. :)
@PenguinPower31
Thanks for listening.
Sadly when I type the exact title of my thread into a search box I get nothing. Only seven results, none of which are my thread.
OK, I'm sad because my thread was lost, and frustrated because it was lost due to a random reorganisation (I don't believe it was deleted by a mod), and more frustrated because I know from my notifications that someone posted to it over night, but I'll never get to see who wanted to reach out to me and what they wanted to say. Just seems to defeat the whole point of having a forum.
And then more pragmatically, I know that the way this forum has been created and organised goes against almost every principle of running a good online forum, and it could just be a lot better, for everyone.
@Indigopineapple--I'm going to tag some of our amazing forum team (@Anomalia @MonBon @PoeticGuy @Roadie @Lyra) to see if they can take some of your suggestions into consideration. Sorry you're so frustrated!! I left you another message above encouraging you to PM me so I can try to help you locate the post you're looking for.
I agree the forums are overcomplicated, and the layout seems to big to me (it could be a couple of font sizes smaller but that's probably just me).
@Indigopineapple
Absolutely agree 100% and I am glad you posted on this.
@Indigopineapple
Hey there, thank you so much for your suggestions! I've been reading things and thinking things over (thank you for the tag @Amelia !) and you've given us a lot of food for thought!
It seems that what's most important is for you to get your thread back - here it is :) When a forum is moved, tags should still work across, so I wonder if there was a bug!
I'll definitely be coming back to read everything more thoroughly, and help come up with suggestions!
Okay, the thinking cap has been duly adjusted :) Let's go through all of the lovely suggestions that you've raised. Your post is really clearly formatted, and so eloquent, and I can't thank you enough for wanting the forums to be the best that they can be.
Over-categorising things can make it harder to work out which subforum a post belongs in.
Having spent quite a lot of my time putting threads where they belong, it seems that a lot of people see categories like General Support and think ''Aha, that's me!). And a lot of people don't really worry at all about where their thread goes - after all, they all come up in ''New threads'' no matter where they're posted, and then people can read them and contribute as they choose. I do agree though, some subforums are really very niche, and would probably best be incorporated into other forums!
On the other hand, as you so rightly pointed out, a lot of people make suggestions that new forums and sub forums should be created, because they want validation for what they're going through, and seeing that someone's taken the time to create a space for you to talk about something you can't talk about anywhere else can be hugely rewarding.
Overlap between the purposes of subforums
If people are in doubt, they might often just post the same thread in two different forums. And people's problems overlap as well - even if we only had one anxiety forum and one depression forum, many sufferers of both would still face the conundrum of which forum to post in. The logical conclusion of that is to have one massive forum marked ''Problems''.
Any given subforum can disappear at a moment's notice
I know how hard it was for you to see that your thread had gone missing, but that was human error on behalf of a forum mentor, and no matter how much the forums are redesigned, human error will still play a massive part.
Changing the structure of the forum creates lots of broken links with notifications
When categories are moved, all notifications should still work! The only case in which they wouldn't is if they were moved to the Listener Only Side, and that should never happen to a support forum.
The search often pulls up 100 other titles (PenguinPower31) - PS. Your description of the search engine made me laugh out loud, that is so true!
Yes, unfortunately the search engine is a little rickety - extensive experimentation has shown that four words are the idea number needed to find the thread you wanted, but often that makes little difference if you can't remember any distinctive words used in it. I really like @RarelyCharlie 's suggestion of nicking the google search engine, I didn't even realise you could do that! Unfortunately, until we get our long overdue forum overhaul, we'll have to muddle on through with the search engine as it is.
The layout seems too big to me (Calmingbreeze16)
I know what you mean - when the last overhaul happened, I was a bit nonplussed at first! I've gotten used to it though, but if it's a problem for you, there's software that you can use to change font sizes for yourself - find out more here.
We would love to have you on the forum team, if you'd be willing! We hold meetings where we discuss stuff like this, it would be so cool if you could join :) In addition, please do submit your suggestions to the Suggestion Box.
@Lyra
Thank you for summarizing this post & the feedback. That is really helpful!
@Indigopineapple I am sorry to anyone who has experienced a deleted post. Obviously, that is the opposite of what we want. We are working to improve the site in a variety of ways, I hope to see forum updates soon! This list of suggestions is very helpful as we think about updates moving forward.
Anyone is welcome to PM me to discuss further.