The slow death of forums *see OP for Admin warning and update 28/02/18*

Chorus_suck wrote: »

With respect, he has answered exactly none of the questions I’ve asked.

And guys, Besty is a big boy ... I’m sure he can answer for himself.

I am currently out of the country with a very sick close relative. I'm not going to be posting again in this thread for a while. When I'm back in action I will respond as I set out previously. Alternatively other admins or someone from the office may pick this up. I am certainly not going to be giving any special treatment to questions asked by a poster who seems to provide a lot more feedback on the site than contributing constructively to its discussion forums

I have spent some time re-reading this thread, and have identified various suggestions made to improve the experience of users. A number of AH-specific points were made (including, for example, the "chat thread" point). I understand the AH mods will do their own review of the thread, and am not going to cover them off here

There are some specific points as well as a couple of generic ones.

Firstly the generic ones:

Feedback forum – we always indicated we wanted to give the current process 6 months or so. We are proposing to hold an Open Feedback thread on this, but want to wait until we had worked through this thread before starting that. There will be some ground rules to avoid too much focus on specific points or the thread being overly dominated by a small number of posters. I would hope we can get this up and running by the end of January

Moderation – this is something we will discuss with mods initially. One thing we are looking at is refreshing the mod guidelines with a view to getting consistency where appropriate. However (and this applies equally to the suggestion of doing away with forum charters altogether), there is never going to be a one-size fits all solution when we cover such diverse topics as Soccer, PI, Politics etc. I would expect us to provide further feedback to the wider community following that discussion, but I don’t want to attempt to put a timescale on that as there is the potential for a large number of points to be considered

Turning now to some of the specific points raised:

Site development issues:

Post 31 – Search function
Post 26 – decent app
Post 376 – mods to only be shown as mods in the forums they moderate
Re-introduce menu link to Post of the Day – I understand there may be a quick fix to this

An additional point was raised at post 1740 about trying to give prominence to more threads on the front page, but there has not been much further discussion on this particular point

I think I can say there is general support for all of these suggestions, and indeed they have been made previously. These though are issues for the Office and Site Development team. As I understand it they have been considered low priority given other issues the site has had to deal with. We will though pass the feedback on to the office. Anything that cannot be accommodated in the current set-up will certainly be considered as the Responsive site is revamped.

Some points for further discussion

Post 894 - Hiding inactive forums (maybe dropping them down a level could be considered though)
Post 1066 - Introduce the ability to hide threads
Prison – there were comments about Admin attitude in the Prison forum. However it seemed to be of concern to a very small number of posters, and it has been recognised that changes were introduced following earlier feedback. One option would be to hide the forum from public view. We would then, no doubt, face claims of not being open. I personally do not see any issue with the way that forum currently operates and we are not proposing to implement any changes, but equally if there is widespread concern we could revisit this. Either way, I’m not currently seeing this as one of the major issues raised here.

A general point I will add is we had comments about making sure changes are properly tested before being introduced and some of these things are not going to be as simple as flicking a switch

A number of points will be discussed with the mod team:

Post 29 – thread locking/deleting
Post 401 – feedback stickies in every forum
Post 979 – zombie threads

We will consider the following at Admin/Office level:

Post 453 – too many forums
Post 730 – focus given to rejuvenating forums (although this is something that has been tried without much success)

Then we have another item for the office:

Post 91 – user survey

I think there is little merit in pursuing a number of suggestions, although we will at least have a discussion at Admin level:

Post 21 – allow “uncensored” discussion – I am pretty sure our legal advisers would risk heart attacks at this suggestion
Post 141 – hide postcounts. Although this was suggested I’m not sure there was much support for this
Post 303 – specific/limited terms for mods – I really don’t see this working with the current site layout, and in particular the number of forums we would probably never get mods for
Post 562 – mods should not moderate topics they have a personal interest in. This arguably links into the suggestion of paid staff doing the modding, but neither seem in any way practical to me
Post 577 – removal of usernames from closed accounts – it would be incredibly confusing if posters cannot see the way a thread developed, and equally I’m not sure what benefit we would get from this

I am proposing we close this thread around lunchtime on Friday. This allows anyone who feels they have more to add, or think we have missed an important suggestion to respond accordingly. Please do not post asking why the thread will not be left open. I have already addressed that point and will re-iterate AH is not the place for site-wide feedback. Further threads here will not be tolerated, certainly while we continue to review the output of this thread.

As a general point I would like to commend posters on the way they have behaved in this thread, which has been part of the reason we have allowed it to remain open. I am not sure the old “Feedback” format would have worked in this way, and perhaps we have benefited by getting a wider cross section of input. Feedback is definitely appreciated, but one issue with that old format was things typically went round in circles with posters complaining about lack of action, often in areas where we really did not have a proper site-wide perspective. This thread has, in my personal view, been much more constructive even if it did get a little tense on occasion.