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One week with Forums – observations and reflecting your insights
It is ~7 days with a new format (changing Discussions → Forums)
The biggest changes I noticed in my behaviour and reflecting towards UX, and UI:
• On the Forums page, we can see besides the title also the part of the description (it is like a hook to participate in one of them) 👍
• Conversations are better moderated. 👍
• Less bots, more genuine feedback. 👍
• Tagging users via the handle. 👍
• You can contribute apart from General, Introduce yourself, and Self-promotion to the Product forum – instead of choosing these 3 topics, you can start typing the name of the product. 👍
Things, I haven't figured out yet:
• When I receive an email stating that some of my friends posted a discussion and I want to check it, I am redirected to the 404 page (maybe their posts weren't approved?).
• I often slip into the fact that General discussions are always at the top as trending, I tend to overlook Self-promotion, Introduce yourself, and AMA discussions.
• How does AMA work? (Cannot choose the option for the topic.)
• It would be fine to have some button in the side panel that redirects users to Forum guidelines so there are higher chances that the discussion will be approved instead of deleted.
Do you have your observations?
What do you appreciate and what would you find useful?
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@jakecrump Hello Jake, thank you for reading this post and making it clear regarding AMA.
When it comes to 404 issue: I received email with the subject line "User XY started discussion." I opened the email, saw the title and the short description. Pressed the button "Reply to User XY" – I expected to be redirected on PH – the post of the user but instead the Page 404 appeared. "We seem to have lost this page"
@busmark_w_nika Thanks for the info! Just emailed you to get a bit more info. We should be able to get this sorted out soon.
How you are able to recognize whether someone account is a bot or genuine, any examples over which you have researched on, it will be very helpful .
@ajay27324 the first, more significant is the green badge (B testers of that new thing – it is a verification). In texts, there are patterns I can recognise what was written with the help of ChatGPT (but I keep this notice for myself as some people (bots) could take it – so yeah, I have advantage now) :D
+ It would be more helpful to get a notification when someone replies to a tagged comment or discussion Iam engaged in. Currently, it’s easy to miss follow-ups unless manually checked.
@hamza_afzal_butt I am usually notified when someone replies to me.
By the way, yes, there are definitely fewer bots. But there are also significantly fewer discussions.
@elenat I think it was because of the strict rules and moderation. A lot of convos were like: Pizza or Burger? – something in that style and I have to admit that sometimes, even me was that one posting such kind of "discussion"... but this could improve the quality :)
For me, the changes to these forums feel more negative than positive. Previously, I used to search for information quite often, using the search function to find relevant discussions from the past. That allowed me to discover useful insights about previous projects and how different teams approached their launches.
Now, we have four sections, and interestingly, the Product Recommendations section is gone. I see that they’re actively working on the forum every day, but overall, it feels chaotic to me. Even though it’s divided into niches and subforums, I find it harder to navigate and locate truly useful information.
Honestly, right now, it just feels like mess to me, and I don’t really like it. That said, I do see some benefits—especially in Twitter posts where people are already sharing how to take advantage of these new forum changes.
@byalexai I missed that search option too. Still observing my user behaviour towards it as it is a relatively new thing to me.
@byalexai we're working on search. What kinds of things are you searching for?
Re: feeling chaotic - That's something we want to improve. If you can share a few examples like this: ("I was on X screen, looking for Y, and I looked but couldn't figure out how to get to Y") that will help us iron out navigation and the overall sense of spatial awareness.
@mike_hasi I have seen multiple inquires regarding dark mode. Probably more people are up to this.
@busmark_w_nika Thanks for having this discussion! Over the past two days, I was facing the 404 issue and reached out via their message bar. The system generated a message saying they'd contact me within 2 hours, but I didn't receive any emails. However, they’ve now fixed the 404 issue. :)
@sonu_goswami2 so you already have live your discussion, right? :)
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