How can we improve the Forums?

[Sophie_M]

Hi all,

 

This discussion is a space for all members to share suggestions and ideas to improve the Forums. This can be anything. Navigation, notifications, topics and themes, moderation, community rules, or something else!

 

We'd love to hear about what you think we can do better. We are really grateful to everyone who has contributed their ideas already, and we're always keen to hear more. 

 

Kind regards, 

 

Sophie M

 

Please note: This is not a thread for discussing the moderation or editing of individual posts - if you have questions about this please contact the team offline via email modsupport@beyondblue.org.au 

[blondguy]

Hi Moderator Staff

I havent spent much time looking at my (or anyone else's) profile as my role is a volunteer/supportive one.

Who has access to the 'Private Stats'  in my profile? I am assuming its Beyond Blue salaried personnel.

Thankyou so much for your ongoing support

Paul

[Sophie_M]

Hey blondguy,

You’re correct. “Private stats" are only visible to you and to Beyond Blue staff. It’s not visible to other users or volunteers. The section that is visible to the Community Champions is only the part at the top of your “Profile” which shows your public threads grouped together.

All information held by Beyond Blue is subject to our Privacy Policy. Personal information contained in your profile, such as your date of birth, postcode and email address, are not visible to the public and will never be.

Thanks for this very important question, and thank you for beign a wonderful part of this community through a period of change - we so appreciate it.

Hey Paw Prints,

Firstly, sorry we didn’t get back to you right away on this.

We can hear you find the page layout frustrating, and don’t understand why the first post of each discussion is pinned to the top of the page. We can hear from you also, mmMekitty, that this means having to scroll a lot, and can seem unnecessary. Thanks to you both for sharing this feedback.

A few members have shared a similar perspective, and we’ve shared it with the team as it’s a really valuable point. That said, it’s not easy for us to make changes on the fly, so in the meantime we wanted to share a really helpful tip romantic_thi3f shared a little while ago for finding the newest post without scrolling:

You have two options:

• Up the top, you can click on the Options button with 3 dots and sort 'Oldest to Newest'
• If you want to go straight down to the bottom of the page, you can press the 'End' key on your keyboard.

Hey mmMekitty,

Thanks for sharing how you would like to have used the Profiles feature. We agree and we’re hearing from the community that being able to choose whether to use a feature like this would be the ideal outcome here. Unfortunately, the technical requirements we’d need to set this up would use too much of our resources. However, in the future we’ll continue to check in with you all to see if this is something people would like.

Thanks everyone!

Kind regards,

Sophie M

[therising]

Hi Sophie

Not sure if this it the right thread in regard to asking the following 3 questions that I'm hoping you'll be able to help me with but here goes

1. I receive some notifications but not all. For example, I'll see a number of notifications come in and check to see who they're from. Then I'll check up to see how some people I've been chatting with are going only to find out they've replied to me some days or weeks back and I wasn't notified of their response
2. When I open the notifications list there are the thread titles and the names of the people who have responded (underneath the title). This doesn't always appear this way though. Sometimes I get the name of the person responding without the thread title to be able to click on. So I can't access it. Hope that makes sense
3. With the old setup, the posts would go in order from most recent to oldest post. While I can access the most recent post on this new setup, I find some ways down the page on occasion the posts are out of order. For example, a thread can start with the most recent post and then after the following posts from a week or 2 weeks back there suddenly appears one from yesterday or the day before

Would appreciate any help you could offer. If you need to redirect me to another thread in order to address these questions, no problem.

Thanks Sophie

[quirkywords]

The rising 

thanks for your questions and I look forward to the answers. 

[geoff]

Hello therising, good questions.

Geoff.

Life Member.

[Black_Magic_Dragon_Ball_Z]

I just want to say thankyou for a wonderful website and place to share. I was wondering if you could possibly add the option to share photos or pictures and gifs and stickers, A picture can paint a thousand words.

Kind regards and Blessings to All 😊

[Sophie_M]

Hey therising,

This is the perfect spot, thank you for raising these questions.

1. We’re sorry to hear what’s happening with your notifications, that’s not how it’s supposed to work. We’ve heard from a few other community members that their notifications aren’t appearing as they should be, so it’s something the team have been looking into.

Anyone with this issue should email us at modsupport@beyondblue.org.au – if you’re comfortable sharing some screenshots to help us to understand what’s happening, it’s super helpful.

2. We’re so sorry to hear it’s causing you to find messages some time after they were posted. How frustrating! One way you can check your settings aren’t causing this is by going to Profile/ Settings / Notification settings and making sure that this box is ticked:

“Automatically follow to all topics or reviews I participate in”

3. Is this happening when you’re viewing All discussions, or when you’re on a particular thread?

If you’re not referring to the All discussions page, we’d love if you could email this for us to pass on to the team to look into, ideally with a screenshot.

If it’s in All discussions, it might be because this page shows you the threads with the most recent updates, but the date shown on the page is the date when the thread was started. So for example, when this discussion appears on the All discussions page because I’ve posted this message, here is what it will look like:

How can we improve the Forums?
by Sophie M, posted in Re-designing and upgrading the Forums               05-07-2022

We hope this is helpful, therising. Thanks again for letting us know about these issues. Hopefully, we can get this sorted quickly and make posting here much smoother. This community is full of beautiful moments and brave words and it's important to us to make it as easy as possible for people like you to keep doing the incredible things you do here. ❤️

Kind regards,

Sophie M

[Sophie_M]

Hi Black_Magic_Dragon_Ball_Z,

Thank you for your lovely words! This place is nothing without you - the community members, so we want to say thank you as well. 

We love the idea of being able to share photos, gifs and stickers. Currently, you can share emojis, but we hear you - it would be great to be able to share more imagery. It might not be something we can prioritise right now, but it's a great suggestion, and now that you've shared it here it's right here for the community to see and let us know if they agree. 

Thanks again for your lovely comment. 

Kind regards, 

Sophie M

[mmMekitty]

Hi Sophie_M,

In general, I would not object to people being able to share photos, stickers, ore any sort of graphic, - except there may be a problem if there is no embedded text description as there is with the emojis. 

Your own blue circles above 'FAQs' & 'Forums Guidelines' Microsoft now announces "appears to be icon". The large Graphics you put on some pages don't announce they are there at all, the smaller logo & flags, I hear "graphic link". People's Profile pictures tell me who the person is, but there is no description of the picture. For now, I can work some things out, but that won't be the case for everyone or for me at some point in the future.

So if people were to insert more images into posts, & they do not have some text (hidden or otherwise), I may well lose the context of the post.

😸Of-course, I would assume all pet photos are gorgeous.

While I can't insert a photo or two of my own, occasionally, I will swap my profile picture, if there is no objection... 😺

& I wonder, how would that effect the character count? ..Which I had some trouble with the other night. I wan't even using emojis that time. That gets so frustrating, trying three times, then splitting what I had wanted to pos. Additedly, it was in the vicinity of 2400 characters, including spaces, but still, I got the 'correct the highlighted errors', & then I find the text saying that I've exceded the 2500... which I find using my mouse, thinking, well, there might be some other kind of 'highlighted' error this time... 'hightlighted'? What hightlights?

The wording of the message seems odd to me. I'm still hopeful you will be able to have a message to tell me how many characters I'm up to, so I can track it & know when I'm nearing the limit. It's a tedious bit of messing about to find out how many characters I am over.

KInd regards,

mmMekitty

[mmMekitty]

I have used the 'Follow' option up there at the near right top corner of my desktop screen, yet it seems to me, I will have notifications only when I 'Support' & continue to 'Support' the posts others leave on the Discussions. Seems to me, (but I'm not sure if my hunch is right), I won't get notified if I stop Supporting posts as they arrive.

On some Discussion I Follow, (as above) people are not 'Support'ing posts, including mine, & i seem not to be notified when someone posts. I have to keep checking if anyone has posted or not, myself.

I expect when I follow one of the links in the Notifications list, that I would go to the top (I've chosen Newest to Oldest), & see the most recent post, but sometimes I've been sent to the oldest, or a page or two from either the oldest or newest. That's confusing. I find I have to take time to check the dates &/or go down to the page nav, & find out which is highlighted, which I can only do via my keyboard. I know I am supposed to know this stuff, but it feels confusing for me, like I don't know where I am on a gage, when I try to use keyboard shortcuts. I'd prefer to know that I will be reliably sent to my prefered top (Newest) of the page.

Thanks again, for considering the issues we have.

mmMekitty