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New forum? Really?

Deleted User

So, we were told we would have a 'new' forum and were given surveys to provide feedback on what we would like in a new platform:

 Upgrading the online community to a new and much improved platform 

 Survey about upgrading the online community 

What we have is the old forum with some functions working again (not all, I note, as I took all my notifications off, then put some back on, but the ones I put back on don't work).

Is it just me that this is bothering?

What was the use of the survey and any communications really, if all we get is what we had before but less broken?

This is another area where a bit of communication would have been nice, at least telling us why we didn't actually get what we were told we would.

Parents

  • Some context first - I was a forum moderator of a few different forums back in the 90's. As time passed I began to run my own forums for the hobby in which I most engaged. As my first self-employed job was in IT and I was pretty good with coding it just made sense. Then HTML5, and 'web 2.0' started to drop. Search engines got better, so did crawlers and the like. Sadly, so too came the age of massive forum spam and bots designed effectively to DDoS forums.

    While I certainly understand the frustrations with the limitations of this forum platform - developing both a secure forum, and a feature packed forum is not the easiest of tasks. For a charity with a limited budget to be able to offer a forum at all is, in my eyes, an impressive feat. 

    I don't want to come across as saying that we should just be grateful for the forum without any criticisms at all. I would just like to highlight that forums are extremely susceptible to abuse and bots. So for me, when I understand the underlying challenges and limitations of forum platforms anything that bothers me is likely to be accepted as a limitation of forums in general when run by charities and small companies.  

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  • Some context first - I was a forum moderator of a few different forums back in the 90's. As time passed I began to run my own forums for the hobby in which I most engaged. As my first self-employed job was in IT and I was pretty good with coding it just made sense. Then HTML5, and 'web 2.0' started to drop. Search engines got better, so did crawlers and the like. Sadly, so too came the age of massive forum spam and bots designed effectively to DDoS forums.

    While I certainly understand the frustrations with the limitations of this forum platform - developing both a secure forum, and a feature packed forum is not the easiest of tasks. For a charity with a limited budget to be able to offer a forum at all is, in my eyes, an impressive feat. 

    I don't want to come across as saying that we should just be grateful for the forum without any criticisms at all. I would just like to highlight that forums are extremely susceptible to abuse and bots. So for me, when I understand the underlying challenges and limitations of forum platforms anything that bothers me is likely to be accepted as a limitation of forums in general when run by charities and small companies.  

Children
  • in reply to martintheactor

    Perhaps this forum doesn’t work on the same principle as social media sites such as Twitter for example, but didn’t the person who started Twitter attempt to do something similar with Threads? Didn’t Threads have problems with the formatting that couldn’t be rectified easily, even by experts with money? Perhaps I am completely deluded and please tell me if I am. I know nothing of forum design but just wondered if this is the same sort of thing.

  • in reply to martintheactor

    That is really helpful to know.  I am very interested to learn more about these matters, because I imagine that the pace of chaotic development in these spaces with non-humans is going to get "mind-bending" soon with the AI hither and thiver....or are we already inevitably going to see AI imitating (convincingly) a human in here at the moment?

    I'm not panicked, nor screaming for blood......I'm simply interested on the current realities, and timescales/breadth of change to expect.

    Do you know more - in general terms?  I love to learn.

  • in reply to martintheactor
    martintheactor said:
    I don't want to come across as saying that we should just be grateful for the forum without any criticisms at all. I would just like to highlight that forums are extremely susceptible to abuse and bots

    Thank you.

    I think the problem was that we were consulted, and expected something (see the wording of a thread I linked to - a 'much improved platform' ) - but ended up with nothing.

    The faults that have occurred since the upgrade do appear to have driven a lot of members away which saddens me.