It’s like universities who ask their students what features they like about their university experience. The students reply “the personal interaction with faculty”, so the university has faculty calling prospective students as part of the admissions process. But there’s one problem with that, as they’d soon find out if they asked those students who rejected offers of admission (which is a far larger group).
What do the latter say? “I’m not going there. They have faculty making phone calls. They must be desperate.”
You need to be asking those who don’t participate in the forums to get a proper picture.
Same - I am stunned that you think by changing to a new forum software you some how won’t need to onboard users. Regardless of the software, someone somewhere will have no experience using it, just moving to a forum software you have used in the past doesn’t solve that issue, expect for you.
Who do you suppose puts that all together and make sure it stays running and operational?
Unfortunately, your specific issue - in regards to the forum software, is not one as community team lead I am willing to look at changing and James above, as infrastructure team lead, has said the same thing.
So, at the end of the day all we can do is iterate on what we have - like we have all been saying all along. Spending time arguing about how to build a forum is frankly pointless.
Wrong again. It’s not that anyone who’s currently using the forum has an opinion that doesn’t count. It’s that without also taking account of those who don’t use the forum, you can’t get a proper picture.
Which is exactly why we shouldn’t be using such software. QED.
There’s no viable way to do that. Message every person? Do a poll that gets votes/comments from the 10-most-active users? If someone doesn’t use the forum, I put less weight on their opinions of how it should run.
I am confused, and I can officially say this thread is so far gone I don’t even know what we are arguing about anymore.
What we will be doing…
We have already said, numerous times, we have heard the key pieces of feedback (thought it really only boiled down to 3 things) and will be implementing changes based on that feedback.
We already have a pretty much completed draft of the new welcome message and will be updating that in the coming days.
To reiterate:
Thank you to everyone for their input, we do appreciate the feedback and know we can make improvements. We will be rolling out changes gradually and will try to take a data driven approach to track improvements.