Hard to navigate to forum
Seems to me, since the reformatted community page, that finding the forums has become even more difficult. Particularly new threads, or those needing an answer. Or is it me? Is there a short cut from the launch page?
@Anomalia
@DeborahUK
Not just you, I noticed it right away.
Its like going around the house to get to the front door.
Yeah I am not getting it very well
@DeborahUK
Hey! There are two ways to get back to the usual forum home page from the Community page. You can click on "Community" and in the URL where it says "Home", change that to "forum" and press enter.
Or you can scroll down and on the dark blue part where it says My Communities and Other Communities, it says "Can't find your community? See more here". Click that and it'll take you to the usual forum place.
It is a shame that 7 Cups made this change without any notification or prewarning. The previous one was better in my opinion. I hope they don't remove the original forum page though, as that's the only way I can properly moderate the forums, using the "New" section.
@laura @krinkthemellowunicorn
I'd say there has been some warning that this was going to be the direction of travel.
For example, @Anomalia raised the issue on March 22nd, getting positive responses from both @Laura and @KrinkTheMellowUnicorn and @bunnypants raised it again on June 10th, tagging @Laura and @KrinkTheMellowUnicorn (but getting no visible response).
The purpose of the design, it seems to me, is to nudge members and listeners towards participation in only one, or only a few, communities, based on their self-diagnosis or expert knowledge, so that the forums become more like a conventional peer support site. But that's just my interpretation of it. I can't think of any other reason to make navigation harder.
@SilentSerenityy
@RarelyCharlie - we've actually worked to preserve or restore the "straight-to-forum" pathways that some people prefer while yes trying to organize our offerings around communities, largely so that as we continue to scale to larger and larger userbases we can still offer the same sort of community support we all enjoyed when the place was mostly one big community.
@SilentSerenityy
Thats clever changing the URL from home to forum! Never even occurred to me, but I shall do that in future. Although, as Anamolia mentions below, it's not something new users would know to do as they wouldn't even be aware of the general forums, and there seems little in place to signpost them towards them.
@DeborahUK - is the new Forum submenu/tab on the Community home helping at all now with this?
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn
It's wonderful 😁
Thank you
@DeborahUK - i'm so glad. thanks for bearing with us as we relearned the obvious....
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn It's much better, but I still miss having it in the top bar as on a chat page - 1-1 or group - there is no forum link.
@AffyAvo - ah so it's always a two step move now - and we hide the footer on the chat page. will keep considering this...
@DeborahUK - I completely agree. It's reasonably easy to find the main forum page if you're an experienced user who knows it exists, but I worry that no new users are going to realize those forums are there, which would be an enormous loss for our members joining the community struggling with any of the multitude of issues not yet covered by subcommunities
@Anomalia
Are there any plans to go back to a direct link do you know? Are there any statistics to suggest whether use of the forums has decreased, or whether new users are posting in similar numbers to previously?
Yeah I noticed this right away. To get to the forums I always just use the url that my browser remembers. It's a lot faster and easier.
PLEASE bring back the community drop-down menu.
Good news - A new update is coming this week, which should help solve this problem. At the top of the community main page there will be a tabbed area and one of the tabs is a direct link to the forum.
As for the drop down, its still on the main community forum page. So we should be good there.
@Laura Yayyyy!!! I am VERY excited to have a direct link to the forums back on the main page!
