Hello everyone,
I’m really sorry to everyone that’s finding it difficult. I know that it can be difficult when you are used to doing things a certain way and then it changes. I also know how important the support of this community is to many people, and I’m really sorry for disrupting this.
To answer those who would like to know why it has been changed, there are two main reasons:
- The ‘platform’ was old and out of date. The platform is the technology behind the site - rather than build a community from scratch (which would be very time consuming and expensive), a platform is like a basic template site that you then adapt to your needs. The old platform was starting to have problems, and we would have soon reached a point where we could no longer get technical support to improve it, so it was unavoidable that we would need to move to a new one.
- Although many of you here have said you found it straightforward to navigate, we did also get quite a lot of feedback from people who found the old version difficult to navigate, or found it hard to know when they had replies. The new features that have been added are in direct response to user feedback.
In terms of the basic functionality, we have tried to change that as little as possible, so the way that you start and reply to conversations is the same, it may just look a little different visually.
We also tested the site with members of the community before we launched to try and make sure it would work for our users - there was a post a little while back asking for people to get involved and those that put themselves forward spent some time on a test version of the site. The feedback from this testing was generally positive and we did make some changes based on comments from our testers.
With regards to the welcome message text and statistics on profiles, I’m really sorry about these. Going back to what I was saying about a platform being a template site, sometimes they come with features that aren’t useful for our particular community, but I will look at getting these hidden.
We will be continuing to work on the site and make improvements, so I’m making a note of everyone’s feedback now, so thanks very much for sharing your comments. At the moment I have a note to investigate:
- The time stamps on posts
- The text size and layout on mobiles and tablets
- Changing the welcome message text
- Hiding the profile statistics
I will keep adding to the list as necessary.