Forum Structure Changes

[Ozzy]

We are about to implement some changes to the forum structure today to accommodate merging in the recent acquisition mentioned in my last announcement, The Supplier Central (aka Wholesale Forums). This will bring in a marketplace section for businesses to source goods and services, a feature used the distributors and retails who form the majority of The Supplier Central community.

I'm aware of the potential for spam in these sections so to mitigate that risk we'll be running the Marketplace in the following way, at least to get started.

• Historically Supplier Central only allowed paying "advertisers" to post offers in the Marketplace so we will be replicating that functionality with our Business Membership. Only business members will be able to post offers and products for sale. We will be providing all existing paid advertisers of Supplier Central with Business Membership on UKBF in the transition.
• The I'm Looking For forum will be redundant, and anyone will be able to post a request for what they are looking for in the marketplace "seeking services" sections but the same rules currently in place for posting of links will be in effect.
• The Marketplace forums will be "noindex" so won't be indexed by search engines, so will be of no value to spammers.
• To avoid unnecessary noise for existing members of UKBF, posts made in these forums will be excluded from the Recent Posts feed.

We are also going to be doing a little bit of housekeeping, the big changes here are going to include;

• Renaming International Business to be Overseas Trade
• Legal, Employment & HR and Insolvency will be merged into one forum "Legal, Employment & HR"
• First steps in starting a business, and growing your startup - these forums will be merged and renamed into 'Startup Space"

You will notice a little bit of fine tuning here and there alongside those, and one of the other changes is going to be encouraging the use of tags when creating posts. We're going to be building a library of tags ready to implement improved searching and categorising of posts in the future.

I'm also encouraged to see the recent update to block link dropping in the forums by spam bots and others has been very effective. We're still monitoring the rules in place before we allow a member to be able to post links to make sure we have the balance right, and I'm happy to fine tune this off the back of member feedback going forward.

Finally, the concept of "Questions" in the forums is having a really positive impact our this sites SEO results. Please continue! If you are creating a thread to ask a question please remember to choose the "Question" thread type. I appreciate the Xenforo system doesn't make this as obvious as it should be, that's something we're working on, but it does make a difference to how Google displays that thread in the search results and highlights your question under the Questions menu item. We're going to be having a greater focus on "Questions" going forward in future site updates.

A quick couple of UKBF product highlights to close off with;

• We're relaunching the newsletter with a series of specialist emails on topics of interest. If you aren't subscribed yet please do and watch out for the changes coming over the coming weeks. All feedback always welcome. : Subscribe here
• We kick off UKBF Northampton at Delapre Abbey in October, and UKBF London comes to an exciting prestigious new venue in Piccadilly in October too. Completely free to attend, and your first drink is free. Subscribe to our events on Event Bright here.
• We have some names you may recognise coming to UKBF Stories podcast, plus we have a new podcast UKBF Talks launching soon talking business advice topics. The first two being neuro-diversity in the workplace and marketing strategies. Available on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, loads of places. You can find all the links for all the platforms on Anchor here.