UK Business Forums: Changes are coming for 2016!

[GraemeL]

This is a copy of the sticky that is closed to replies. It is something worth commenting on:-

Here at UK Business Forums, we’ve been thinking about what we can do to support you, our members, in a better way.

We’ve looked at how you use the site, whether full members, free members, logged in members or nonmembers; we’ve run user surveys and conducted telephone interviews and we’ve got some ideas that we feel will improve and enhance the forums on a number of different levels for all of the community. (Why not take account of all of the suggestions made both prior to and after the new format UKBF was introduced?)

Every week we see an increasing number of questions, comments and blogs, all seeking the right kinds of business advice. We want you to get to this advice in the ways that suit you and how you use this site. (There are a lot of rubbish questions)

We love nothing more than helping you, the UK’s biggest community of small business, make the right connections and grow professionally and personally alongside us, which is why we’ve done our research and come up with a plan. (This is drivel - sorry)

Here’s a breakdown of the ideas we’ll be bringing in over the coming weeks:

1. Forum changes: We want to make the forums more functional, to make your posts easier to find and get you the answers you want, quicker. We will be revisiting forum organisation and eventually they’ll be colour coded depending on theme to make it easier to find the corresponding articles and downloads. Content from some of the legacy, or less active forums will be merged into new areas that make is easier to find where to ask a question for existing and new members.
   
2. Structured content: We want to you to find the answers you want, to get the insight you need and create points of pertinent discussion. To do this we want to introduce structured content and relevant articles alongside relevant forums. We want you to be able to comment on articles the same way you do with forum threads. The idea is that we can surface more of the content that matters, be it created by the team here, by business journalists or industry experts or indeed by you, the members, that is informative, stimulates debate and drives conversation
   
3. A new editor: Rachael Power, currently small business editor of our sister site BusinessZone will join Dan Izzard on UKBF as the full-time, dedicated UKBF editor in January and will spend all of her time trying to bring you the best content, partly dictated by the big issues surrounding small business, and also reflecting the issues being discussed on site
   
4. Email bulletins: We’ve taken a good long look at our email newsletters and evaluating what you want to see in your inbox, aided by our user research. We’ll send these out four times a week, from the middle of January. They’ll be themed based on what topics you told us in our research are most pressing to you: Finance, sales and marketing, starting up and will introduce your very own community email bulletin on weekends
   
5. MeetUps: We’d love to meet more of our amazing members face-to-face, so early next year we’ll look at starting some informal, possibly theme-based meetups in local areas, if there’s interest (But if you have done research you know what the amazing members think about this?)
   
   
6. UKBF shop: We’re going to close the UKBF shop starting from this month, because we feel there’s more effective ways those who want to advertise with us can get their voice heard. For more on this contact [email protected] (Shop? I didnt know there was a shop?)

We based our plans and ideas on the research we conducted both in the form of an on-site survey (which hundreds of you answered - thank you!), in-depth phone calls that we completed with some of you and worked with our in-house web development team and user experience designer to ensure we get this right. We’ve also taken into account your queries and comments about the last UKBF upgrade process in 2013.

The most pressing thing to remember is that the UKBF you know and love will still look and feel like UKBF, your membership experience and how you use the site to post threads, answer questions and all of your most loved features will remain the same. (Love UKBF?)

We’ll start rolling out the forum changes on UKBF in the next week or so and bring in the content and editorial ideas from the end of January, but we’re not going to leave the design changes at that. It’ll be in beta version, which means we’re committed to gathering your thoughts, feedback and ideas in order to improve the site.

As we’re also a small business like most of you - whilst we will take into account every suggestion we receive, as we have finite resources, we'll be bringing in a new feedback system that collates and organises your ideas and thoughts so we can commit to reviewing and actioning them in a smarter way.

It’s just a short time until you get to see the new beta version of UKBF, and when you do we want to hear your thoughts. However in order for us to properly sort through the feedback, if you’ve got something to suggest we can only consider it if you feed it back through our feedback survey, which will be available here once the changes start happening. (If history is anything to go by, the attention paid to suggestions made in 2013 would not encourage me to contribute)

We’re so excited to launch our beta version of the new UKBF and we hope you will be too. (Yes I am very excited )
The stated objectives of these changes are these:-

What we can do to support you, our members, in a better way.

Helping you, the UK’s biggest community of small business, make the right connections and grow professionally and personally alongside us

Is that all? There must be a commercial benefit?

G

 

[Bob]

Why not also survey some of the free members to ascertain why we don't sign up?
Maybe there could be some type of free full membership for the free members who have contributed positively to the forum over many years
So far as the rubbish questions are concerned, I seem to recall that there was going to be some method of full members marking a post of spam and it being automatically withdrawn.
There is currently the ability to make a post a sticky. Unfortunately, the posts are not always locked and hence no chance of finding anything useful on the Accounts and Finance forum stickies which currently have in excess of 300 posts each
I must admit that I tend to ignore forum names most of the time and just search "New posts"
Even though I am a free member, I do tend to report spam. It would be nice to have some sort of acknowledgment as to the action taken from all mods as maybe an automatic action

 

[cjd]

I'm cynically assuming that this is a method for Sift to spam the forums with the content from their other sites. If so, it's going to annoy.

 

[simon field]

Just getting basic things right would be a start.

Still calling posts 'messages'?, I mean come on is it really so hard?

And 'points'? Did any members want that?

Those tiny little hover-triangles which appear next to the main forum titles and contain drop-downs - if you precision-aim your cursor you might get lucky...

This is basic stuff.

 

[fisicx]

Basic stuff that was all mentioned 2 years ago and Dan promised would get sorted. If Sift really cared about UKBF they would have invested some resources in fixing things instead of just increasing the number of adverts

 

[Andrew Chambers]

Basic stuff that was all mentioned 2 years ago and Dan promised would get sorted. If Sift really cared about UKBF they would have invested some resources in fixing things instead of just increasing the number of adverts

Increasing adverts/spam (I see they have their own in-house spammer now) whilst decreasing the forums "usefulness", and therby active members, is only going to end one way for ukbf. Ironic for a business forum.

It's often maligned on this forum "build it and they will come". But equally, "destroy it and and they won't come" is a certainty.

 

[UKSBD]

I'm cynically assuming that this is a method for Sift to spam the forums with the content from their other sites. If so, it's going to annoy.

That was my immediate thought too,

Articles published here to look like forum posts, blind eye turned to self promotion, a clique pulled over to comment on and discuss each others <strike>articles</strike> sorry Posts.

Hope that's just me being too cynical.

 

[cjd]

Someone - presumably the new boy - will have noticed that we here don't go to the other Sift sites like we're supposed to. So Sift will bring the other Sift content to us. Now what could possibly go wrong with that?

 

[Employment Law Clinic]

Someone - presumably the new boy - will have noticed that we here don't go to the other Sift sites like we're supposed to. So Sift will bring the other Sift content to us. Now what could possibly go wrong with that?

I used to go to the other sites, particularly HR Zone. But that site was pretty much killed off for a while with the main Q&A section out of action for I don't know how long.

I've visited Business & HR Zone recently, and it is most confusing, they just looks like sites used to publish "promoted articles", nothing that would encourage me to use them any more.

I did encounter that infinite scrolling thing: bloody confusing, trying to jump to the bottom of a promoted article, oops post, to read the comments only to find I was reading another bloody promoted article altogether.

I spend far less of my time contributing to Sift forums than I ever did, and cannot see it going any other way.


But of course, Graeme being a pain in the neck has created a thread on a subject Sift clearly don't want the plebs on UKBF to discuss (I guess we're not worthy, unless we use Business Zone too) so I'll bow out of this thread - mustn't upset the new Community Manager before she starts with a mandate to purge the next mass of members, just in case there is a genuine post here or on HR Zone that I might be able to find & contribute to.



Karl Limpert

 

[Ian J]

Just getting basic things right would be a start.

Still calling posts 'messages'?, I mean come on is it really so hard?

And 'points'? Did any members want that?

Those tiny little hover-triangles which appear next to the main forum titles and contain drop-downs - if you precision-aim your cursor you might get lucky...

This is basic stuff.

I've never noticed them before and had to go looking for them to see what you were talking about. I do surf by clicking on "New Posts" though so I won't have missed anything.

The Xenforo software that is used here was developed by a bunch of techies who left vbulletin and set out to make something supposedly better. The messages instead of posts, points and trophies are all part of their so called improvements.

It may be better under the skin especially in terms of security but vbulletin had thousands of users, many of whom had written hacks to do almost anything so if a forum owner wanted something in particular to happen there was probably already a hack to do it in the vbulletin forum.

I used to be an Admin of a large forum and I know that human nature being what it is people like to be thanked if they are helpful to the management and a particular bugbear of mine is that if one reports a post for whatever reason they don't receive a response from the mods with the exception of one of them. I won't mention any names though Ray won't have to take a bow.

On the forum that I looked after I used to insist that all reported posts were responded to even if it was just the single word "thanks" and it was fairly easy to do within vbulletin but rumour has it that it's more difficult with this software. Has anyone looked on the Xenforo for a suitable hack?

 

[Tin]

Unfortunately with the implementation of the new forum software, not only did the use of the forum take a backwards step for members but how we modded the forum became more onerous too. It is possible to send a thank you message to the reporter but it does require a certain amount of hoops to be jumped through and it is understandable that mods don't take the time to do so.

 

[Connexions]

In my opinion traditional forums arent the way to go for discusion. You can see this simply doing a search on google.

They should be social media based.

Perhaps even like this http://startups.stackexchange.com/

Can only flog a dead horse for so long. Sorry about being negative to the OP comments.

 

[fisicx]

Stackexchange isn't social media based

 

[GraemeL]

Sorry about being negative to the OP comments.

The OP was Sift - not me - just in case you thought ...........

 

[Connexions]

Stackexchange isn't social media based

All I am really getting at, is the way discussion is made on the forum. It really isnt traditional forums anymore. A mix of a Q&A site and social media, in my opinion would be better.

Many forums I frequented over the years, have either died, or on their last legs with no obvious replacements.

 

[fisicx]

On the other hand there are still an awful lot of forums that are doing really well. So while there is a place for the Stackexchange model I don't think you can say it's the only way to go.

 

[Spock]

shop?

 

[fisicx]

Unfortunately with the implementation of the new forum software, not only did the use of the forum take a backwards step for members but how we modded the forum became more onerous too.

But Ray, it was all shiny and exciting - doesn't matter that it was pants as long as you can have more adverts. I reckon as long as Sift is making money and will continue to make money they don't care if those with the expertise leave the forum and head off to other places.

 

[Bob]

I must have missed something happening. A week has passed and I haven't noticed the changes ???

 

[japancool]

Looking at a couple of threads that have been posted here lately, which are clearly in the wrong place, putting this forum and Community at the top is not working, and it's confusing people.

So far, these "changes" seem to involve peeing around, pardon my French, with the forum structure, and doing it badly, given that ecommerce has magically vanished.

 

[sjr4x4]

Wasn't life so much simpler when vbulletin 3.x ruled the waves, a forum was a forum and the biggest moan was colour schemes or aggressive mods

We agonised long and hard over what to migrate to, watching UKBL first move to vbulletin 4 , then Xenforo, then UKBF following suit with Xenforo and the subsequent backlash from regulars.

Personally I'm not a fan of Xenforo or the new advert laden design and it has put me off from visiting. Although we are minuscule in comparison to UKBF, we decided in the end the only option was to write the forum in-house, allowing us to keep the look and feel of vbulletin, whilst allowing for much easier editing, moderation and spam control.

One of the biggest bleats is adverts, and your regular members are the least likely to click them, so switch most of them off. This allows for a visually less cluttered experience for anyone who has taken the time and effort to login. I'm baffled why Sift don't do this, it's so straightforward?

Whether we have got it right or wrong is open to personal interpretation, but we are no longer a slave to continual vulnerability updates or buggy mods. Plus we can implement features that members have requested, without trying to tweak or break someone else's framework.

I'd imagine Sift must have some good internal technical resource, and with a community of this size, they already have a good idea of what people want, they could narrow down a wish list of top 10, or 20 requests, have a vote on maybe 3 different styles, and then have a unique, quality inhouse platform, with a happy core member base, who feel they have been listened to.

Here is our effort which we launched last year, and not saying this is what Sift should move to, but shows what can be done relatively easily, efficiently, whilst remaining commercially viable.
https://www.mylocalservices.co.uk/forum/

 

[japancool]

It's easier though just to move the forums around and tout this as some kind of big, major change.

Because that's what it seems like has happened.

 

[GraemeL]

Because that's what it seems like has happened.

No, its a plan. See below.

We love nothing more than helping you, the UK’s biggest community of small business, make the right connections and grow professionally and personally alongside us, which is why we’ve done our research and come up with a plan

 

[japancool]

No, its a plan. See below.

A cunning plan?

 

[GraemeL]

The "cunning plans" in question are dreamed up by B..........k as a solution to a particular problem or crisis and are usually ridiculed scathingly by B.............r for their implausibility

No, that doesn't seem to fit, does it?

 

[fisicx]

After all the suggestions that were made, acknoweledged and promised 12 months ago so far we have:

1. Trophy points
2. Forums now in a different order

All that research paid off then.

 

[japancool]

Oh yeah, when I tried to use the forum on my mobile, I got that stupid feedback page after I made a post, and I couldn't get it to go away. Perhaps I'm just dense, I couldn't find a "No, I do not want to complete your survey" option or a close link.

 

[japancool]

All I am really getting at, is the way discussion is made on the forum. It really isnt traditional forums anymore. A mix of a Q&A site and social media, in my opinion would be better.

Many forums I frequented over the years, have either died, or on their last legs with no obvious replacements.

Christ no, NOT social media. It is impossible to find any past information on social media groups, and the more active it is, the quicker questions become lost, preventing new participants from joining in it.

 

[japancool]

Dear Sift,

We would love to hear your thoughts on our thoughts on the latest "changes" to UKBF. All submissions made by you in this thread will be read by the participants and disregarded. Please click on the "Post" button below.

 

[estwig]

After all the suggestions that were made, acknoweledged and promised 12 months ago so far we have:

1. Trophy points
2. Forums now in a different order

All that research paid off then.

Trophy points sound like fun, didn't notice them.

Can they be awarded for newbie bashing?