- Original Poster
- #1
TL;DR:
On Monday next week, we’re adding new functionality and quality of life changes to UKBF. These changes are a big step for us towards our goal of making UKBF the best community it can possibly be. Between 9 AM and 11 AM on the 6th of March, these changes will be rolled out one at a time as our team works on getting them deployed.
Hello everyone. I hope you’ve all had a productive week and are ready for the weekend.
On the 6th of March at 9 AM we are going to be rolling out a number of changes and updates to UK Business Forums. These were covered in Ozzy’s announcement back on the 10th of February, but I’ll be going into a little more detail here.
Due to the way that these changes are being rolled out over the course of the morning of the 6th, there might be some periods where the site is slow or functionality doesn’t work as expected. We’re loath to bring the website down for these changes, but our testing has indicated that we should be able to make these changes while the website is available without impacting service greatly.
Our observations were that the frustrations were born out of a combination of new members chafing against some of the honest feedback they received and some, mostly well-meaning, pokes and jokes being taken as malicious remarks. This seemed to escalate to the point of hostility even though every case we looked at started off well-meaning and productive.
This leads us to the conclusion that the escalation of threads from productive to hostile was caused in almost every instance by a misunderstanding between existing members and new members, not by any one individual trying to start an argument.
To try and help prevent these misunderstandings from taking place, we’ve implemented two things.
A good number of tags have now been merged together which should help improve their relevancy. Our intention moving forward is to encourage tagging further using auto-suggestion tools and have tags act as ways of more easily identifying posts so our members can contribute their expertise.
We’ll be introducing a tag creation process further down the line once tags are more seamlessly integrated into the standard journey members take when creating new threads.
We’re not intending to use this system to automatically ban members. This service is still very heavily in Beta, so this is mostly an experiment on our part to see the effects that identifying the tone of members has. Our instructions to the moderators on this will be to use a light touch with these flags until we’re confident that it isn’t interfering with any of our members' well-meaning activity.
https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/code-of-conduct/
We felt that since re-inheriting UKBF from its previous owners we hadn’t put anything out there in the world to clearly state the core values we hope our members will follow. As such, the new Code of Conduct acts not as a new set of rules to follow, although we have included our rules as part of the Code, but instead explains the three values that UKBF members should hold close when acting as the pillars of the UK’s small businesses.
Be constructive
Be inclusive
Be compassionate.
By keeping constructive, inclusive and compassionate, our members can ensure that UKBF stays a relevant and useful place for those starting, running and growing their businesses in the UK to find guidance and help.
We’ve also included some FAQs to cover questions we’ve been contacted about frequently in the past and added guidance on how to ensure your tone isn’t misinterpreted within the platform.
We might not always respond to let you know, but we do frequently act on the feedback, public or otherwise, that our member base sends our way. We appreciate all of it, without it we wouldn’t be the exemplary community we are today.
On Monday next week, we’re adding new functionality and quality of life changes to UKBF. These changes are a big step for us towards our goal of making UKBF the best community it can possibly be. Between 9 AM and 11 AM on the 6th of March, these changes will be rolled out one at a time as our team works on getting them deployed.
Hello everyone. I hope you’ve all had a productive week and are ready for the weekend.
On the 6th of March at 9 AM we are going to be rolling out a number of changes and updates to UK Business Forums. These were covered in Ozzy’s announcement back on the 10th of February, but I’ll be going into a little more detail here.
Due to the way that these changes are being rolled out over the course of the morning of the 6th, there might be some periods where the site is slow or functionality doesn’t work as expected. We’re loath to bring the website down for these changes, but our testing has indicated that we should be able to make these changes while the website is available without impacting service greatly.
New Member Welcoming Changes
Some of the feedback we’ve received in the past indicates that there has historically been an issue with new members feeling unsupported. We took the time to speak with some of the individuals that approached us to talk about how they felt and reviewed the interactions that they had with existing members of our community.Our observations were that the frustrations were born out of a combination of new members chafing against some of the honest feedback they received and some, mostly well-meaning, pokes and jokes being taken as malicious remarks. This seemed to escalate to the point of hostility even though every case we looked at started off well-meaning and productive.
This leads us to the conclusion that the escalation of threads from productive to hostile was caused in almost every instance by a misunderstanding between existing members and new members, not by any one individual trying to start an argument.
To try and help prevent these misunderstandings from taking place, we’ve implemented two things.
- We now have a message which appears to new members of the platform when creating their first two threads. This message informs the member that the responses they receive are well-intentioned and that our existing member base does know what they’re talking about when it comes to almost all topics around small UK businesses.
- We’ve also introduced a marker for new members which will appear alongside their first few messages so that new members are more easily identifiable. Additionally, a message now appears above the reply box when replying to new members which ask that our existing members bear in mind that new members might not necessarily have a fundamental understanding of their topic of conversation.
Tagging Changes
We’ve laid the groundwork for updating our tagging functionality. This involved restricting the creation of new tags to just moderators and members of our staff and the reduction of our tag list from several hundred down to under two hundred.A good number of tags have now been merged together which should help improve their relevancy. Our intention moving forward is to encourage tagging further using auto-suggestion tools and have tags act as ways of more easily identifying posts so our members can contribute their expertise.
We’ll be introducing a tag creation process further down the line once tags are more seamlessly integrated into the standard journey members take when creating new threads.
New Moderation Procedures
A big chunk of our work over the past ~3 months has been improving the tools that our moderators have access to. We’ve sat down with our moderators to identify anything that they felt was lacking within the system and out of this have implemented a number of new tools for them.- Our moderators have been provided with a selection of training documents that walk them through all of the actions available to them and how to assist our members with actions such as migrating posts, updating account details and so forth.
- Our moderators have also been provided with a new warning process to follow, which is a small part of our larger Code of Conduct release (detailed later in this post).
- Additionally, we’ve added extra features to our report management tools and added analytical functionality to allow our staff members not only to more easily review the activities of our moderators but also to look for trends in activity such as spam and abuse.
Google Perspective
As some of you may have seen earlier in the week, we’ve integrated Google Perspective within the system. This is a tool that identifies the tone of any message added to the platform and can automatically flag content containing toxicity, sexually explicit connotations and misogyny to our moderation team.We’re not intending to use this system to automatically ban members. This service is still very heavily in Beta, so this is mostly an experiment on our part to see the effects that identifying the tone of members has. Our instructions to the moderators on this will be to use a light touch with these flags until we’re confident that it isn’t interfering with any of our members' well-meaning activity.
Code of Conduct
A big part of our update is the introduction of a new code of conduct:https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/code-of-conduct/
We felt that since re-inheriting UKBF from its previous owners we hadn’t put anything out there in the world to clearly state the core values we hope our members will follow. As such, the new Code of Conduct acts not as a new set of rules to follow, although we have included our rules as part of the Code, but instead explains the three values that UKBF members should hold close when acting as the pillars of the UK’s small businesses.
Be constructive
Be inclusive
Be compassionate.
By keeping constructive, inclusive and compassionate, our members can ensure that UKBF stays a relevant and useful place for those starting, running and growing their businesses in the UK to find guidance and help.
We’ve also included some FAQs to cover questions we’ve been contacted about frequently in the past and added guidance on how to ensure your tone isn’t misinterpreted within the platform.
Additional Items
As well as the above we’ve been busy behind the scenes improving the platform through little tweaks and upgrades. We’re always actively working on different aspects of the system, visible or otherwise, to make sure that UKBF is the best it can be.We might not always respond to let you know, but we do frequently act on the feedback, public or otherwise, that our member base sends our way. We appreciate all of it, without it we wouldn’t be the exemplary community we are today.
