On Wednesday 5th May, we will be introducing the first of our improvements to the Community. In our previous blog, ‘Look out for improvements’, we announced that we would be making some key improvements to the site.
We are continually grateful for all of the feedback that you send to us, the Community team, as this is what has helped us to work on the things that matter the most to our members.
We’ve got three releases coming to the Community over the coming months. Each of these releases will bring improvements to the site – some small fixes and some larger developments. On Wednesday 5th May, we’ll be introducing the first of these three.
EDIT: We've been informed that there will now be some downtime needed to release these improvements. The Community will be down for half an hour, and we're aiming to do the release as early as we can.
So what’s involved?
The first release will bring 5 main improvements.
The ‘Latest’ link
We’re sure many of you will be pleased to hear that first on the list is fixing the ‘Latest’ link in the discussion list in groups.
Currently, when you view a list of discussions, you can see the ‘Latest’ activity on the right-hand side of the discussion title.
At the moment, when you select this link it takes you to the beginning of the discussion and not to the latest post.
Our first improvement is to make sure that the ‘Latest’ link will take users to the end of the thread, the latest post.
Bug fix for replies not showing
We’ve had multiple reports from users who have reported that they can see that a discussion has a number of replies, but after clicking into the thread those replies are not showing. This issue has been particularly prominent for users who are using an Internet Explorer browser.
We will be fixing this bug, so that users will be able to see all replies. If anyone continues to experience this issue after our release on Wednesday, please don’t hesitate to message the Community team on community@macmillan.org.uk.
'Flag to Moderator’ option now showing underneath all posts
In order to keep all of our members safe on the Community, we have a ‘Flag to Moderator’ option available on every post.
At the moment, to find this option, you will need to select ‘More’ underneath a post.
In order to make sure that this option is as visible and as useful as possible, we are moving it out of the ‘More’ menu and displaying it underneath every post on the site.
We encourage everyone on the site to help us keep it as safe as possible. Whether you see something that breaks our guidelines, or you’re just concerned about someone else on the site, please do make use of our ‘Flag to Moderator’ button. One of the team will be on hand to help.
We’re making the ‘Reply’ button bigger and easier to see
We’ve heard from our members that the ‘Reply’ button is too small, and not always easy to see. Especially for anyone using a mobile device, or a smaller screen.
To improve this, we’re making our ‘Reply’ button bigger and more visible. At the moment, the reply button has a grey background. Once you hover over it, it turns teal.
We’re now making sure all of the reply buttons are teal at all times, and we’ve made them bigger.
In addition to this, we have moved around some of the options. Currently, we’ve got the up and down voting arrows, and then the Reply button and then the ‘More’ option.
What we will have is the Reply button, the up and down voting arrows and then the ‘Flag to Moderator’ option.
What it looks like now:
What it will look like:
We hope this will make the ‘Reply’ button easier to see and use, especially for those on a mobile device.
Introducing page numbers on a mobile device
We’ve heard from our users who use a mobile device that navigating through pages within a discussion thread can be really difficult. Especially for longer threads. To improve this, we’re bringing in page numbers when using a mobile device, to make it easier for users to go between the pages in a discussion thread.
We hope that you are as excited as us about bringing in these much needed improvements, and we have more coming our way.
As ever, your feedback is so important to us and really helps us to drive these changes forward. If you have any questions or concerns about the release on Wednesday, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can Private Message (PM) us on the Moderator account, or you can contact us by email on community@macmillan.org.uk.
