How would you like to see your group improve?

Hi Ellen,

Hope these ideas are of some help to you. These could be applicable to all forum groups, not just the Carers one.

1) Pinned Topics

A lot of forums use these to keep important topics at the top of the list. Pinned topics are commonly used for things like "First timers - start here", "New users FAQ", "Online posting for beginners", "Important contact details" (for Government departments, hospital phone numbers, support services numbers, URLS, etc.) - that kind of thing.

New users, when first registering, should be sent an email with links to these pinned topics.

2) Sub Groups

The carers group currently consists of one enormous listing of posts, spread over many, many pages. This can make finding a post on a particular topic hard to find.

Equally, forums that present all their posts in a long single list tend to suffer from what I call "Google Syndrome" - i.e. "If it ain't on page 1 then it ain't getting eyeballs". There are some fantastic posts buried in the carers forums, but you have to go through many, many, many "Load More" sequences to get to them. Few will expend the effort and that information is therefore lost.

Sub groups could be used to create separate streams devoted to a particular aspect of caring. For example;

• Carers Group -> Treatments and side effects
• Carers Group -> Dealing with Emotions
• Carers Group -> Diet, Food and Nutrition
• Carers Group -> Dealing with Government services
• Carers Group -> Chewing the Fat (General chit chat, members intros, social postings, etc.)

3) "Kudos" for users

Kudos is a means of highlighting users who have posted well received or relevant postings. Many forums use "kudos" as a way of showing new users which posts have come from users whose posts have been liked by the most users and, hopefully, be deemed to be worth reading. It's not a way of patting users on the back, it's more a way of highlighting the more relevant posts. Many forum platforms support this (SMF, Kayako, etc.) , but most do it through an add-on, rather than natively. Your forum software may or may not support this.

4) "Next page", "Previous page", "First page" and "Last Page" button order

Where your forum topics can have multiple pages (like blogs, etc.), the order of the page progression buttons is illogical.

Currently, the current page detail is centred and the buttons immediately adjacent to this are for "first page" and "last page". The "next page" and "previous page" buttons are at the extreme left and right hand edges (See below).

If you think of a book in the real world, the two things next to your current page are the "previous page" and the "next page". The "first page" and the "last page" are generally further away (discounting, of course, if you are reading page 2 or the second last page ;-) )

The button order shown in the image labelled "Should Be" is a far more widely accepted button placement, is generally considered to be more logical and coherent and it minimizes mouse movement for the users.

Hope this helps,
Ewen :-)

panic

Hi Ewen,

A lot to think about! Thank you so much for taking the time to share these thoughts and suggestions for improvement with me. It's invaluable for us to hear from you how you'd like our Community to improve and develop as fundamentally, you're the ones who're using the site each and every day. 

Also just to say I agree 100% about the page button orders! I always click the wrong one...

Thanks again Ewen.

Best wishes,

Ellen
Macmillan Community Team

I agree with Ewan and would add that one of the most frequent carer questions is about coping mechanisms (how do others cope).

Loobylou asked this of us a while ago and I have trouble getting back to that page so Ewans ideas make sense. Coping is what carers do, day in day out. Some are new to it and others (unfortunately) have a lot of experience but that is useful to many of us.

Sometimes you just what to hone in one particular topics so yes being able to get to them easily would be useful; dealing with appetite loss; moods; anger.

Hi

Thanks for taking the time to come back to me. It's certainly something we need to look at and I'll be sure to take your feedback on board.

In the meantime, I wonder if there's any particular threads that you, as a group, would like 'pinning' to the first page of discussions? Essentially, we could pin one or two discussions that you/new members would find most useful.

Let me know what you think.

Best wishes,

Ellen
Macmillan Community Team

Hi Ellen. I’m new here, and board is as overwhelming as the hospital experience. I think panic post has pretty much nailed it. I hope this will happen. 

Hi again Ellen.

I've just found out that if you search for posts, it appears that your search engine is only displaying results for the prior 12 months.

I was searching for an old post of mine so I could paste the URL in a reply. The oldest post of mine in the search results was 11 months old and I know I joined quite a bit earlier than that. 

I'm unsure if this limitation only applies when searching your own posts or if it is how it is operating globally on the forum database (I suspect the latter).

Either way, its not good. The current forum structure makes it hard enough to find anything without the underlying search engine obfuscating search results.

Cheer , 

Ewen :-) 

panic

Hi Ewan

Hope you don't mind me jumping in to your question (I'm sure that Ellen - Macmillan won't mind - I hope)

As far as I can see the first post you responded to was made on 4th January 2019 under the heading "I feel like a fraud" in the carers only group.

I'm off to the hospital soon but if you care to let me know the post you are looking for I will send you the link.

Alternatively if you go into your profile page and hit latest activity all you previous posts will be listed.

I have entered into the search box Panic and I ended up with posts going back 13 years because somewhere in the posts the word panic has been included.

If I enter in my user name I found my first post dated over 3 years ago.

If I can be of any help in finding the post you are after let me know, it's no problem to do search for you and let you have the link.

Regards 

Ian

Apologies to Ellen - Macmillan for getting involved in this really hope you don't mind.

Ian

Hi Bodach,

Apologies for the late reply - I wasn't receivng notifications for replies for several months.

There is a disparity in the forums two different means of searching - different results are obtained when searching using the "My Posts" function and when searching for your user name (or actual name) using the forums global search function.

You said

I'm off to the hospital soon but if you care to let me know the post you are looking for I will send you the link.

LOL. If I knew the post I wouldn't have to search for it.

You said

As far as I can see the first post you responded to was made on 4th January 2019 under the heading "I feel like a fraud" in the carers only group.

I have entered into the search box Panic and I ended up with posts going back 13 years because somewhere in the posts the word panic has been included.

If I search using "My Posts", the search results only go back 11 months. If, on the other hand, I search using the forums global search function for my actual name, it shows all posts that I have initiated or replied to (plus older posts that contain the search term "Ewen"). The earliest post of mine that I have definively found is dated 20th March, 2017  - around 39 months ago.

There is something wrong with the way the "My Posts" search function reports. I strongly suspect that the "My Posts" search will only show posts done within the last 11 months or so.

I'm pretty sure neither I nor the global search function imagined the missing 28 months. ;-)

Cheers,
Ewen :-)