I wanted to share a little about our upcoming plans in the forum.
Over the past few weeks, the forum team have been reaching out to a handful of forum members to discuss the possibility of merging two categories; For the Love of Pets & Fun Stuff to create ‘Pets and Fun Stuff’ (other suggestions for the category name are welcome).
The feedback has been positive, so we wanted to share those plans with the wider group.
How would we do this?
We’ll simply move all the discussions from one category into another and update the title/description. Once complete, the empty category area will be removed.
The categories we’re looking at merging provide a similar function in the forum, merging them will mean less pagination to view recent discussions and lead to even more vibrant discussions.
Not sure this really matters, I spend waaaay too much time on the forum and read all posts that interest me (most) regardless of what heading they are under. Time could be spent better elsewhere in my opinion.
I always assumed that “Fun Stuff” meant upbeat (but not-pet related) off-topic posts. Assuming I’m not mistaken, then maybe to a slight modification to “Pets and Other Fun Stuff” would make it clearer that non-pet fun stuff belongs there too?
We’ll take a pause for a few weeks to review how we can improve the process. However in the weeks and/or months ahead, we’ll consider merging the two Product related categories
Currently, the existing “Product Updates” was designed to share information and “THS News & feedback” was designed as a place to receive feedback. Having a single “THS Updates & Feedback” may simplify things a little.
As mentioned in the OP, these changes aren’t revolutionary to the forum, but can reduce pagination and increase the vibrancy and visibility of your discussions.
Thanks, Mark. Understand your logic here, but would like to chime in from my experience with gaming and other software-related Forums that a straight-up “Product Updates & Announcements” category was hugely beneficial in quickly finding important ‘from the company’ announcements and important product updates.
My fear is that combining it with the feedback category would bury the important announcements, unless there’s some way to clearly differentiate them from user posts – and even then, they’d tend to get pushed down the category and become less visible.
Q: Have you considered leaving the Product Updates category, but making it so only THS staff members can post there? The forum software I used previously allowed the moderators to start a twin thread in a “feedback” category for open discussion, that referred back to the “announcements” thread.