EA Forum update (Oct 2024)

By Sarah Cheng @ 2024-10-24T13:03 (+46)

It’s been a few months since our last update. In addition to preparing for a big Giving Season event, here are some of the things we’ve been up to.

Site improvements

Notifications re-redesign

After evaluating the feedback we received from our notifications redesign earlier this year, we decided to overhaul the UI again. We removed the standalone notifications page and improved the notification icon dropdown menu, so that it stays open on click.

As a reminder, there are many options for customizing your notifications via your account settings page.

Advanced search syntax

We’ve started adding support for search operators in the search text box. Right now you can use the “user” operator to filter by author, and the “topic” operator to filter by topic, though these will currently only do exact matches and are case-sensitive. Note that there is already a topic filter on the left side, if that is more convenient for you.

Let us know if there are other operators you would like to see! And a reminder that our codebase is open source, so you are also welcome to implement them yourself.

Decreased karma threshold for adding/editing topics

We made a quick change to the amount of karma Forum users need in order to suggest new topics, and edit existing topic wiki descriptions. Now you only need one karma, to prove that you are a legit user.

Updating wiki pages makes the Forum better for everyone. :) If you’d like to contribute, see the latest guidelines for adding a topic here, and overall wiki FAQs here (note that the FAQs have not been updated in a while). Thanks to @Gemma 🔸 for inspiring this change!

Footnotes on mobile open in a floating box

Thanks to the LessWrong team for this one! Now rather than scrolling you all the way down to the bottom of the post, clicking on a footnote number on mobile will just open the text in a modal.^[1]

Changing post/comment types retains your drafted text

This is a niche but very welcome fix. We’ve updated our editor software, so now when you, for example, start typing a post and change it to a linkpost, or start typing an answer to a question and change it to a comment instead, the textbox no longer gets cleared. 

Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week

Thanks to everyone who voted or otherwise participated in this debate week! There were a lot of great discussions, and we plan to incorporate some of this tech into the upcoming Donation Election as well. If you have any feedback on the event, please let us know. We’ll continue to run debate week events in 2025.

Team updates

Our team has changed a bit more than usual recently, so here is a quick summary:

1. Lizka has left CEA to do research at Forethought.
2. @JP Addison🔸 is now “Head of Online & Interim Exec Program Manager”. He is spending about half his time helping CEA Exec, and the other half mostly on Online Team projects outside of the Forum. He is still the head moderator of the Forum.
3. My role (Sarah) is now “Interim EA Forum Project Lead”. Previously I was a software engineer, and I still do a small amount of coding, but most of my time is now spent on people management, team strategy, and other tasks that arise (such as working on our funding proposal). I’ve also been onboarded as a Forum moderator.
4. @Will Howard🔹 is still a software engineer on the team, but is now spending more of his time both on content work (you’ve probably seen him be more active on the Forum) and supporting the CEA Comms Team. We expect his specific role to evolve quickly as the Comms Team is building up capacity and deciding their nearterm priorities.
5. @Agnes Stenlund, @Ollie Etherington, and @Toby Tremlett🔹 are continuing in their roles as product designer, software engineer, and content manager respectively.
6. Overall, relative to, say, six months ago, our team is spending less of our capacity on the Forum in particular, and a larger percent of Forum capacity is on content rather than engineering work.

You can see some of this reflected in our half-quarterly OKRs. I’ll also quickly plug that you can hire us for software and/or design work.

Other updates

• We ran a big Forum user survey — thanks to everyone who responded! I plan to post about the results at some point, so let me know if there are particular things you would like to see.
• As CEA is ramping up hiring, our team redesigned CEA.org to modernize the UI and improve the job applicant experience.
• We hosted several AMAs on the Forum.
• Toby set up a banner and wrote a post for Petrov Day.
• We’ve experimented a bit with the EA Newsletter, and as Will mentioned here we are likely going to move the Forum Digest and the EA Newsletter over to Substack.
• We’re testing out manually running the EA Forum Twitter account. We’ll likely do more projects in this direction in the future, like experimenting with other social media platforms or paid ads.
• We’re kicking off a project to improve effectivealtruism.org — check out Agnes’s quick take for more details and ways to provide input.

Share your feedback

Thanks for reading! :) Let us know if you have feedback or questions about these changes. You can comment on this post or reach out to us another way. You can also share feature requests in the feature suggestion thread.

A few of our team will be attending the upcoming EAG Boston, so feel free to connect with us there! Toby and I will be running a Forum workshop, and we’ll have office hours afterward. We also plan to run a similar session at EAGxVirtual.

1. ^{^}

   No more scrolling around and losing your place!