Forum update: New features (August 2020)
By JP Addison🔸, Aaron Gertler 🔸 @ 2020-08-28T16:26 (+31)
We have a few quick updates regarding the Forum:
Refactoring the “Community” section
Previously, all Forum posts would be sorted into one of three categories: Frontpage, Community, or Personal Blog. We treated “Community” and “Frontpage” posts differently, giving them their own separate pages on the site.
While “Personal Blog” posts will still exist separately from “Frontpage” posts (because they don’t show up on the front page of the Forum), “Community” is no longer its own category. Instead, we have a “Community” tag which acts like any other tag; you can choose to filter it however you see fit from the front page.
Currently, all Forum accounts start out with community posts hidden from the front page.
- If you un-hid these posts at some point, that setting won’t have changed, and community posts will still have the weighting you chose.
- If you never touched that setting, or if you view the Forum while logged out, the weighting of community posts will be “-25” by default. (The algorithm will show posts with the Community tag less prominently, as though they all had 25 less karma.) You can change this weighting at any time.
Updates to the “About” page
We have a page — How to use the Forum — which displays rules, norms, and advice for anyone who uses the Forum. If you haven’t read it, you should check it out!
In fact, you may want to check it out even if you have read it, because we just made a bunch of updates. Among other things, we’ve added information about the Forum’s various content editors and more details on what we hope people will include in their posts.
Sometime in the near future, we’ll start to send this page to every new Forum user. Given that, do you think there’s anything else we should include on the page? Anything we should change or remove? If so, please let me know: aaron@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
MichaelDickens @ 2020-08-28T20:18 (+11)
It seems weird to me that posts don't appear on the front page unless they're explicitly promoted by a moderator. I would prefer if my posts automatically appeared on the front page. What is the reason for this behavior? (Unless the new tag system will automatically put posts on the front page by default? I'm confused about this.)
Larks @ 2020-08-28T21:24 (+28)
I also find this a bit annoying. When I put a lot of effort into a time-sensitive post I would like it to be visible immediately. My 2018 AI review took four days and multiple emails to get promoted to frontpage - approximately a third of the remaining 2018 giving season.
I realise there is some risk of hypocrisy here, as I help mod the facebook group and we can be slow at times approving posts. But unlike facebook, the forum has a karma system for spam suppression; it seems you could say that any user with >1000 karma or whatever could post directly to main. Moderators could always move it away if the submitter misclassified it.