Forum update: User database, card view, and more (Jul 2024)

By Sarah Cheng, Agnes Stenlund, Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2024-07-24T21:03 (+53)

Highlights since our last feature update:

• People directory

• Google Doc import

• Card view for the Frontpage

• User profile updates

• Updates to sequences

We've also hosted 3 events, significantly improved the site speed, and made many more improvements across the Forum. 

As always, we'd love feedback on these changes.

People directory

We’ve built a filterable database where anyone can find Forum users they might want to hire, collaborate with, or read.

You can filter the database by role, organization, interests and more.

If you want people to easily find you, consider adding more information to your Forum profile.

Google Doc import

You can now import posts directly from Google Docs. Footnotes and images will be imported along with the text.

How it works:

• Write and format your post in Google Docs
• Share the Google doc with eaforum.posts@gmail.com
• Copy the link to your doc, click “Import Google doc” on a new Forum post, and paste the link

For more details, check out Will Howard’s quick take.

Card view for the Frontpage

Card view is a new way to view the Frontpage, allowing you to see post images and a preview of the content.

Try it out by changing to card view in the dropdown to the right of “Customize feed”.

User profile updates

We’ve redesigned the Edit profile page, and moved “Display name” to this page (from Account settings). Feel free to update your display name to add a GWWC pledge diamond.

We’ve also re-enabled topic interests. This helps possible collaborators or hiring managers find you in our new People directory, as well as letting you make your profile a bit more information dense and personalized.

Updates to sequences

You can now get notified when posts are added to a sequence. We’ve also updated the sequence editor, including adding the ability to delete sequences.

Other updates

Forum performance is greatly improved

We’ve made several behind the scenes changes which have sped up the Forum loading times. This should make your experience of using the Forum a lot smoother.

Improved on-site audio experience

While the previous version was static, attached to the top of the post, the new audio player sticks to the bottom of the page while the reader scrolls through the article. Once you have clicked the speaker icon to open the audio player, you can click the play button next to any header to start playing the audio from there.

We’ve fixed our Twitter bot

Our Twitter bot tweets posts when they hit 40 karma. It’s been out of commission for a while, but now it’s back up and running! We encourage you to follow, share, and retweet posts that you think are valuable.

Updated UI for post stats

We’ve simplified the UI and added high level metrics to your post stats.

Before and after:

Self-service account deletion

There is now a section at the bottom of your account settings allowing you to permanently delete your personal data from the Forum.

Events since March

Draft Amnesty Week

We hosted a Draft Amnesty Week to encourage people to publish posts that had been languishing in draft or procrastinated states. We had around 50 posts published.

We also made some design changes to how we show events on the Forum, which will make future events more visible and navigable.

"Ways the world is getting better" banner

This banner was on the Forum for a week. Users could add emojis to the banner, which would show a piece of good news when someone hovered over them. When you clicked the emojis, you would be linked to an article explaining the good news.

AI Welfare Debate Week

Our first interactive debate week had over 500 Forum users voting on our interactive banner, around 30 posts, and much discussion in comments and quick takes. We received a lot of encouraging and constructive feedback, so stay tuned for debate week 2.0! You can read the posts from the event here.

Bonus: April Fools

Bulby!

Share your feedback

Thank you for helping make the Forum a valuable place to be. If you have feedback on any of these new features, comment below or reach out to us. You can also make feature suggestions in this thread.

For reference, here is a doc with our team's recent and current OKRs, which summarizes some of the work we've prioritized and some things you'll see from us soon.

OscarD @ 2024-07-24T21:45 (+4)

Nice! I didn't actually know we had access to our author stats, cool. What is the difference between 'views' and 'reads'? Also, how 'true' do you think these numbers are? They seem rather surprisingly high to me, could there just be a bunch of bots racking up numbers?

OscarD🔸 @ 2024-07-24T21:53 (+5)

(answered my own question - 'read' means stayed on page >30s).

However, one of my posts has a negative bounce rate, seems like a bug! Or maybe my post was just that engaging ;)
 

Will Howard🔹 @ 2024-07-25T11:08 (+6)

Hi Oscar, thanks for flagging that bug, I'll look into it and reply here when it's fixed.

To answer your other question: The "reads" number should be pretty reliable, we don't tend to get bots that load the page for long enough to trigger the necessary timer events (or deliberately fake these events). The views number is more likely to be off, as there are some bots that can trigger the page view event.