I find this forum increasingly difficult to navigate

It would be great if the AllPosts page displayed the first ~100 posts instead of just the first ~16. Every few months, I find myself spending several minutes repeatedly clicking the "Load More Days" button.

LessWrong has a sidebar which makes the link to All Posts much more prominent; it looks like EA Forum hasn't adopted that yet, but it would probably help.

Strong upvoted mostly to make it easier to find this comment.

Here's an editor guide I just updated.

There's a section on writing in the lesswrong faq (named Posting & Commenting). If any information is missing from there, you can suggest adding it in the comments.

Of course, even given that such instructions exists somewhere, it's important to make sure that it's findable. Not sure what the best way to do that is.

Re: searching for great posts, there is also an archive page where you can order by top and other things in the gear menu.

Ok, that's quite a lot more helpful than I'd realised - why not make it more prominent though? I didn't see these options even when actively looking for them, and even knowing they're there, unless I deep link to the page as someone above suggested, it's several clicks to reach where I want to be. Though (more on this below), the 'top' option is the only one I can see myself ever using.

Can you say more about how you used the old forum? I’m hearing something like “A couple of times per year I’d look at the top-posts list and read new things there”. (I infer a couple of times per year because once you’ve done it once or twice I’d guess you’ve read all the top posts.) I think that’s still very doable using the archive feature.

I mainly used the 'top posts in <various time periods>' option (typically the 1 or 3 month options, IIRC); median time between visits was probably something like 1-3 months, so that fit pretty well. That said, even on the old forum I strongly wished for a way to filter by subject. Honestly, my favourite forums for UX were probably the old phpBB style ones, where you'd have forums devoted to arbitrarily many subtopics. I don't think they're anywhere near the pinnacle of forum design, but 'subtopic' is such an important divider, that I feel much less clear on how I can get value from a forum without it (which is part of why I've never spent a huge amount of time on the EA forums - though a bigger part is just not having much time to spare)

To a lesser degree, I found the metadata on who'd been active recently. It let me pseudo-follow certain users (though I suspect an actual follow function would be more helpful)

Am also surprised that you lose posts. My sense is that for a post to leave the frontpage takes a couple of days to a week. Do you keep tabs open that long? Or are you finding the posts somewhere else?

Often a friend would link me to a post that had already been around for a week or two when I read it.

LessWrong* used to have a single default image for everything and I thought it was annoying because it was so generic and was glad when they removed it. I'm not familiar with best practices on social links, it's possible there's standard advice that disagrees with me.

*Who's codebase we forked and thus we have similar dynamics as.

I am very torn because on the one hand, I really want to appreciate people's hard work, but on the other hand, just because people work hard doesn't mean their work has actually improved the Forum.

It's important to be kind, but it's also important to be honest. While I think this post could have been better, the most important thing is that it exists at all. And it's important that it's not just a feature request - it's important that the post is clear that some people think the site is getting worse overall.

Michelle, I’m very surprised you find the new search functionality to be an improvement. I thought the old search worked quite well, but find the new functionality nearly useless. Unless I know the exact title of a post and search for that, I routinely get results that are tangentially/un-related, old, not-well-upvoted, or all of the above. For example, the top results when searching for “effective altruism” are:

1. Effective Altruism and Religious Faiths: Mutually Exclusive Entities, or an Important Nexus to Explore (9 karma, 4 years old)

2. Effective Altruism & Slate Star Codex Readership (3 karma, 6 months old)

3. Effective Altruism subreddit (9 karma, 3 years old)

The comments that are returned are similarly old and low-karma (though I do love that the new search returns both posts and comments). I also tried searching for “bednets”, “artificial intelligence”, and “jobs” all with similar outcomes.

I actually wanted to post screenshots of the search results, but couldn’t figure out how to insert pictures (I figured out a workaround in the past, but I can’t remember what I did, only that it was time-consuming and extremely annoying). More generally, I’ve found the process of posting quite frustrating (which I’m not alone in). I strongly upvoted the OP for these reasons; I hope this isn’t read as a lack of appreciation for the hard and extensive work that people have put in on the new forum.

Ben Pace @ 2019-07-05T16:31 (+15)

Can you say more about what you find frustrating about using the editor/posting? Am also interested to know if you find it better/worse than the old site.

Jon_Behar @ 2019-07-05T18:21 (+16)

My frustration centered around not being able to take a post I’d written in google docs and simply paste it into the forum to post without extra work. I’ve run into two problems trying to do that: pictures and footnotes. It didn’t help matters that I wrote a post with a ton of footnotes before they became supported, but even now that they are it’s a pain to use the markup editor instead of just copy/pasting things. I’d strongly prefer to get this and the search functionality taken care of before adding new functionality (e.g. sequences).

There are also things I like about the new forum. The notifications about replies is a huge plus, and the question and link post types are a clever nudge to engage people. I’m sort of on the fence about the frontpage/community distinction. I sympathize with the intention, but worry that it buries time sensitive news that EAs need to know about (e.g. when a grant application window opens).

Last but definitely not least, thanks Ben for your openness to feedback (even if some is critical) and lack of defensiveness! Strong upvote.

Lukas_Finnveden @ 2019-07-05T20:25 (+20)

With regards to images, I get flawless behaviour when I copy-paste from googledocs. Somehow, the images automatically get converted, and link to the images hosted with google (in the editor only visible as small cameras). Maybe you can get the same behaviour by making your docs public?

Actually, I'll test copying an image from a google doc into this comment: (edit: seems to be working!)

Jon_Behar @ 2019-07-05T20:50 (+6)

Testing a reply with an image copy/pasted from a public google doc (shows up as camera in the editor)

Edit: it worked! Good to know about this workaround (though the direct google doc import Ben mentioned would still be preferable since it'd deal with footnotes too).

Jon_Behar @ 2019-07-05T18:24 (+15)

btw, I had to google what a markdown editor was so perhaps the instructions could be made more accessible to laypeople

Ben Pace @ 2019-07-05T20:14 (+9)

A year ago I did write a little editor guide, but many parts of it quickly went out of date. I'll post to the Forum if I update it.

Edit: I updated it.

Ben Pace @ 2019-07-05T20:12 (+13)

Gotcha. Not being able to easily copy-in from G-Docs and fotnotes+pictures being lotsa work.

Chatting with the team, their sense is that copy-pasting footnotes is very unlikely to ever work between editors (e.g. I don't expect footnotes to be copied functionally into MS word, Dropbox paper, or any other editor you might use). If that's the case, I would like to build the ability to do a direct import from g-docs, which would solve these problems.

Also agree with the images. The big thing we don't do right now is host images, which means you have to upload them to the internet yourself then put the URL into our editor.

The current state of the plan is to do a big overhaul of the editor framework either this quarter or next, where I expect us to spend time on these issues and others. In general we found that making small edits to the current editor for things like this were too costly in both the short and long run, and we'd also prefer an editor a bit more like google docs in a bunch of ways.

SiebeRozendal @ 2019-07-05T22:15 (+9)

Just adding something here: I had done all my images and footnotes well and then switched back and forth between editors, which somehow messed it all up and I had to manually insert all footnotes again.

Jon_Behar @ 2019-07-05T20:21 (+2)

Cool, direct import from g-docs would do the trick from my perspective. Thanks for the update!

aarongertler @ 2019-07-05T18:25 (+4)

I'm curious about your vision for what better search results would look like. I'm not sure how the current search works, but I expect that it prioritizes title-matching, so that the phrase "Effective Altruism" returns posts whose titles begin with that phrase (which isn't very common, as most people here abbreviate it "EA").

Would your preferred results look like any of the following?

• The highest-karma posts using the phrase "effective altruism" anywhere (title or text)
• The newest posts using the phrase "effective altruism" anywhere (title or text)
• The posts using the phrase "effective altruism" most often (between title and text)

Keyword search seems like a pretty good way to find "that one post you're looking for", but I could imagine that karma/newness should be factors if people are using Forum search to hunt down "interesting posts about topic X". I don't know how common each use case is.

----

Regarding screenshots: Images can't be added to comments (correction: they can, see here); is that what you were trying to find a workaround for? (If so, it's useful feedback for us that this is something people want.)

You can add an image to a post by leaving a blank line where you want the image to go. Then, highlight a space in the blank line. You'll see a bar pop up with options like "bold" and "italic".

Click the image of a photo on that bar, and you'll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesn't support attachments, but there are a lot of sites where you can upload an image for free. My favorite is imgbb.

Jon_Behar @ 2019-07-05T19:36 (+16)

Re: pictures, ability to do pictures in comments would be nice. But my frustration was really around this:

Click the image of a photo on that bar, and you'll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesn't support attachments, but there are a lot of sites where you can upload an image for free. My favorite is imgbb.

This is a real pain, and a disincentive to using charts or tables. I write in google docs for a variety of reasons, including because it’s easy to get feedback from people. So once I’ve written a draft, edited, sent it out for feedback, revised it, given it a final edit, and at long last have it looking the way I want in a format that’s used around the world, I don’t want to have to upload a bunch of images to some site I'm unfamiliar with, then insert each of them into the post.

I’d like to do be able to do a simple copy/paste. Inserting attachments would still be frustrating, but a significant improvement on the status quo. In either case, I’d like there to be clear and easily accessible instructions (people shouldn't have to figure out the imgbb solution on their own). Hope this clarifies where the frustration stems from, let me know if you still have questions.

Jon_Behar @ 2019-07-05T19:33 (+16)

Re: search, “effective altruism” was probably a bad example but I guess I’d like to see that return something like CEA’s guiding principles (or whatever the old search version did). “Bednet” is probably a better example. You’d expect this to turn up something about bednets and/or AMF. Instead, it returns three results that mention bednets but are in no way about them.

1. Charity Entrepreneurship Research Summary (22 karma, 3 years old)

2. The age distribution of GiveWell’s charities (13 karma, 4 years old)

3. What consequences? (25 karma, 2 years old)

Interestingly, searching for “bednets” instead of “bednet” yields very different results:

1. 8 ways to free up donation money without sacrifice

2. Where should anti-paternalists donate?

3. Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it.

I’m not sure exactly what my algorithm would be, I imagine it’d involve keyword matching in the title, in the text, karma, recentness, etc. Let’s say someone wanted to find “After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organization”, which I believe is the highest karma post in forum history. And it has a title that you can’t expect people to remember. I’d definitely want that to be the top result if someone searched for “jobs” (it’s the 7th result, requiring an extra click to see) or “ea job market” (doesn’t show up).

Lukas_Finnveden @ 2019-07-05T20:32 (+1)

Images can't be added to comments; is that what you were trying to find a workaround for?

It's possible to add images to comments by selecting and copying them from anywhere public (note that it doesn't work if you right click and choose 'copy image'). In this thread, I do it in this comment.

I see how I can't do it manually, though, by selecting text. I wouldn't expect it to be too difficult to add that possibility, though, given that it's already possible in another way?

Habryka @ 2019-07-05T23:47 (+9)

On LessWrong we intentionally didn't want to encourage pictures in the comments, since that provides a way to hijack people's attention in a way that seemed too easy. You can use markdown syntax to add pictures, both in the markdown editor and the WYSIWYG editor.

Tah for trying to generally make the Forum a nicer place Michelle. That said I want to say that in this case, for me, I had zero negative experiences reading the post, and the line “The latest version has reached the point where I just don't see the point of visiting the forum any more” was the most useful part of the post for me. I’ve not heard anyone tell me the new Forum is unusable for them, and I’m interested in further (unfiltered) info from Arepo + others (though I don’t have a lot of time to engage).

(@everyone else, in case it’s not apparent, I’m part of the LW team who created the codebase for the new site)

Just as a data point, I didn't read OP as an attack at all.

I also don't think that if you have overall negative feedback, you should necessarily have to come up with some good things to say as well, just to balance things out and "be nice". OP said what they wanted to say and it reads to me like valuable feedback, including the subtle undertone of frustration.

As a data point on the object level, I think that magic sorting makes sense on a website with intense traffic (HN, reddit), not on a site with a few posts a day.

For the record I'm someone who works on the forum and thought the OP was expressed pretty reasonably.

My impression, incidentally, is that the search functionality is decidedly better than it was on the old forum: the search results seem to be more related to what I'm looking for, and be easier to sort through (eg separating 'comments' and 'posts')

For what it's worth, my main concerns are the visual navigation (esp filtering and sorting) rather than a search feature - the latter I find Google invariably better for, as long as you can persuade the bots to index frequently.

Great to learn about that group, maybe worth a top-level link post?

Google Forms is free and very easy to use if you want to do a poll without being restricted to people with FB accounts.