Tell us how to improve the forum
EA Forum volunteers are doing a brief survey to get a better idea about how people use the forum and what they think about it. Your response will help us decide how much effort should be invested in improving various aspects of the forum.
In addition, please post any ideas for features or changes you’d like to see in the comments. We recommend that you make each suggestion a separate comment and upvote those that seem most useful. Ryan and EA Forum Volunteers
I wish I could close a comment by clicking a bar on the left-hand side (as reddit has) rather than only the small plus at the top. Currently if I start reading a long comment (particularly on a phone) it’s a far to close that particular thread.
Better ways to categorize or tag articles would be really helpful.
Here is something I recently proposed in a .impact chat: Do we need to make it more clear how people can ask questions? When people are new to EA, they’ll have lots of questions, and Google might not always be able to point them to the best documents answering them.
(1) The international effective altruism group has a high bar for quality, so it’s not a good fit for asking a random question; (2) the EA Forum is being used for longer articles, so people who are sensitive to that will refrain from asking questions here; (3) in open threads, questions that arrive rather late are easily overlooked; and (4) not everyone has a meetup nearby or is curious enough about any particular answer to go to one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/ is the best fit that I can think of for asking questions, but it took me a while to remember that it exists, and I don’t recognize any (nick) names there, so if it really is the best place to ask questions, then it would need to be promoted more to newcomers and seasoned EAs. People who work in outreach could add the Reddit feed to their Feedly accounts, and the people operating the EA Forum could put up a link to recommend it as a place to ask questions.
What do you think?
An EA stackexchange would be good for this. There is one being proposed: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97583/effective-altruism
But it needs someone to take it on as a project to do all that’s necessary to make it a success. Oli Habryka has been thinking about how to make it a success, but he needs someone to take on the project.
@Richard_Batty, I’d be interested finding out more about what’s needed for EA-SE proposal. I’ll also shoot Oliver a email about this.
Oh, awesome! I hadn’t seen the Stack Exchange proposal. *fingers crossed*
I was wondering about why there is a 5 karma requirement to publishing an article. Was there problems before that was put into place?
It would also be handy to be able to get a weekly digest of top voted posts or something similar in my email.
One reason this might be good is to prevent spambots from making top-level posts.
Yes, of course, but I haven’t seen spambots in comments so far, and thus would guess that they wouldn’t become a problem on top level either.
I often see spambots in the comments.
I would find HTTPS support useful.
I haven’t been able to successfully log in to EAF from my phone (which is a pretty old Windows Mobile phone, so might be something unique to it). That probably increases the number of pageviews I generated for EAF, because I revisit on desktop to leave a comment :).
It could be helpful to allow us to subscribe to receive email notification of new posts.
I’d be in favor of creating subsections for more clarity. Presumably different cause areas could be subsections, there could be a philosophy subsection, and so on. And I think a “Introduce yourself” section could be good as it would make the forum more approachable.