I’m a software engineer at the Centre for Effective Altruism. I mostly work on the EA Forum. If you’d like to support our work, sign up for a 30 min user interview with someone on our team. Hearing about your experience with the Forum helps us improve the site for everyone.
In general, we’d be happy to hear any feedback you have! :) Feel free to contact us or post in this suggestion thread. You can also give us anonymous feedback via this form.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve added this to our list for triage.
Appreciate the suggestions! I’ve added them to our list for triage.
Thanks for the suggestion! Could you expand on this idea a bit? Are you imagining that each post has a button that lets you translate the post body into any language you select?
I think most events have a specific language they will cater to, so if you can’t read the Italian event description you probably won’t get much from attending the event.
That said, I have been considering adding “languages spoken” to the user profile, and displaying what languages are spoken by the event attendees on the event page (based on people RSVPing). This could be helpful if you are looking for nearby in-person events but you don’t speak the local language (ex. you are traveling or recently moved). But I assume users will generally ignore any events posted in a language they don’t understand.
Thanks for the screenshot—that’s helpful! I’ll add this suggestion to our list for triage, though I think the browser’s translation is good enough for most cases.
Great suggestions! I added them to our list for triage.
Thanks for the suggestions! I’ve added them to our list for triage.
Thanks for the suggestion! Markdown formatting should work, though I agree it’s very unclear how to add a link your bio. And it looks like we already have an item in our backlog to use the rich text editor for the bio. :)
I believe I’ve converted this to a normal post—please let me know if you see any issues.
Thanks for providing feedback on the Forum! I just wanted to clarify some of the specific features you requested.
ability to delete account and all posts/comments
We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to delete account but leave posts/comments up
We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to change username
You can now do this from your account settings page! Though you only get one change, after that you’ll have to contact us to change it again.
ensure the subdomain or link alloted reflects changed username
We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to disable profile from search indexing
We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to disable posts from search indexing
We can do this for you if you contact us.
We really appreciate hearing from folks. We keep an eye on the Forum feature suggestion thread, so please feel free to post suggestions there.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve added it to our list for triage. Also I agree that “sequence” is unclear—personally I’m a fan of “series”, since it still implies that there is an order, but I haven’t put that much thought into it. :)
I believe we can rss-import blogs to the forum, and we currently do so for a few. We have to manually set it up on our end, so if you contact us we can work with you to start doing this. :)
Thanks Vaidehi! I’ve added it to our list for triage.
We appreciate your feedback! We will explore how to better support users without Google access.
I believe moderators can do this for you, but perhaps we should allow users to do this as well. I’ll add it to our list for triage.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve added it to our list for triage.
LW have been working hard on this, and are still ironing out the bugs. When it’s more production-ready, the EA Forum devs will figure out how we might want to enable it (ex. we might want some different functionality here).
If you’re excited for collaborative editing, I recommend you beta test it on LW and give them lots of feedback! :) That will help improve both forums.
Thanks for the post! We do encourage people to use their real names as their usernames.
Our current policy is that each user can change their own username once[1] - you can do this by going to the Edit Account page and updating your “Display Name”.
After that, further changes to your username need to be done by moderators. Please contact us to ask to change your username. :)
Unfortunately we had a bug that took this one chance away for many users. This should be fixed for new accounts going forward, but if you don’t see this option in your Edit Account page, then please reach out to us and we will change your username for you.
Thanks for asking! It sounds like you were affected by our bug, so please contact us and we will update your username for you.
Thanks Nathan! I see this is already in our backlog. :)