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.
Excited about EA Global? The Centre for Effective Altruism’s Events Team is hiring for multiple roles, including an EA Global Events Associate. The deadline for applying is next Tuesday, October 11!
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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 flagging that we had a bug affecting voting! It should be fixed now, please let me know if you see any more related issues.
Thanks for reporting the bug! I just deployed a fix, so the “Magic” default sorting should be properly applied now.
You can now subscribe to be notified when posts are added to a sequence. You can see more details in GitHub here.
We’ve also made it a bit easier to create and edit sequences, including allowing users to delete sequences they’ve made.
I’ve been thinking a bit about how to improve sequences, so I’d be curious to hear:
How you use them
What you’d like to be able to do with them
Any other thoughts/feedback
We’ve updated our new user onboarding flow! You can see more details in GitHub here.
In addition to making it way prettier, we’re trying out adding some optional steps, including:
You can select topics you’re interested in, to make your frontpage more relevant to you.
You can also click the “Customize feed” button on the frontpage—see details here.
You can choose some authors to subscribe to. You will be notified when an author you are subscribed to publishes a post.
You can also subscribe from any user’s profile page.
You’re prompted to fill in some profile information to give other users context on who you are.
You can also edit your profile here.
I hope that these additional optional steps help new users get more out of the Forum. We will continue to iterate on this flow based on usage and feedback—feel free to reply to this quick take with your thoughts!
Thanks for sharing your feedback! Responding to each point:
I removed the profile button link because I found it slightly annoying that opening that menu on mobile also navigates you to your profile, plus I think it’s unusual UX for the user menu button to also be a link.
We recently changed this back, so now both the timestamp and the link icon navigate you to the comment permalink. We’ll probably change the link icon to copy the link to your clipboard instead.
We didn’t change the criteria for whether the vote arrows appear at the bottom of a post—we still use the same threshold (post is >300 words) as LW does. We did move the vote arrows from the right side of the title to the left side of the title on the post page. This makes the post page header more visually consistent with the post list item, which also has the karma info on the left of the title.
I recommend you add that in your bio, since the text search will match on both the map location and any text written in your bio. :)
Are you referring to Unflattering reasons why I’m attracted to EA ?
People interested in AI risk and this post might be interested in applying to the Business Operations role at Anthropic, which is working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
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Thanks for the feedback! This feature was an experiment, and based on the results we’ve decided to remove it from the forum. We might redesign it and run a follow-up experiment in the future, so if you have other thoughts on it we’d be interested to hear them.
We appreciate your feedback! We will explore how to better support users without Google access.
Yes, currently you can contact us and our team can hide your profile page from search engines. We are considering allowing users to do this themselves. However, there are ways to view profile info that are outside the profile itself, so we need to be careful about how we communicate this feature.
People interested in global health & development and this post might be interested in applying to the Program Operations Assistant, Global Health & Wellbeing role at Open Philanthropy, and EA-aligned research and grantmaking foundation.
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People interested in nuclear security and this post might be interested in applying to the Spring 2023 Internship Program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-profit working to prevent global catastrophic risks by driving systemic solutions to nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity. Applications are due by Friday, October 21.
This is a test by the EA Forum Team to gauge interest in job ads relevant to posts - give us feedback here.