G
Graham Marsden (ACA)
Guest
Introducing the new member-stats bars on the forum
(these are just the first of a range of upgrades to the forum and member functions that we'd like to build over the months ahead, with your input).
Huge numbers of you contribute loads to the site, but people only found out by occasionally clicking your member pages, or if we happened to look at our databases and produce a 'top posters' or 'top reviewers' list once in a while.
We wanted to show those stats so that:
a) everyone who contributes to the site is celebrated (in a small way...)
b) other readers can see how established on the site the person is whose post they are reading. If Mr X posts a forum comment about a product and you can easily see he's added 35 reviews to the site, you'll probably think he's at least had some experience with a number of products. Or if someone posts a rave message about the service they've received from a shop, you might not dismiss it as spam if you can see they've posted 1200 other messages on the site.
c) Hopefully... some readers think 'ooh, I didn't realise I could keep bookmarks / add a review / write an article for the site' and head off to do so...
There are potential downsides: more excitable members might race each other to increase their stats numbers, and quantity of contribution is not always the same as quality, so you can?t always assess a person by their stats.
Some people may raise privacy concerns. You can still hide anything that you could hide before; we maybe need to make that more obvious. If you go into your My Bookmarks page you can untick 'Display on my profile' at the top-right of the page, for instance, as ever. Your bookmarks stat would still show above your forum post, but if someone clicked it, they'd see 'This person has chosen to keep their bookmarks private'.
You can also hide your entire stats bar (sad as that would make us): just go to your ?My Forum? page and choose 'Default to hide' under 'My activity stats'.
As we roll out new features we're keen that as many as possible are switch-offable for people who don't want to see them. That's why you can choose to show or hide other people's stats bars (though you can never 'show' stats bars that they have hidden) - or move them from the top of each post to the left-hand side. Just use the triangle to the left of their nickname to toggle between hide/show horizontal/show vertical - or change the setting on your ?My Forum? page.
It's your site and we need to keep it feeling like home.
If anyone posts about this new forum implementation on another thread, please drop a link in to this thread.
Thanks.
(these are just the first of a range of upgrades to the forum and member functions that we'd like to build over the months ahead, with your input).
Huge numbers of you contribute loads to the site, but people only found out by occasionally clicking your member pages, or if we happened to look at our databases and produce a 'top posters' or 'top reviewers' list once in a while.
We wanted to show those stats so that:
a) everyone who contributes to the site is celebrated (in a small way...)
b) other readers can see how established on the site the person is whose post they are reading. If Mr X posts a forum comment about a product and you can easily see he's added 35 reviews to the site, you'll probably think he's at least had some experience with a number of products. Or if someone posts a rave message about the service they've received from a shop, you might not dismiss it as spam if you can see they've posted 1200 other messages on the site.
c) Hopefully... some readers think 'ooh, I didn't realise I could keep bookmarks / add a review / write an article for the site' and head off to do so...
There are potential downsides: more excitable members might race each other to increase their stats numbers, and quantity of contribution is not always the same as quality, so you can?t always assess a person by their stats.
Some people may raise privacy concerns. You can still hide anything that you could hide before; we maybe need to make that more obvious. If you go into your My Bookmarks page you can untick 'Display on my profile' at the top-right of the page, for instance, as ever. Your bookmarks stat would still show above your forum post, but if someone clicked it, they'd see 'This person has chosen to keep their bookmarks private'.
You can also hide your entire stats bar (sad as that would make us): just go to your ?My Forum? page and choose 'Default to hide' under 'My activity stats'.
As we roll out new features we're keen that as many as possible are switch-offable for people who don't want to see them. That's why you can choose to show or hide other people's stats bars (though you can never 'show' stats bars that they have hidden) - or move them from the top of each post to the left-hand side. Just use the triangle to the left of their nickname to toggle between hide/show horizontal/show vertical - or change the setting on your ?My Forum? page.
It's your site and we need to keep it feeling like home.
If anyone posts about this new forum implementation on another thread, please drop a link in to this thread.
Thanks.
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