Help! Ideas for improving this forum....

[Rebecca Petris]

Hi everybody!

After a few years of neglect (!!!) I am finally circling back and really to start reshaping this forum to make it easier to use and more helpful. I would LOVE to start gathering feedback about what is and isn't working, and what would make it more useful. Brent and I are going to be meeting regularly to try and learning some of the new vBulletin features that we could use, or ways to simplify what we have.

I know that one thing we need is an activate moderator who knows the technical ropes and can help people with technical issues. Brent does a lot of that, and I'm going to be giving him more time to put into it, so please don't hesitate to reach out to him for help any time!

We have looked at trying to replace this with some other kind of software, but after looking at several packages, we're kind of circling back to this one. At the end of the day all bulletin board software run along the same concept. To move from one to another would probably be pretty difficult (not to say expensive) - but I'm willing to consider it, for sure, if there's a compelling reason. So any of you who are software-savvy, if you have ideas, this is a great time to raise them

[diydry]

Thanks Rebecca for soliciting our feedback. I'm not software-savvy by any means, but I think it's in pretty good shape overall. Have you thought about locking the archived forums? Sometimes people still post in there and their queries go unanswered for weeks. Seems to me archived posts should be for reference only. Just in general when I first joined the site, I was overwhelmed by all the different forums and had to strongly rely on search functionality to find anything useful. Perhaps it's just my penchant for minimalism. Good luck and thanks for all you do!

[hannsho]

Rebecca, I second diydry’s thoughts on the quality of the software platform this forum uses. I have been using LinkedIn regularly for several years now, and think it works less well than this platform. So, I can’t really suggest any improvements. But I’d like to thank you for your considered approach of consulting all the users of the form before considering any major changes – something that LinkedIn never does!

[Rebecca Petris]

Thank you both! Appreciate it!

I will definitely look at locking those forums again. Done it in the past and people tended to push back but it really does get messy having responses on buried threads from years ago. I need to update categories a bit. Worst of all is when we stopped doing the filing, so there's probably a couple years worth of threads at least that never got filed.

The thing that bothers me most here is the confusion factor (too many forums) so I'm looking at consolidating some of the less-used non-archive ones.

[Guest]

Rebecca Petris This is a slightly different topic but is there any way to have an easy to read info post on corneal neuropathy, why it happens after surgery/dry eye and inflammation, and the flags for it e.g. severe pain without the stain?

I know very few people get this but I was confused for so long why my eyes hurt so badly whilst there was no staining or apparent damage to my eye. I just want to help other people get to a diagnosis quicker. My problem started off as dry eye but has now morphed to something very severe and constantly painful. Even though a lot of dry eye treatments and neuropathy ones are the same it has really helped my mental state to know I wasn't going crazy with the level of pain I was feeling. I'm also doing treatments more tailored to neuropathy now and it has helped me realise some expensive dry eye treatments are going to be pointless.

Best, Lena

[Rebecca Petris]

Hi Lena11 ,

Absolutely... What a great idea. Can't make any promises but putting it on my list! Or if anybody wants to write something up here and 'pin' it that would be great too

Speaking of... I wonder if you might be interested in writing up a story for dryeyestories.com. As you obviously know many people have gone through the same thing you have and there's nothing like reading someone else's story to glean ideas for asking yourself and your doctor new questions... Posts about things in forums and groups get buried quickly, that's why we're doing the stories project - to make a much more easily accessible/searchable database of stories.

[Guest]

Rebecca Petris I'm happy to do a story if you would message me more details?

[hopeful_hiker]

Rebecca Petris thanks for all your work on this forum and to the rest of the forum team! Couple of suggestions:

1) Ability to respond to comments in posts so that they can become their own thread. Example: person A posts about MDG. Person B responds about MDG and a local doctor. I am interested to know more about the local doctor but not steer the conversation away from MDG. I want to respond to the comment from person B specifically, not to the main post. Otherwise the conversation risks going off topic so the original poster does not get answers about MDG because people start discussing the doctor.

Ideally, this comment thread can be collapsed hidden with a button if you don’t want to read it.

2) Trigger warnings. Say if the person is in distress, it would be good if there was a red icon or something next to the post. I think that if someone is doing badly mentally, and another user is also in the same boat, they may not be prepared to read suicidal messages. Or it may spiral them out even more into the darkness and hopelessness.

More often then not, the titles are explicit enough to guess the content, but sometimes you click on the post without thinking but it ends up very taxing emotionally if you are also in a bad place.

[Rebecca Petris]

Lena11 Oh my goodness I'm not sure how I completely missed your post! I will message you!

[Rebecca Petris]

hopeful_hiker

[quote]1) Ability to respond to comments in posts so that they can become their own thread. [quote]

What a great point. I think I'm going to post some directions for this separately. I don't think the software will support anything particularly sophisticated (i.e. threads within threads) but TDEZ Admin please correct me if I'm wrong about that. What I'm thinking is, you can check the box on the post you want to reply to, then make a copy of it to create a new thread (with a new title if appropriate) and respond there. I'm not sure it will let everyone do that but I'll check it out.

2) Trigger warnings.

Oh yes absolutely. I'm thinking what would be great is, if anybody sees something that might be a trigger, could you tag a moderator (that's me and Chaidie) or also if anyone wants to volunteer as a moderator I can get you set up! As a very simple thing we could just add a little text to the title but there may be something built in that we can use.

Thanks for the ideas, keep 'em coming!