Grateful for your thoughts please
New year always brings around new attitudes, new focus (such as weight loss fitness etc).
I love the fact we carry different topics on our platform and think it really adds to our site and helps give it its ‘community’ aspect.
We created a sub group for politics last year off the main forum. I don’t use it myself but in terms of activity it has thrived with around 250 signed up to the group and been successful in taking the topic away from the main forum.
Interested on whether we should expand on that approach or not? Grateful for views on the following:
1. creating a second, new sub-group for Activities and Accountability? A dedicated group away from the main forum for topics for weight loss, Parkrun / running, cycling, cooking, Dry January, learning languages, weight training etc. Anything that involves a target, activity or encouragement from others. One thing I’ve learned is that there is far more chance in people successful in achieving aims if they ‘commit and go public’ with it, creating a degree of accountability.
Will take those topics off the main forum but give them a more specific and easier to identify ‘home’. Users there will need to have registered for that group so won’t be commenting/ participating without activity wanting to be engaged with that group.
2 Not do the above. Instead, re-align the current Categories breakdown on the main forum. In particular, split out all the non-Charlton / non-football stuff into more clearer defined categories (music, RIPs, Tv&film, travel etc). Maybe encourage people to use more the category listing page
https://forum.charltonlife.com/categories/ as their landing / starting page rather than the main one that links to Recent Discussions (from all categories)
3. Not broke, don’t fix it. Just crack on as things are
Not fixed on any myself as can see different pros and cons. so don’t want to impose any changes that may not be what people want. Cheers.
Comments
If anything then I'd suggest maybe a small re-alignment of the current categories?
Not looking at this to be an exercise in people highlighting the things on this platform they don’t like. 100 responses will bring 100 different things and we are not set up to address them at the moment.
I don't want to have to go digging for the groups, I would want them a part of the main site and 2 improves it, but 3 already achieves it.
The quote function does not work.
Your own comments do not appear on the comments section of your own page, so if someone comments (without quoting, because you can't) on something you wrote some pages back, it takes ages to track it down.
Although likes & lols are counted, they also do not appear on your own page.
Before anything else is hived off into this backwater, these issues need fixing.
I come on here to find out about Charlton but love all the random topics that crop up - if i'm not interested I just won't click it
Like to be able to see the new threads on "recent discussions" though. Can choose to open or not open.
Takeover thread should be a sticky until one month after confirmed on OS.
Sorry, I am not techie at all so that may just not be possible).
to be clear, if you did this i would select all discussions and have the site as is so not an issue for me but would help some hide topics they don't like from their view
You were right to get politics sent off on it's own though. People could be quite snotty and unpleasant to each other over politics/Brexit. No need for it.
My only comment, which is probably down to my laziness if I'm honest, is that whereas I used to read and comment on the politics threads because I don't 'see' them anymore it doesn't occur to me to engage with them.
That said I can understand why the decision was taken to remove politics from the main forum given the controvery caused.
It works fine as it is.
One of the strengths of this site is that there are so many different threads there to choose, if some are categorises separately there is a chance I won't bother looking and that would be a shame