Suggestions for making sure new posts and members are not lost.

hello @Former-Member

I am not a computer buff so am loving the idea that someone else has some brilliant suggestions

I do still believe that the people monitoring should only be moderators as it is a huge responsibility and there are probably even legal implications which sounds bizarre I know.

no offence intended for those who are volunteering

it just has to be put into perspective this website is an organisation who employs people and also is responsible under it's guidelines etc for the safety etc of all who post on here

even volunteers come under the umbrella of employees and are bound by regulations

my thoughts

I agree with @Former-Member's suggestion about moderator responsibility, but I think this should only apply to high distress threads. I think the forum guidelines and general moderator oversight would be enough to allow general members to repsond appropriately to unanswered posts and new member posts.

Hi all,

I think this is certainly a tricky dilemma without an easy solution. I like the idea of unanswered posts being readily identifiable by being in bold or something.

I don't know about anyone else, but I find hanging out on the forums quite addictive and thus I deliberately limit myself to a few threads. I know this means there are a lot of people in Forum Land that I don't really know and it makes it tricky to connect with new people. Thus I can see the problem...but not quite the solution.

To me, the "something's not right" space already serves the purpose of providing somewhere for people to post when they are super struggling. Thus I'm not sure if an "I'm in distress" space would solve the issue.

What we really need to do is rob a bank or something and get some more money for SANE so that they can have more moderators on at any given time.

Everybody ready ..... ?

Hello @Fish

my response was a little confusing

I meant monitoring of posts to be done only by moderators

Any forum member to still be able to respond to any post

You and I are in agreement

hope that makes more sense

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for your ideas - @NikNik I'd be really interested what @Sane's response is to this discussion.

And I'm tagging @CherryBomb, cause gosh darn it, don't we all miss you.

I don't know whether to be grateful or concerned you guys would be willing to rob a bank

To answer your question @Former-Member, every piece of feedback we get, we look at in terms of:

1) Can we provide a solution for it now: One example of this is that the 'Report inappropriate content' button doesn't appear on mobile, so we created the @moderator account for people to tag us if they were concerned about a post. Another example is early on at the launch of the Forums, we didn't have the @mention functionality - but that was really easy to fix.

2) How much $$ will it cost? Some things bizarrely cost a lot of money to change. We use a 3rd party forum platform, that is really sophisticated, but can be costly (though cheaper than create one from scratch) so if we have a solution for something people have raised, but not the $$, we will add it to a list of priorities

3) Is it possible? As I said above, we have utilised a 3rd party forum platform. We have made significant adaptions though - so sometimes, for technical reasons I can't make sense of (that's what the web developer is there for!) we simply can't do some things. One really silly one is that we can only pin one ONE thread in the whole forum (at the moment it's the Guidelines in the Carers forums).

What I can give you a quick insight into though, is that we are looking at doing community consultations (both with current members and people who are not members) to improve the Forums. So as I said, all of this feedback is taken on board and there will be more opportunities for this in the not-too-distant future (this year sometime). I can share more about this once the project has launched - I can't wait!

In 2014 when we launched the Forums, we did so in collaboration with people impacted by mental illness. Co-design is important to us!

Thanks @NikNik, and we'd only rob a SMALL bank, not a big one or anything so no need to be worried.

I think I can speak for everyone on this forum when I say we really appreceiate this service and all the hard work you and the other mods put in.

I'm not sure where I'd be without it!