Introduction and planned changes

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

My name is Leonard and as part of the plans we’ve been discussing in the forum, I’m been brought on board to help further evolve the forums as an exciting and interesting place for anything around O2. I’ve recently moved from warm and sunny Gibraltar, where I was responsible for the world’s largest poker community, managed by 500 freelance and full time employees across 19 different languages.

While getting up to speed with everything within O2 in recent weeks, I’ve been looking from the sidelines and I must say, I’m very excited about getting to know everyone. It’s also been great fun working with Abs, Paul and the other guys from the social media team. Over the next few months, we’ve got some great stuff planned for you.

In the next few days, we’ll be making a couple of changes to further support discussions, learning and supporting one another. Nothing too dramatic, but I just wanted to give you a quick heads up about the changes we’re planning to make:

1. Naming of ranks

The current rank structure is focused quite heavily on the word newbie and once you’re past that, you’re not really able to gain any ranks anymore. Although the rank newbie is fine, we feel that quite quickly you are no longer a newbie so we’re planning to add some more interesting ranks.

We want to make participating in the community a lot more fun and we’ll therefore implement 50+ brand new ranks (the names of which will be revealed as people start to gain them) and completely rework how those are calculated. Basically, you’ll be rewarded for any form of participation in the community and you will even keep gaining ranks on the highest levels.

2. Board structure

To make sure the boards are as active as they can be, we have looked at where the activity takes place at the moment. Some of the current sections only have 1 post per month, so we feel it’s better to merge those inactive ones.

There are two main advantages to this:

1. It’ll be easier to decide where to post
2. For new users, it’ll be less ‘scary’ to post in an active board

After having analysed the different boards, this means we’ll move from 18 (or 22 if you’re a super user) to 9 boards.

The board structure will look as follows:

• Welcome & News
• Pay Monthly and Pay & Go
• Mobile or Home Broadband and Home Phone
• O2 Wallet
• Other Services
• Android Devices
• Apple Devices
• Other Devices
• Off topic & community suggestions 

We’ll keep all of the existing threads, but you might initially struggle to find a few, which is to be expected when something like this changes.

Other than that, we haven’t planned any major changes for the moment. However, as part of our service offering improvements, we’ll be hosting a Q&A session with our Sales & Service director who will be answering all your questions and taking your feedback and suggestions from this thread: http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Latest-O2-Info/Ask-the-Director-How-can-we-make-your-life-even-better-c... 

I’m really looking forward to working with you all and if you have any suggestions for the future, please let me know.

Hope to speak soon!

Leonard

[adamtemp64]

will the super user section stay?

[perksie]

Sounds a good idea, I'm surprised Pay Monthly and Pay and Go are to be merged though as these can get very busy, and are the areas where much confusion can arise.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

@adamtemp64: We're planning to make those sections part of the public forums. For example, we'd like to give everyone the opportunity to provide feedback and talk to the community team. I'll be a very active part of the community to make sure that happens

@perksie: Yes, I can imagine. I've basically looked at two things
1. The activity in those boards since the forum move
2. The increase/decrease in activity for each board

Once the forum starts growing, I'll definitely have another look at splitting them.

[Anonymous]

Hi Leonard and welcome.

Just so that I can get the correct perspective on this, would you mind confirming if you are an O2 employee or are you employed by a contractor working for O2 ?

There's no ulterior motive behind the request, it's just nice to know 

[Anonymous]

Hi O2MACH2,

Thanks for the welcome

I've actually signed an O2 employment contract when I started working here

Cheers,

Leonard

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much.

[Anonymous]

I don't think the mobile and home broadband forums should be combined, they are too different from one another and inevitably there will be confusion as to which one the OP has.

[Anonymous]

Hi Oliver,

Thanks for posting your feedback.

The mobile broadband board is currently very inactive. As a result, first time posters find it 'scary' to post their question. Because of that, we decided to merge the boards. If we'll see lots of confusion on those boards, we can always add the mobile broadband board to the "other services" board.  

Cheers,

Leonard

[perksie]

Hi Leonard, good to have you here to help.:smileyhappy: