Get involved: your thoughts on forum board structure

[Marjo]

Hi everyone!

We have seen feedback and comments related to the forum board structure from many of you, so it would be awesome to collect your views and ideas in more detail in this thread and get a discussion going.

We would like to make the forum boards structure easier and clearer so that it would be better for both old and new members to find the content and help they're looking for and easily engage with each other.

Please let us know your thoughts on how you think we could improve:

• Board structure: what categories/boards would you remove or add and why?
  
• How would you improve the clarity of board names and descriptions? For example, would 'Guides & Reviews' be clearer than 'Community Knowledge Base'?
  

Thanks a lot in advance!

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Your feedback so far Updated 11 September:

Board names and descriptions:

• Clarify the purpose of 'O2 Home' section | Update: the name of the board has been clarified as "O2 Home (Smart home products)"
• 'Guides and reviews' would be a little clearer than 'Knowledge Base'
• Current signposting is ok. Only add/change what is needed.

Board structure:

• Clearer structure: show 'mobile', 'apps', 'smart home' under products & services, and then clear subsections under that
• Apple devices shouldn't be its own area in the Knowledge base unless other device areas added
• Less main categories on home page (e.g. 4,5,6 max)
• Remove the standalone section of O2 Home
• Separate boards for PAYM/PAYG?
• Enforcing community rules and guidelines (new board?)
• Have a hardware or device section (like the get help with your device) and then split to manufacturer/type?
• Move O2 home from the top of the page
• Apple, Android and Other Devices are valid. How about adding Roaming etc.?

Other feedback:

• Mobile skin: mobile view on smaller devices and in general should be improved
• Mobile skin: With a 6.1" screen the view is not too bad, however cannot make long posts
• Mobile skin: have a separate mobile app instead
• Ideas section: not working, revive/archive?
• Re-design: clarification that this is not customer services but a peer-to-peer / self-help community
• Re-design: change the layout of the home page and community forums in general
• Re-design: display full path (instead of just name of section) in the new post dropdown list
• Re-design: hover-over description over the make a post dropdown that lets you know what the section is about
• Re-design: old forum preferred; it was more logical and clearer to use than current forum
• Re-design: have out-of-date articles auto lock
• General: The forum is currently good for an older person and for a deaf person.
• General: Bulleted info easier to read in community page description.
• General: Clarify that O2 community is self help and not Customer Service
• Lithium bugs: fix them & a list of current bugs visible to community (e.g. in a thread)
• Feedback to O2: making sure changes are made and forum members listened to
• Feedback to O2: change the Lithium platform to something else
• O2 website top header changes: not fit for purpose, i.e. it is more difficult for regular users to navigate it in order to help new users

[adamtemp64]

another lithium based one https://community.plus.net/ I use  I like this on the main page

Welcome to the Plusnet Community

We're a friendly bunch of Plusnet customers helping each other out, answering questions and talking about everything under the sun from broadband to what we're having for breakfast.

[Beenherebefore]

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@adamtemp64 wrote:

another lithium based one https://community.plus.net/ I use  I like this on the main page

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Is it ?????.......I can't see the "powered by Lithium" logo.....are you sure it's Lithium ?

[Beenherebefore]

My apologies Adam....you are correct......but there's no reference to Lithium on their web pages unlike here, Sky and other forums

[adamtemp64]

@Beenherebefore I guess they pay to debrand it mentiond in some posts about updates to the platform https://community.plus.net/t5/Community-Announcements/Community-updates-March-2017/td-p/1425130

and in some users sigs eg @browni over there Browni is the same user as here

I like the debranding and the layout of plusnet

[browni]

I'm being haunted by lithium forums, they're everywhere!

[Beenherebefore]

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@browni wrote:
I'm being haunted by lithium forums, they're everywhere!

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They must have a very good contract negotiation team......BT, Plusnet, Sky, O2, Skype, Virgin etc etc

[jonsie]

But o2 must be way down the Lithium priority list as forum faults still exist such as unread posts. On this thread I had to scroll back half a dozen posts to get to the first unread. Some of the suggestions here are excellent,especially splitting pay monthly and P&G which is something we asked for over 2 years ago.

• By all means, ask for suggestions but from long experience I and others have found that our suggestions are largely ignored and the community team just carry on regardless with their own strategy. This was particularly evident at initial  changeover to lithium when we 'guinea pigs' were first used, abused and 95% ignored. We had special logins to the new community keeping that and the regular forum going
• By all means make necessary changes but let's factor in present site problems and get Lithium to make O2 a priority  (but maybe O2 have a cheapo deal with them?). It seems so difficult at present to get the smallest issue dealt with.

[Beenherebefore]

I think the consensus is that changes are needed but to have too many changes logged will have a negative effect and only delay changes that are urgently needed.

So I would suggest :

1. We request that all current faults already logged are remedied by 30 June 2017.

2. The Community home page displays a statement such as @MercedesS has used, i.e. 

"The O2 Community is a place for you to ask other customers like you, we are not O2 CS I am afraid. 

Please make sure you don't post personal information. Like any other website, the community forums can be viewed by anyone or searched via Google and other search engines. For your safety and privacy, please do not post personal details such as phone numbers, address details, email address."

This statement should have a prominent position on the home page and also on the "Register" page.

This change should be made by 30 June 2017 at the very latest 

Once the above have been implemented, we should then construct a list of other recommendations.

If by 30 June 2017, points 1 and 2 are still outstanding then I suggest we need to think hard about our future involvement with the O2 Community because it would suggest to me that O2 are not taking our concerns seriously enough.

[Cleoriff]

The unread posts issue was first mentioned in February of this year. Identified as a 'bug'... STILL not fixed

https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Discussions-Feedback/More-Forum-Issues/m-p/1050186/highlight/true#M913...

Re: forum board structure. For me the biggest waste of space and most misused section is O2 HOME.

New customers post in this section in error. I am constantly reporting posts as NOT O2 HOME.

Is it necessary to have a standalone section on O2 Home anyway...??

[Marjo]

Hi guys, going through the feedback that you've posted so far, thanks so much!!