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

[jonsie]

I'm with you on those points npr.

Don't forget, the detail is in the preparation!:smileywink:

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Merging "mobile internet" with "home broadband and phone" is not something I look forward to. 😞
The technical issue of mobile have little relation to those of BB.

IMO we need technical help from O2 in this forum, at present we get none. After today's activities I get the impression O2 are trying to turn this into a social / PR forum not a technical help one.

I also have a similar strong view about making the "superuser" section part of the public forum. 😞


( Yes, still decorating )

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Hi npr, 

As far as I can see, the superuser section consists of two areas:

1. Giving feedback to different O2 teams

2. Providing feedback about the community

I'd like to give the entire community the opportunity to provide such feedback. However, I can imagine you'd like to keep some things private. As I'll be here (almost) every day, the best way forward would probably be to PM such issues. These changes will give everyone a direct route to the business and a bigger platform to share thoughts/ideas. 

I'm not what a social / PR forum looks like, but my goal is to help create a place where people can get answers to their questions and share feedback with the business. 

Regarding your other points: Do you feel mobile broadband should be added to the "other services" board? I'll send you a PM about the technical help in a sec as it might derail the thread a bit.

[Anonymous]

Be nice to have o2 actually posting outages and things that are going to happen, or are being looked at, in their own forums

Having to trawl the internet to find out why something isn't working (and finding it on other boards) doesn't look good on o2. Recent example was when half the country had ridiculously slow speed and couldn't access most of the internet. Nowt official (from what I can remember at the time) was posted on o2's boards. Another example was when o2 just changed direct debit info with Santander/Alliance & Leicester. Nothing could be found on here!

[Anonymous]

Hi BlueMeany68,

I'm planning to have a dedicated thread for service outages. Will be part of the restructure.

Cheers,
Leonard

[Anonymous]

I expect the jury is still out over the planned changes, but they look fine to me.  I would like to see an O2 person commenting directly in some of the blogs, so that the negative comments can be put to rest. Too many times there is never enough information about O2 policy/dates on software updates, except by rumour. For example, when is the ICS update for the Experia S going to be issued by O2? O2 seems to be good at sending me texts about their services, but I have never been notified of software updates.

[Anonymous]

Leonard,
If you merge these boards as you suggest, how (and I think I asked this earlier) will you split them again if it proves unpopular? How will you know which posts to re-place, if the topic heading is not clearly one or the other?

[Anonymous]

I have only just picked up this post having been on holiday with very limited access to the web.

If you administer or work on a forum there is nothing worse than having sections unused as it gives the wrong impression to forum visitors.

1. I adminster a forum that had little use on many of the sections. I merged some of the        sections and the page hits increased as visitors and users didnt feel overpowered

2. I moderate on another forum which again had too many sections for the activity and again the admin merged to the benefit of the site

These two forums are on different subjects with differing user profiles.

I go on another forum as a member which hasnt been culled section wise and covers the same subject as 2 above. It has been going for 4 years longer than 2 and has a very low page hit rate and new postings despite having a much larger membership.  The owner knows my background and asked why I didnt post much on there and I gave the answer that unknown to me others had given - too many topics to trawl through.

I can however understand the concern over the home and mobile internet merged sections.

I am an O2 landline,broadband and mobile users.  

O2 cannot offer the option I have as a main mobile internet option so I have no interest in O2 mobile internet.  I can and do use my mobile phone to access the web, but if using the netbook away from home I use a Vodafone payg (unexpiring cash) dongle.

This is one section merger I would look at closely

[Anonymous]

@ Leonard

Perhaps, if sections of the forum are to be merged, you would consider separate log in for the mobile phone related section and the broadband/landline related section.

Personally I'm not interested in the mobile phone part of the forum as I don't have an O2 mobile and I'm sure there are many others who have either O2 mobile or O2 broadband but not both.

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the feedback

@slyone:
As I've PM'ed you, the other thread has some posts from other members with specific dates.

@asteellrule:
We're talking about boards with <1 thread per week, so identifying them 'manually' shouldn't be an issue.

@reader:
Thanks for your thoughts. Based on the comments in this thread, I will reconsider merging mobile and home broadband.

@O2MACH2:
Are you talking about the mobile broadband and home broadband boards? If so, it might be better to add mobile broadband to other services.

The important thing is that people that are new to the forums need to know where to post their mobile broadband questions. That'll depend on the wording and the logic behind the structure. It's something we'll have to find out as we go, I'm afraid.

As there are less than 1 posts per day, we'll find out soon enough

Have a nice evening!
Leonard

[Anonymous]

Hi will there be a section for users to be informed of tariffs & contracts plus any changes as to new & existing customers