Mods,
We've been making some changes behind the scenes. I'm going to send you an email with much of this info.
1) If you're reading this thread you are in the new moderator only forum. Posts here should show up in your regular index but you can also select "moderator only forum" to view them.
2) We want you to test the new forum software. We've been testing it the last few days, looking for bugs and would love your feed back.
To access it you go here
https://www.letsrun.com/forum/moderation-discussion
and check the check box at the bottom of the page. Then when you surf the forums you'll see the new version. if you ever want to go back to the old forum go back to the link above and uncheck the box.
3) The goals of the improvements were a) to improve the user experience and b) improve moderation (which is related to a))
User ExperienceIn terms of the user experience, we want the forums to look better and be more usable. In terms of looks, it is a cleaner look, block quotes are improved, plus you can post with HTML, and key features are now highlighted and easier to access.
We have a new improved nav bar to let people get where they want quicker and everyone is in charge of their own experience.
Everyone can filter the type of posts they see. Want to see only running posts? you can do that. Want to exclude Covid posts? you can do that.
You can even block posters and prevent their posts from showing in threads.
There also now will be upvoting and downvoting of posts. We're not sure what to do with this info but are going to start collecting it.
We also have made the "Report a post" button more prominent and made our phone number more prominent so people know they can reach us.
And one big addition is we will now show a placeholder where posts were deleted. So it will say "this post was deleted". We hope this a better user experience but it also is an attempt to be more transparent with people in terms of moderating (see below).
Improved ModeratingIn terms of moderating, the goals are to moderate more quickly, be better at it, and to be more transparent about our moderating.
In terms of speed, moderators will now be alerted when they are surfing with bigger prompts that there are posts to remove. We will have it optional so you can sign up for text alerts if posts aren't moderated withing 30 minutes of being posted (I'm going to do this myself but for others you can sign up if you want).
There is a moderating overview thread that we need to update the copy on but it will show key stats on moderation for the last week.
https://www.letsrun.com/forum/moderation
Moderating is a difficult job but we want to show people what we're doing on this end.
Just looking at those stats we should get more overseas moderators.
Also related to transparency, we are now asking people to report what rule they think a post violated when they report it. There is a list of rules they can pick. Also when you delete a post there is a rule you can pick. This is going to be optional but we at least want to collect this info on our end.
We also have a few tools involving IP addresses and cookies to combat the worst offenders. Currently we don't let volunteer moderators access those.
How can you help?
Surf around the new forum and moderate as you would and please give us your feedback or any bugs you have or any improvements. We weren't going to do this staging server but decided it was worth it to test things out in a live environment. Feel free to email me as well
wejo@letsrun.com
Right now when people report a post they don't pick a reason for its removal as they are on the regular forum, so that isn't totally functional but besides that nearly everything is working as it will once it launches.
Thanks for your help and making LetsRun, LetsRun!