I posted the below message over on this thread --> http://community.prostatecanceruk.org/posts/t9658-Questions-about-how-to-use-the-new-community-space
and Yorkhull kindly suggested I copy it over here too as it answers questions about navigating the topic areas:
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Hi all --
Regarding the topic headings and George's suggestion that we use the old ones, we've talked this through and here's what we're doing:
- We've just gone through and given all of the new topic areas proper descriptions so visitors will know what to expect and post in each area.
- We totally understand that the topic areas aren't easy to navigate right now, but we think a significant part of that is down to a bug in what happens when you click the broader topic areas like 'welcome' 'treatment' etc -- they're meant to expand in place so you can see all of the topic areas at a glance on the same page, but what they actually do is go to an intermediate page which is pretty useless. Our developers are in the process of fixing that. We're also putting the topic areas right on the home page so you'll have that overview of the whole board instantly.
- We don't want to go back down to the smaller number of forums *yet*, for two reasons... First because a lot of the new areas are things that users have been asking for for ages and we want to give people the opportunity to use them and show whether or not they're needed. And second, because of the bugs in the navigation we want to fix those first and see if it solves the problem.
It's very easy to merge two topic areas into one, but it's very difficult to split one back into two because you have to move every conversation one by one. So we'd like to wait, fix the bugs, and then see how the new areas bed in and if after a while it seems like most people want the topic areas merged, we'll certainly do that.
I hope this approach will make sense to everyone!
Best,
Sadie