I’m writing to give everyone a heads up that we are planning to make some big changes to the Forum in the coming weeks to try to improve the experience here. We want to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for and to foster discussions in areas that have been neglected
It’s mostly going to be a kind of spring cleaning. A tidy up and reorganization effort. That means we are going to restructure the categories and the layout of the landing page. No topics will be deleted, only moved. Initially that will be done by me but there are a lot of topics that need to be moved and we need to keep on top of new topics being moved to the most appropriate category, so we will likely try to get some MODerators on board to help out
Of course the best way to get topics in the right place is by teaching people where to create them when posting. So we will put some work into better documentation on how to use the forum and improve the category descriptions
If we can, we will try to add some new features but that may come later. Things like adding new badges that will have icons that you can add to your titles to show off the contributions you have made to the community. Adding tags, so we can easily label topics with things like “solved” for example. We would also like to add custom reactions. This would not only allow you to express your thoughts on a post better, but would also allow you to mark things as to vote something as a good idea and we can mark if we have mapped it in our backlog (to do list)
So basically, you can expect things to be a bit messy in the coming weeks, and then expect things to look pretty different!
I keep lurking around the forums since the beginning and cannot remember that any user has ever complained about the forums. Lack of communication, sure. Technical issues, every day. Interesting discussions, plenty.
The forums just seemed to work for everybody. But that may just be my perspective. Good on you for trying something new!
The custom emojis/reactions may help with communication, and it will allow me to personally stop saying “lol, haha, and lmao” I’m generally a very stoic and reserved person in my day to day and lean on the tweenspeak to indicate I’m in a good mood rather than being critical.
Taking the discord approach with custom reactions to posts may, or may not be a good way to go, but I guess we will see.
100% agreed. I’ll keep my opinions about time management to myself about this.
Agreed that the forums work for the current users and the experience shouldn’t change you guys, it’s only intended to make it a bit more inviting or less intimidating for new users. Just a bit of a tidy up, nothing too crazy
I didn’t get it at first but now I can see the concern about time management. What I will say is that I’m not the one doing software development so time spent on the forum won’t take away from device or plugin improvements. Also, any hardware topics will also immediately take priority over this. Besides that, these changes should help with development. The aim is basically to make forum onboarding easier (meaning more users) and organize things better (easier to track topics) and label posts with meaningful markers (to inform our priorities better and keep track of how many times something is requested)
The outcome should mean the same experience for existing users, plus a bigger pool of users who’s requests are better tracked meaning that we can more accurately allocate development time to the things that the majority of users want the most. It should also foster more discussion in areas like pedalboard creation from the community meaning that we actually spend less time on that and more on developing
In terms of the new features, it’s just a matter of installing discourse plugins, it’s not a huge project. Just little improvements here and there
Just want to say, regardless of the things I bring up, and the way I present them on the forum; you guys are some of the best (99th percentile) developers I’ve ever interacted with.
If I am ever critical, it’s with the desire for MOD to be the best.
I apologize if any of my posts seem like they are cutting from the edges, as you and your team know the best path forward for your vision.
And if you want to correct me I’m fine with it being public or private.
In terms of the forum stuff, I’m on mobile 100% of the time haha.
I dig the new header image of the MOD lineup, and the new category colors and icons are nice too; it makes it much simpler to know what the posts are about at a quick glance based on those icons.
I keep checking to see if there are new badges to work on acquiring haha
Glad you like it. This one has been on desktop for a while. I actually need to change the image because the Dwarf is missing some engravings
I’m glad you like it! I agree, it’s a bit less colour busy now
I dare say when the feature arrives you will already have some to wear! There might be a content creator one for example. We might also make a user selectable one to show which device you use. More to be decided.
This requires us to install a plugin though which we are currently not able to do but hopefully soon
this is a big project, but necessary for further improvements, and streamlining some categories and moderating discussions will help keeping them on topic so that new and old users can get the most knowledge out of it.(I wonder where this reply might be sorted under??(
Sometimes information about solving issues is hard to find, sometimes an idea leads to contrary opinions how it should be solved so I’d like to say yes to both ways…
We all are individuals with our own special history and culture, with different approaches when solving issues. Sometimes people have to re-think methods to do it on the Mod platform because of the flexibility in general.
I’m looking forward to the forum being a place where users help users where solutions could be demonstrated in a short topic summary while the issue itself might be more of philosophical nature.
Thanks for your encouraging words @mj_prod ! I hope you like the progress
Update
The categorisation effort is basically done now or at least is at a functional level that we are happy with. Although, we are always open to making more improvements
I have added a few features that I think have already improved the experience and the feedback has been mostly positive so far. There have already been a few requests that we added such as the Pure Data Category (@dreamer) and the extended functionality of polls (@FistfulOfStars)
Please let me know what you guys think!
We have also recruited some moderators to help out with further organisation and… well… moderation now that things are a bit better set up for it
We still have more features in the pipeline such as reactions, “Best Answer” / Solution checkboxes, tables of contents and wearable badge icons to name a few. For this, we will need someone to maintain the discourse instal. Something @gianfranco wants to propose to the community
Let us know what you think about the changes! or any other ideas you have
on board to help out
to vote something as a good idea and we can mark 
if we have mapped it in our backlog (to do list)
