I recently signed up to two different XF forums for some help and advice on a particular issue.
I won't mention which ones as this is not intended to be finger pointing.
In both cases the end user experience was frustrating and put me off posting there long term.
The first one was related to ads.
Everywhere!
Ads in the sidebar, between posts, under the editor, all over the place.
Trying to compose a post and an ad would slide up and cover the editor window making it impossible to write the post.
Dismiss it and a few seconds later another one would.
The dismiss link was so small that in most cases I ended up triggering the ad and being sent elsewhere.
I stopped using that site almost immediately.
The other site had great members and I got lots of help but good grief, the auto merge add-on for subsequent posts by the same author is just awful.
A member would post a reply, which I would read, then they would post another one before anyone else posted and it would be merged into the previous post.
As I had already read it, I was missing pertinent information - who reads old posts?
There was no notification a new post had been made, alerts don't work (naturally, as it's an edited post), so a lot of stuff was being missed.
For my own part I would make a post which others would read and several hours later I would add something else to the thread, asking another question, and the post is auto merged into the previous one.
Again, everyone who was following the thread had no idea and missed the new information, which resulted in fewer responses and information not being provided.
I resorted to posting a new thread in the end, just so people would be aware.
I understand why posts get merged - we do it here (manually) but to do it automatically and silently without alerting those involved in the thread is a massive UX failure.
Food for thought for those of you trying to attract new members and complaining about social media killing forums.
I won't mention which ones as this is not intended to be finger pointing.
In both cases the end user experience was frustrating and put me off posting there long term.
The first one was related to ads.
Everywhere!
Ads in the sidebar, between posts, under the editor, all over the place.
Trying to compose a post and an ad would slide up and cover the editor window making it impossible to write the post.
Dismiss it and a few seconds later another one would.
The dismiss link was so small that in most cases I ended up triggering the ad and being sent elsewhere.
I stopped using that site almost immediately.
The other site had great members and I got lots of help but good grief, the auto merge add-on for subsequent posts by the same author is just awful.
A member would post a reply, which I would read, then they would post another one before anyone else posted and it would be merged into the previous post.
As I had already read it, I was missing pertinent information - who reads old posts?
There was no notification a new post had been made, alerts don't work (naturally, as it's an edited post), so a lot of stuff was being missed.
For my own part I would make a post which others would read and several hours later I would add something else to the thread, asking another question, and the post is auto merged into the previous one.
Again, everyone who was following the thread had no idea and missed the new information, which resulted in fewer responses and information not being provided.
I resorted to posting a new thread in the end, just so people would be aware.
I understand why posts get merged - we do it here (manually) but to do it automatically and silently without alerting those involved in the thread is a massive UX failure.
Food for thought for those of you trying to attract new members and complaining about social media killing forums.
