People are people are people are people. Even if you do not want users to give feedback, they will. It’s been pretty clear – though not clear enough bad Memrise – that you’re not looking for feedback for a long while now, still almost the entire current Course Ideas forum is filled with them.
If you do not provide users with a way to give feedback, the other forums will most likely be filled with them. If you do not provide users with a way to give feedback they will feel frustrated there is no-one to listen to their brilliant musings.
You can try all you want to try to steer the conversation, however ineptly, but you will never be able to stop it.
Do you want a messy forum or a clean one? I’m certainly not going to close or delete all the threads that will pop up about feature requests and you don’t have the time. I would be happy to move them to a user feedback section. In the introduction to the forum you can say that unfortunately, due to staff and time constraints, you cannot consider user suggestions at this time, and probably also not in the future. That is an honest and adult way to deal with the problem, trying to stop the conversation before it begins isn’t. Not giving users an avenue to voice their frustrations and suggestions is the opposite of '“joyful”.
The psychologists on your team should confirm what I am saying.
An added benefit of having this from our standpoint is that it will be harder for you to live in a bubble that your product as it is now is fine as it is, when it so clearly isn’t, allowing us the vain hope that you would try to get on with improving the product ever so slightly quicker, within your constraints. Course creation was always bad but now it’s actually broken as it doesn’t give you the definitions for the entries from the database, for example.
Not having a user feedback section: frustrated repetitive shouting all over the forum, having a user feedback section: slightly less frustrated and more understanding and reasoned rumblings in that section, maybe even with a FAQ so users won’t have to submit the same ideas again and again.
Effective communication, it’s the stuff of Magic! Avoidance leads to frustration, leads to resentment, leads to fear, leads to the dark side. (and user disengagement somewhere in there)
It changes the narrative from incompetent, uncaring, uncommunicative Memrise, why won’t you listen to us, to it’s a small team that doesn’t have the time to engage with ideas that would make it stray from its chosen course, let’s all be patient, at least for a little while, here are the updates on their progress they have given last month.
I don’t see an Announcement section either yet. You should have that. It soothes to know that actually you are doing stuff. If you don’t want to have discussion there, you can close the topics.
In the past you’ve tried to do weekly update threads. If that didn’t work out as planned you could do monthly ones.
If you want to have a good forum you have to do some give and take. Regularly posting updates would be your give, responding to bug threads as well. No give and as you’ve seen in the past, the forum mood can quickly become negative. Do some giving and we can quickly start to like you. Ignore us and we really can’t. Who can like someone that constantly ignores them…
The User Feedback can be a sub-category in the Community Hub category. The Announcement section perhaps too.
I would say you could delete the Meet & Greet sub-category. That function is usually done through a sticky thread, here in say the General Discussion sub-category. The START HERE post also doesn’t require its own sub-category. Again, you can achieve the same result with a sticky, say in the General Discussion or/and the How-to sub-categories.
As it is there is also a barrier for the many learners you have who barely or don’t speak English. One possible solution could be to have one (sub-)category for them. A category at the top – with say “welcome” or “hello” in many languages for a title --, with no sub-categories, is probably nice for maximum visibility. In that category you would have a short stickied welcome post in many languages.
Another possible solution would be to change the name of the Community Hub category to that multi-language “hello” title, and perhaps also change the name of the General Discussion sub-category, or make a new sub-category. If you go with my previous solution, you run the chance of that category staying very empty, which does not encourage new users to post there, and does not encourage regular posters to check it, like currently posting in the Course Ideas forum will get you less replies. This current solution of course will have its own drawbacks. Perhaps users will feel reluctant to post a message that is not in English in an overwhelming English section?
We definitely see this bubble thinking in how Memrise doesn’t seem to see how flawed some of their new features are, or the mobile apps - they think if lots of people use it that inherently means it’s great.
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Arete_Hime
(Ultra-Sadist Delinquent)
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