The New Forum Sucks

Hey KenFlieger​, Noele Flowers here, I'm the Director of Community here at Articulate which means I'm responsible for changes & improvements to our forum experience, including the platform we use. 

I've been here for about a year and the move to this platform pre-dates me, but I can speak a little bit to the "why" behind it: we used to host ELH on a home-grown platform, meaning it was built and maintained by our own in-house engineers. This was great in that it gave us a ton of control over the way the forum worked and made it feel incredibly tailor-made to our community (because it was!), but not-so-great in that it meant that our in-house engineering team had to devote time to developing, updating, and maintaining the stability of the community "product" in addition to the actual product we are focussed on here, which is to say Articulate :) 

So, the decision to move was really about getting our community onto a third-party, community-specific platform (in this case, we use a tool called Khoros) that would allow us to rely on the stability and continued growth of our community technology while putting our own engineering team's focus where it really needs to be, which is on our products. 

I can really hear that the move was frustrating for some, especially if you really loved and were used to the old forum. It sounds like some of your main frustrations are around the ease of finding information. Like Judy mentioned below, some of that, while it is laid out differently than the previous forum, can be improved with bookmarking and using tags. However, "ease of finding stuff" is a common feedback point I hear from members, so I think there's still a long way to go in terms of making sure the forum is easy to navigate and speaks to the things that feel most important to our members. 

If you ever want to chat more about your thoughts on the community and how it can be improved, I'm always happy to make note of specific pain points if you want to share them here, or to hop on a call sometime. I like having virtual coffees with community members especially if you use our community regularly and have strong opinions about what we can do to improve it. 

So, tl;dr we're not planning to revert back to the old forum, but we are always open to feedback on how we can improve this one. 

Hope you have a lovely long weekend!