Hi all,

We’ve been really excited to see the increase in posts on the EA Forum recently! While it’s wonderful that engagement is increasing, we’re working to make the EA Forum an even smoother and more fulfilling experience for users. Over the last few months, several dedicated EAs have put in hours of their free time improving the forum. Below is a list of the changes they’ve made.

New features

• Moderators now have the ability to delete posts (note: moderators will only delete posts if they are completely irrelevant or contrary to the community's standards of decency).
• Chrome autofill fills in your login boxes.
• The karma threshold for posting has been reduced from 10 to 5: woo more posts!
• You can now send messages to a fellow EA directly from that user's page. Click on a username to get to the user's page, then click on "Send Message." The next time that user logs in, the 'Messages' link at the top right will indicate an unread message. If you'd like to get someone's attention with an email instead, you can click the link to their EA Profile by their name if they've added this (more below) and then click 'contact' at the top of the resulting page (see image below).

Improving integrations

• Easy "share" buttons for Twitter and Facebook have been added at the bottom of each post.
• You can now add an icon that links to your EA Profile by your username when you comment or post, so readers can see who you are and find out more about you. The icons linking to Profiles on the Forum will look like this: . To add your Profile, click 'Preferences' at the top right of the EA Forum once you're logged in and fill in "EA Profiles Link" at the bottom of the page, as depicted below. Search this alphabetical list if you can't find the address of your Profile, or sign up at the Effective Altruism Hub if you don't already have one.
• The meetups page (which can be accessed by clicking on the "Meetups" heading in the sidebar) now links to the list and map of all EA groups on the Effective Altruism Hub.

Fixing bugs

• There used to be zooming problems when using the forum in Firefox or on some phones. For example, sometimes if a user tried to zoom in our out the sidebar would disappear, and other times users would not be able to zoom out after zooming in. This is fixed.
• It used to the be the case that sometimes if you wanted to comment on the forum while you were on your phone, the comment box would grow so large once you typed in it that it would cover the comment button. No longer.
• Encoding issues with special characters in HTML are fixed (e.g., sometimes apostrophes turned into &%$%!#$%, and they shouldn't do that any more).

We owe a large thank you to  Alex Richard (arichard4), Patrick Brinich-Langlois (patbl), Joshua David (JoshuaDavid), Tom Ash (tog22), Peter Hurford (peterhurford), and Ryan Carey (ryancarey) for working to make these changes happen.

If you would like to hear more about future plans for the EA Forum, or become involved with improving an EA website (especially the EA Forum or the EA Hub), contact: peter@peterhurford.com.