Edit from 2022: Consider checking the Forum user manual if you're not sure if something you're looking for might already be possible. 

 

Hello, Forum!

This is Aaron and JP of the EA Forum team. 

We spend a lot of time working on the Forum, and we’d like to hear your ideas for making it better. These can be new features or other kinds of requests.

Even if you don’t have suggestions of your own, consider upvoting ideas you like from the comments. That will have nonzero influence on the features we prioritize (though we also take many other factors into account).

If you’d rather make a suggestion privately, get in touch with us through this page.

Edit April 2022: This thread is still very live as you can see by the continual influx of suggestions. We have now synced our asana project with our public Github issues list, so you can see our recorded tasks there.[1] I'd still recommend suggesting features here so that other users can see and discuss them. — JP

  1. ^

    Note: there's a delay between when we write tasks down and when they get triaged into a state that gets synced with Github.

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I think it would make sense to exclude emoji from the audio narrations, especially now that a lot of users are adding diamond emoji to their usernames. The audio software currently reads aloud the emoji even if it is in a username, e.g. "Eevee orange diamond emoji".

Something which has come up a few times, and recently a lot in the context of Debate Week (and the reaction to Leif's post) is things getting downvoted quickly and being removed from the Front Page, which drastically drops the likelihood of engagement.[1]

So a potential suggestion for the Frontpage might be:

  • Hide the vote score of all new posts if the absolute score of the post is below some threshold (I'll use 20 as an example)
    • If a post hits -20, it drops off the front page
    • After a post hits 20+, it's karma score is permanently revealed
    • Galaxy-brain version is that Community/Non-Community grouping should only take effect once a post hits these thresholds[2]
  • This will still probably leave us with too many new posts to fit on the front page, so some rules to sort which stay and which get knocked off:
    • Some consideration to total karma should probably count (how much to weight it is debatable)
    • Some consideration to how recent the post is should count too (e.g. I'd probably want to see a new post that got 20+ karma quickly than 100+ karma over weeks)
    • Some consideration should also go to engagement - some metric related to either number of votes or comment count would probably indicate which po
... (read more)
4
Will Howard🔹
This is a problem we have thought about, and personally I think it is quite bad, in that it causes a lot of randomness in which posts get past ~10 karma. We agree that essentially showing new posts to more people is the answer (even if they start to get downvoted). The fairly standard solution in recommendation algorithms is to view this as an explore/exploit problem, and to add some randomness to tune the tradeoff between then (see Bandits for Recommender Systems). This would mean each user would get a slightly different ordering of the list (stable per user) in order to make sure each post gets an appropriate number of views (based on the quality signal we have so far). Here's an internal doc with our plans on this. We may not get to it that soon, because of giving season and other stuff, but it is one of our priorities after that. I'm not that optimistic about this. For algorithm purposes the thing that matters is the number of opportunities a post gets to be voted on (~views) before dropping off the frontpage. Presumably the theory here is that seeing post has low karma makes you less likely to view it and/or biased towards also downvoting it. Based on my own experience I don't think this is the case. If I see a 0 to negative karma post on the frontpage I think I'm more likely to click it out of morbid curiosity, and then if it's at least ok I'll upvote it because I think the current score is overly harsh. I know a lot of people apply this logic about voting (correcting the current score rather than applying a fully independent judgement), and we generally endorse this. I think this is a good idea (thinking about comment counts specifically), although I agree it could be prone to going wrong, e.g. making doom threads even doomier. One solution I can think of is to give a boost for comments but only up to a fairly low cutoff (say, 6 comments). Thoughts on this? For a ~20 karma post I think having 5+ comments is a good signal that its a valuable-but-niche po
2
Will Howard🔹
Digression but I would recommend reading about Thompson sampling :) (wikipedia, inscrutable LessWrong post). It's a good model to have for thinking about explore-exploit tradeoffs in general.
4
Jason
I think number and weight of upvotes (not netted against downvotes) is an important criterion here, especially when it comes to the risk of controversial material getting buried before most users have a chance to see it. I think this may be practically much the same as what you're suggesting. * If something has a good number of upvotes and downvotes, my assumption is that we ideally want to present that content to the user and let them make their own decision on whether it is worth reading / engaging with. In other words, conditioned on there being a critical mass of upvotes, the presence of the downvotes doesn't update the probability of "this is worth showing to other users and letting them make their own decision" very much for me. * If something has had enough impressions on the front page and hasn't gotten much engagement, then the odds of future users wanting to engage with it seems fairly low.

As a group organizer, I want to know how many people are following our city group on the forum and find out when a new person starts following it. E.g., how many people are following our city group on the forum now compared to before a recent EAGx event?

As a group organizer, it might be nice to be able to DM people who follow our local group, though this may have privacy implications I have not thought through.

2
Sarah Cheng
I appreciate this suggestion, and the really helpful context! I'll add it to our backlog. The Groups features of the site haven't gotten any love in a while and I hope we can circle back to them soon.
1
Kevin Ulug
The "free mailing list for new events" aspect of following a city group (depending on your notification settings) could be pretty useful. I wonder if we could make posts in a city group and have that be emailed to group followers (depending on settings), basically as a mailing list? I don't currently have something like a mailing list. Our group has an increasing number of platforms - a mailing list would be one more ... signing up to the forum and following the group is a bit more work than signing up for than a mailing list but would save me one additional platform and potentially a monthly fee, etc.
1
Kevin Ulug
Thank you very much!

I think the EA Forum software does a poor job at communicating the license terms of forum posts. (For context, all new forum content published on or after 1 December 2022 has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.)

The current license statement is buried in the forum terms of use which can be reached from the "How to use the Forum" page in the navigation sidebar, so many readers may be unaware of the license terms if they have not registered on the forum and clicked through the license agreement. By contrast, many sites that use CC licenses, ... (read more)

2
Eevee🔹
Somewhat relatedly, the forum terms of use addendum currently does not mention the ForumMagnum software, which is GPL-v3. CEA itself might have obligations under the GPL to other contributors to the forum software (i.e. anyone who contributed to it and was not a CEA employee), like informing forum users of the terms and conditions of the GPL and not imposing further restrictions on them. I suggest looking into this to see if the EA Forum terms of service need to be modified in order to comply with the GPL. [edit: reworded to avoid being interpreted as legal advice]

Hi JP,

Nice that user interests are now visible on the profile page. I think it would be good if they were sorted alphabetically.

I would like to suggest a rule/norm that people or orgs should not post the same article they are ready posted multiple times over the course of a few months, especially if there was already discussion in the comments the first time, unless they have significantly new points to make.

Hi JP,

It would be nice to have the possibility of filtering the posts of a user by a given tag. As of now, it is not possible.

4
JP Addison🔸
You can do this on the search page. (I agree it would be better for that option to appear on the user page filtering — it's a natural thing to want to look for.)

Hi JP,

I think it would be nice to have the possibility of filtering content by user. As of now it is not possible.

My use case was trying to find something I said.

4
JP Addison🔸
I believe it should work if you search "foobar Vasco Grilo"
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Vasco Grilo🔸
Thanks! That restricts the search to posts and comments from me, but then there are no results if I add a key word (e.g. "foobar Vasco Grilo 4.64").

Hi JP,

I imported this Doc to the EA Forum editor, and noted the 2nd to 4th bullets of the section "Cost-effectiveness of the Climate Change Fund" were not imported.

2
Vasco Grilo🔸
Relatedly, I imported this Doc to the EA Forum editor, and noted the figures in the section "Cumulative distribution functions (CDFs)" were not imported.
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Will Howard🔹
Hi Vasco, both of these bugs should be fixed now :)
2
Vasco Grilo🔸
Thanks, Will! Relatedly, I noted the importation makes the text in tables go from aligned t