Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Forum feature updates: add buttons, see your stats, send DMs easier, and more (March '24), published by tobytrem on March 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

It's been a while since our last feature update in October. Since then, the Forum team has done a lot. This post includes:

New tools for authors

See all your stats on one page

Add buttons to posts

Improved tables for posts

Improved notifications, messaging and onboarding

More comprehensive and interactive notifications

Subscribe to a user's comments

Improved onboarding for new users:

Redesign of Forum messaging

Other updates and projects

Job recommendations

Making it easier to fork our codebase and set up new forums

Giving Season

A Giving portal

A custom voting tool for the Donation Election

An interactive banner

Forum Wrapped 2023

Miscellaneous

You can now hide community quick takes

Clearer previews of posts, topics, and sequences

A new opportunities tab on the Frontpage

New tools for authors

See all your stats on one page

We've built a page which collects the stats for your posts into one overview. These stats include: how many people have viewed/read your posts, how much karma they've accrued, and the number of comments. You can access analytics for a particular post by clicking 'View detailed stats' from your post stats page.

Add buttons to posts

If you have a "call to action" in a post or comment, you can now add it as a button. Your button could be a link to an application, a survey, a calendar, or any other link you'd like to stand out.

Improved tables for posts

We've improved tables to make them much more readable and less prone to awkward word cut-offs such as "Wei

ght"

Improved notifications, messaging and onboarding

More comprehensive and interactive notifications

Notifications now have their own page, accessed by clicking the bell icon:

On this page, you can directly reply to comments.

We have also:

Created notifications for Reactions

Moved message notifications from the notifications list to this symbol

in the top bar.

Made a notifications summary showing on hover so that you can check your notifications before clicking the bell to clear them (pictured below)

We aim to make notifications informative without making them addictive or incentivising behaviour you don't endorse. If notifications bother you, you can:

Change your settings to batch your notifications differently (or not be notified at all).

Give us feedback.

Subscribe to a user's comments

You can now subscribe to be notified every time a user comments. We've also clarified subscriptions' functionality, with a new "Get notified" menu.

Improved onboarding for new users:

We've changed the process a user goes through when signing up for a Forum account.

This has already increased the number of users giving information about their role, signing up for the Digest, and subscribing to topics.

The new process looks like this:

Redesign of Forum messaging

The DM page has undergone a total redesign, making it easier to start individual and group messages and navigate your message history.

You can now create a new message by clicking the new conversation symbol (

) and selecting a Forum user (you used to have to navigate to their account). You can also create a group message by adding multiple Forum users in the search box:

Other updates and projects

Job recommendations

You may have noticed that we've recently been exploring ways we could help Forum users hire and be hired. As part of this project, we're experimenting more with targeted job recommendations.

We're selecting high-impact jobs and showing each job to a small set of users that we have reason to believe may be interested in it. For example, if the job is limited to a specific country, we use your account location to help determine if it's relevant to you.

We'll continue to iterate on thi...