Exciting new forum format coming!

Caring for someone with MS
1

Excited to receive news by email that this forum is going to be updated with a new platform at the end of April. Great! Thank you MS Soc team and well done to all who have no doubt worked hard developing this.

I wonder if you can tell us any more Oliver Admin and we can have a discussion in preparation on this thread?

I hope we can find and gather specific information easier, like on ‘Advanced MS/caring’ for me. Can we set up notifications if new info on say ‘#Advanced MS’ is posted and can this be in a thread with history to save searching around?

I hope we can link up easier with other people across the MS community (MS Society & MS Trust) who are going through, or have been through, similar things to glean insight and learned experience better so we’re not always starting from scratch ourselves (even after 20+ years…!). A knowledge hub…

I hope we can form better links to have better conversations as the current format is a little clunky.

Can pictures be shared, which is useful for things like sharing home adaptations etc.

Can links to other sources of info like websites, twitter/facebook be posted to tie in other sources of info/reference?

I’m sure the new format won’t be able to do everything, but excited to see what it can do to improve how we all can link up and share insights and mutual peer support better and more effectively.

What do others think?!

1 Like
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Thank you for your post and sharing some of what you’d like to see on the new forum! We’re excited too - we began looking into this project back in May 2019 by initially gathering feedback from two surveys and asking for your thoughts on the forum and about using forums for online support more generally. Over 1,350 people with and affected by MS completed the survey and that feedback helped us shape the requirements for the new forum. So, we hope that this new forum provides the space which are members fed back to us that they’d like.

We also consulted with forum members in February 2021 to help us decide which categories we’d have on the forum.

Regarding some of your points - there will be an improved search function which can filter results by dates and categories and relevance. We will also have improved content tagging and notifications which can be turned on for posts which you subscribe to, to make the content you’re interested in, easier to find. You will also be able to tag a specific member in posts, so that they are notified when you mention them.

Links to websites and the possibility for social sharing of posts will also be allowed. As will a cleaner and easier to use forum in general.

We’re looking forward to welcoming you on the new forum very soon.

Oliver