Wazers,

The majority of this post below is taken from a couple different posts in a thread I started with the Waze Champs about reorganizing the forums. This is for your visibility and commentary. Waze has accepted this organization and we look to implement it in the next week or so. However, I would like some more community feedback, especially those with experience with other large forums.

I'd like to know if you agree with one of my main points, "...we should be open to the users posting a question or issue in a forum which is directly connected to where they experienced the error..." That is, does this make sense? Or does it make things too loose?

Thanks
-Alan

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Forums are split into multiple subcategories, the uses of which are overlapping and confusing. Like the general forum has a "Bugs" sub-forum which we often redirect people to the Client or Map forum instead. From and end-user perspective, coming into the forums, which are spread far and wide, appears daunting.

My proposal is to make the forums more friendly to the end-users who are coming here to find answers and ask questions and post feature requests. To that end, I suggest dramatic pruning, mostly of subforums. To my way of thinking, we should be open to the users posting a question or issue in a forum which is directly connected to where they experienced the error.

The proposal below of the forum structure also shows how existing forums will be collapsed. Forums to be combined are to the right of the <- and in italics. Some forums have a 1:1 match, but many don't. Some I am also recommending just renaming. You can figure these out by seeing there is just a single forum collapsing into one new one and the name is substantially similar.

• Official Announcements <- Announcements and Updates
• New Here? Go here first
• Waze App <- Client, User Live Reports and Road Validation, General Options and Usability
  • Search <- Search
  • Navigation <- Navigation
  • App Beta Testing <- Beta
• Waze Editor <- Map, View and Search, Editing, General Options and Usability, Help When Waze...x3
  • WME Beta Testing <- WME - beta group, Beta editor experts
    • Papyrus - alpha forum [closed]
• Website, Community, General <- Community, Newcomers and General Discussion, Thoughts and Suggestions, Bugs
  • Ranks and Points <- Permissions, Ranks and Points
  • Waze Global Champs <- waze champs forum
  • Wiki Updates <- Wiki changes
  • Off-topic <- Off-topic
• Country (Language) Forums <- Country (Language) Forums
  • Hierarchy remains
  • United States (and other countries)
    • Unlock/Update Requests (new forum)
• Localization <- Localization experts

Forums recommended to Archive:

• Map/Editing/Unlock Requests
• Map/Editing/Update Requests
• Wazeperts

The reason I would like to see changes made is mostly for the end-user experience, but the reduction of compartmentalization of information is going to be reduced and help us all. I often find the "new posts" in the web and "recent" view in Tapatalk doesn't actually show me everything that is unread that I want to see. By reducing the places we click and look into, the faster and hopefully better, our forum experience will be. Same goes for the majority of users.

The new "read me first" forum needs to be populated with a handful of threads about the usage of each forum and the places in the wiki which need to be read/searched first. That the forum they post in should be the same as where they experienced the problem (App, Editor, Website) As well as pointing them to using the nanorep tool. A thread specifically about why the Country(Language) forums exist and when they should be used needs to be posted in this area.

There should be new rules established and posted setting some expectations of the end users. Information like Waze (the company) doesn't often respond to most posts would be good.