Hey folks! I’m bringing back our forum feature post from the previous forum and including a few replies. Please, if there’s any kind of features you want to see in these new forums let us know here
Hey Zwifters!
Those of us on the community team are constantly promoting a family atmosphere for Zwifters, where we can talk Zwift, cycling, or even day to day adventures in a familiar space. So naturally, we want to apply this to the forums!
We want to shake things up in the forums a bit to make them a more robust destination of discussion. So, if you have any suggestions on how to make these forums a better experience for you, or ideas on what features you would love for us to add please let us know! Comment under this post and we’ll keep track of everything said.
Thank you all so much for being such an awesome community and Ride On!
Now if the Zwift team can have an efficient, user friendly robust structure to add members value, then the result would be pretty awesome and useful for members.
As an information researcher - I think the weakest parts of any typical forum is the growing duplication of information, one lacking robust searching and quality labeling mechanism for sifting through information. Not to mention efficient management, as some highly active forum threads are 100s of pages long - which is amplified by the above issues i mention.
Other considerations may include designing a way forum information is corroborated to be accurate. A community which has managed a reasonable level of accuracy and global support is Wikipedia, so why not build a Zwift wiki which enhances the forum with less debate and more accuracy. I appreciate there is the business end in the knowledge base; perhaps quality forum debates could be distilled into wiki content from academic or practice based knowledge.Then topic links on a forum sticky could direct people to the information efficiently. Have the Zwift tech writing who can populate the wiki, with credible references, sources and articles for forum reference.
An easy way to find discussions I have participated in, or tagged in some way would be good to track the discussion.
I do like seeing the Zwift team participation so that’s “keep doing”.
And tonight I found the section on known bugs which was easy to peruse as it was reasonably short, but when you look in other sections, like feature requests, its difficult to find similar threads so people (me for example) end up opening another request for something that has been requested multiple times. So a way of joining up the requests and perhaps categorising them to make them easier to review?
This might be dumb, but I would like to see a sticky somewhere in the forums with a constantly updated list of current major events going on with accompanying links. The events page on the website does not make it easy to find the individual pages for things like fondos and tours and their various dates. I always have to do a google search to find the direct link to a particular page.
You could have a giveaway each month where Zwift would give out prizes for first second and third place in each category. These prizes could include gift cards, PayPal money, road bike accessories. Furthermore, Zwift could have a certain subscription amount for each month that they would need to reach and if that subscription amount was met, then Zwift could do a big giveaway with prizes such as road bikes, bike parts(these bike parts would have to be worth more than $150 since it is a big giveaway), gift cards, PayPal money and more. With big giveaway’s since they cost a lot more, there could be only 1 winner for each category.
Longest Rider (Whoever rides the most Km or Miles during that 1 month)
Most Achieved (During that month staff could look at riders information that they produce on each ride they do, and if the improvement was to beat everyone else in that month then they win the giveaway.)
Most Helpful ( Helping others in-game, suggestion ideas, reporting bugs, keeping the forums alive with good discussion and things like that)
I like the idea of user levels to help promote discussion. I’ve seen that work other places. Maybe I’m just nosy, haha, but I also like when forums have a “who’s online” list (that you can opt out of in user settings, so that it just shows you as a guest or “private” instead of listing your username).
Is there a plugin for the “Best Answer” and/or “Helpful” designation Paul Allen suggested? This would be most useful in the Bugs and Support forums to help people filter through a discussion for good information - especially to highlight answers from Zwift HQ.
A direct link on the homepage was mentioned elsewhere, but that would be very helpful in steering people here. It doesn’t have to be very prominent, just one of several things in a menu.
There’s a “Solved” plugin that I believe is present in some categories. Let me double check because it should at least be activated in Bugs and Support.
Edit: How it works in Bugs and Support is you have to be the topic creator to mark someone’s reply as Solved. It shows up as a checkmark with box around it:
