Members hating Change on your Site/Forum

(BTW i love the Similar thread feature, @Brandon)

Since a lot of you here are older and more experienced admins than I am, I love to pick your brains about various things. What do you guys do when you want to redesign something on your site? Be it a brand spanking new skin or possibly rearranging things on your forum?

I am lucky that more or less my members seem to embrace chance very well. We've switched from Mybb to SMF and then I saw better support and features and switched to Xenforo to IPB to Xenforo to ipb again and for the most part, they just went through the changes with no adverse reaction.

However, for example, I frequent sites like avclub, who has just recently went through a redesign on their site and while I think it looks great, fresh and modern, members are claiming to rage quit and throwing fits(it's always funny seeing grown adults act like children and I'm 18 lol)

Allkpop.com is a Kpop forum I am a fan of and they did a redesign of their site..Which actually did sort of make the site worse. Only because the features they added are just crap and they don't seem to be in any rush to fix it. Thus, I frequent another forum in the same niche.

Then I look at Software...Microsoft did a major redesign with Windows 8/Windows Phone 8(Both i love) and yet people have had adverse reactions to it. Same with Apple's IOS 7.

So how do you guys handle Members who don't handle change well?
Do you go on and go ahead with the redesign and just ignore the whiners?
What happens if your change directly causes issues and causes you to lose members? Do you change back or what?

Just curious

 

I usually ask for feedback before doing the changes so no one be surprised or annoyed if sometimes a feature is removed or the link was moved to a different place.

Once the changes have taken place, once again I rely in the feedback received from members to keep things going on, unless the change involves a major improvement that whether they like or not, has to be made.

 

I think the biggest problem with the KPop forum you mentioned is that they made changes people were unhappy with and provided very little support to help users get along better with the new features.

Ignoring users definitely isn't the best approach and will only damage the community. Who's going to stick around if they feel like they're not being listened to? Personally, I'd go with the approach of making a friendly compromise. If a user says they don't like a feature, ask them why. Once they've voiced their concerns, figure out a way you can address them without totally rolling back on yourself.

 

yeah Allkpop(AKP) originally used Xenforo when i had joined them last year and for whatever reason they went to this new custom designed software.

Visually it is pretty attractive and I like its looks...but a lot of people preferred the way it looked with Xenforo(and i believe also they used IPB in the past).

Add in the fact that, the site is just broken and that definitely pissed a lot of people off. Notifications don't actually clear when you check them, Quoting/Multi-quoting doesn't work, as well as many many other things.

How i run my site and the types of site i tend join are forums that definitely take a more active role in their users preferences. Yes, it is OUR site as forum owners but I do realize that without them(my members), I would just have a site and no members. So I tend to make sure the majority is on board with everything. And the minority who may be against it, I definitely try to work with them because I tend to run my forum as a democracy and join forums like that.

My friend Dylan runs his site more stricter and almost dictator like so generally features he wants he adds to the site and things he doesn't want, he'll remove and he just expects his members to deal with it or not. Luckily for him, his niche allows his site to be the dominant one but i certainly wouldn't want to have that mindset where its my way or the high way.

What bugs me is people who within 5 seconds...I hate this. I always at least give a new site design a few hours or at best a day or two. Within a few hours, I can more or less see what i like and dislike.

Thankfully, i don't have a big board. I Can imagine while having a big board is a huge accomplishment, dealing with whining and complaining from 1000s if not millions o fusers really grates on your nerves

 

Well then the Kpop forum sounds like it's on a slippery track if they're not prepared to pick up the pieces. I had a quick look and the whole place just looks incredibly confusing. That said, it also looks like the forum is very much a work in progress. Am I right in thinking that, or am I way off the mark? For a forum with 4 million posts, I hope I'm wrong...

I think sometimes it can be best to ignore the majority, as awful as that sounds. I've had experience running two fairly large forums and ended up leaving the admin team on one, as I felt the community had been given too much of a voice. They were becoming far too opinionated on the way the site should be run, and not looking at the bigger picture at all. The voices that pipe up can be either a blessing or a curse, and in my case, as soon as we started listening and taking their smaller suggestions on board they came back every day DEMANDING that we add in the most ridiculous, trivial things without thinking of the impact it would have on SEO or site performance.

In essence, I feel that it is important to listen to the community but it's down to you as an administrator to decide what's best for your site and what might actually hurt it in the long run. I've learnt my lesson and am now running a forum where I make it clear to the members that I'm all ears when it comes to their suggestions but have very little transparency when it comes to the development of the forum.

I feel your frustration with people being too dismissive too early on. Let's be honest though - it happens with even the largest of platforms. Let's look at a recent example of initial hatred. We have iOS7, arguably the best imagining of iOS yet. Did people like it at first? Nope. They said the design was ridiculous and looked nasty. Now here we are a few weeks later; people have had time to settle in to it and discover all the neat little features and I think the fact that complaints haven't made tech blog headlines for any more than a week after release speaks for itself.

I'm switching from phpBB 3.0.11 to Xenforo 1.2 in a couple of weeks and I'm hoping that our current users will get along with the platform and engage more. I'm 100% certain that I'll see some complaints but I'll make a conscious effort to address them and make a few compromises here and there

 

I haven't actively used AKP(aside from a sporadic log-in every few months). It is so hard to even make a new topic in there. The site has lost a lot of members/activity due to the fact that it went from a very attractive functional site to a confusing work in progress. In fact, if I remember correctly when they did the switch to the current software, Moderators did not have the ability to ban/warn members and there was a LOT of controversy because people were getting away with stuff and Mods literally had no power to stop them.

Yeah I get what you mean. especially on large boards, where you have the Veteran members who have more or less built up a reputation and popularity and they often time have their own little clique that more or less backs up and echoes their thoughts and complaints.

You're going from PHPBB to Xenforo? That is certainly going to be a huge change for your members(But I think a positive change) just because Xenforo is so modern and up to date compared to PHPBB. I am not sure of your site's demographic but I know when we went from SMF to Xenforo the members really loved it.

 

Asking for feedback is the first thing I do before I make any major changes. I value my members opinions and if they say they don't like a certain design then I won't go with it. I would rather go without a new design then cramming one down their throats. Then in the process lose several members because they didn't like the action that was took.

 

Some of my members hated the change from vBulletin to Xenforo, but they've since gotten used to it. However, a lot of our members voted for the change and they were fully full it, they're loving the new software. I guess with change you'll always find members unhappy with the changes where others are quite pleased with the new results. You can't please everyone and you shouldn't try to.