egullet experience

egullet has the _highest_ quality forum I have seen anywhere. It might feel archaic, and there are lots of things it can be improved upon. But it works. And it has become a gem of information.

I am sure you are trying to learn from them and improve in the UI. But keep in mind, UI is expensive to do, and hard to do right. And if not done right, it gets on the way.

Egullet has taken a simplistic approach. The advantage is that their forum is the highest quality cooking forum on the internet. As I am about to post about my experience buying a Anova water circulator I discovered that I can't access my previous posting on that (same issue as "Where is my posting") and when I search there is no way to narrow my search. And there is no way to list my postings only (at least that I have been able to find).

My impression is that the improvements are not towards better content, but better look. So please, please, don't forget purpose and content. Think in terms of use-cases, and address them. I am sure, you, developers, are users of the forum, so do the OSS way and scratch your own itch too.

--dmg

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Brendan_Lee_56950

I don't think they're trying to do anything like egullet. The forum has, and I'm assuming always will be, a place to talk about the content that the provide for free or in paid courses and then build upon that knowledge to do our own experimenting. I have never viewed this as a reddit or egullet clone where the intention is to just provide a forum for anything and everything.

I also think that egullet rose up so quickly because it was very heavily moderated and that increased the quality of the content. I think with this new format we have here we should be moving towards more moderation as in the past there has been none whatsoever.

In reality, the content in the forum is 100% the same as it was, it's just being presented in a different way. It will take some time for people to get accustomed to the new format but it's not like the content the team has been providing has changed at all, if anything it has gotten better and more in depth.

cammarata.nick

Thanks for your post and feedback, dmg. I've responded to your specific points below, and additionally I've sent you an email privately to hear any more specific feedback you have. Everyone is always welcome to contact me at nickc@chefsteps.com with any feedback at all or just to say hi.

Listing your own posts: this one is simple, we're launching it next week. Furthermore, we'll be shipping an update to profiles, so you can easily see how many posts/comments someone has made through their avatar.

In terms of dogfooding, we love this community and Andrew and I (developers of the community center and comments) were visiting it frequently before we started working with ChefSteps on the community tools. We now visit several times a day just to explore and see what everyone is up to, and of course to use the software.

At this point, things are in public beta stage - we know that things could be improved. For instance, the fact that clicking back doesn't keep your point in the infinite scroll really bothers me quite a bit.

We're only a few weeks in and are committed to rapidly improving things, and there's nothing we appreciate more than specific feedback of things to improve and your patience as we make things easier to use

DiggingDogFarm_65362

I very much like the atmosphere here..no strong-arm control freaks in admin....egullet is okay but there are several serious problems with over-moderation...the problem snowballed and it's now a bit better than it was at it's worst, but it'll never again be what it once was several years ago.

DiggingDogFarm_65362

You're doing a great job. : )

Chris_Young_80640

So this raises and interesting topic that we've been discussing a lot internally. ChefSteps is actually a pretty small company, and we're thinking hard about how to balance a need to be very engaged with our community (which we know hasn't been as good as it could be lately), and to continue to invest in producing helpful content and tools like a forum that we can actually improve over time.

It's not practical for us to heavily moderate the community, and we'd really like your thoughts on how we can help this community remain healthy and self-policing.

Brendan_Lee_56950

I think enlisting community members to police the forums would be a good first step, similar to how things are run on reddit but with an eye towards keeping the content high rather than dealing with trolls.

I also think that if we had a weekly or bi-monthly Q&A thread where you and the team could answer random questions AMA style it would cut back on a lot of the noise since we would have a time and place to direct those not so modern questions. I liken this to Dave Arnold getting tweets all week and then addressing them on his show each week.

Lastly, I think to engage a wider community there needs to be some more interesting engagement from outside sources. So maybe it doesn't have to be you guys all the time but maybe to think about having "sponsored posts" where someone like Dave Arnold, or Polyscience, or Modernist, Panty, etc, would be able to engage the community with novel information and maybe a challenge with some sort of prize to be won/contest. It would really engage the more skilled community and I think draw good attention to you and the other businesses (aka maybe more money)

dmg_3440

I am sorry, I think i created a bit of a confusion. When I meant "the egullet experience" I meant the experience of using a simple user interface compared to a rich javascript-based one.

I totally agree that ChefSteps creates a more open atmosphere, that depends more on the interaction of its users rather than editors. there is a place for both. So, no, I am not advocating editorial contral the way e-gullet does it. I am advocating an interface that concentrates on content and discussion. Content: how to browse and search for content. Discussion: how to respond to questions and allow these responses to enhance the experience (for example, I love that ChefSteps allow direct replies to a message, rather than a "post-at-end" method that is so frequently found in other forums.

sorry again, for this confusion.

--dmg

dr.kiuchi

I think Reddit has a great model to learn from regarding this. Just my 2 cents.