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As you guys know, I've been putting a LOT of focus and energy lately on building up the community. With the recent changes to the homepage, member profiles, etc., do you like the direction we're headed in? Any suggestions??

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Nice direction — making the site about people rather than just threads is the right move. Avatars, a central activity feed and an always-on chat turn one-off visitors into returning members because they can quickly see who’s active, who helps, and what’s trending. Keep the feed scannable (not noisy) and make discovery the priority: surface experts, recent answers, and popular tags before raw chronological noise.

’s visual concerns are useful and fixable without a redesign. Pick one visual system for social items (size, corner radius, spacing) and apply it everywhere so mixed inputs don’t read as a mash. For example, force consistent icon sizing and baseline alignment with a small CSS rule:

.social-icons img, .social-icons svg {
  width: 20px;
  height: 20px;
  border-radius: 4px;
  vertical-align: middle;
  margin-right: 8px;
}
.social-handle { font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; color: #333; }

Product and community suggestions to consider next:

  • Group similar activities in the stream (collapse repeated likes/comments) and add simple filters (questions, replies, people you follow).
  • Add lightweight onboarding: a one-step “introduce yourself” nudge, suggested tags, and a short tour for first 3 visits.
  • Promote discoverability: highlight top responders, recent accepted answers, and an “active today” list.
  • Measure impact: DAU/MAU, time-to-first-reply, new-member retention, and replies-per-thread.

Tech & policy cautions: stream endpoints need pagination and a fallback (polling) for mobile; make activity visibility opt-in/opt-out and provide moderation/flagging for stream noise. Roll features in phases and A/B test changes so the community benefits without breaking what already works — this addresses ’s community goal while answering ’s UI concerns.

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Member Avatar for Member #120589

Profiles a lot cleaner. But social icons are far too big. Skype icon? Disjointed if you have icon for some and not other socials.

Also the mix of rounded stuff, square corners and totally rounded badges looks like a mish-mash. Design needs to be more consistent. 2p.

Edited by Member #120589
Member Avatar for Dani

I was actually meaning for this thread to be about the concepts of putting a heavier focus on community, but I won't turn down UI feedback! :) Social media info are icons if there is a profile for them to link to, and just text if it's Skype/AIM/ICQ/etc where it's just a username you need to look up in a third-party application.

Member Avatar for Member #120589

I was actually meaning for this thread to be about the concepts of putting a heavier focus on community

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be critical. I'm not sure how the profile has changed wrt community other than a general tidying up. WRT socials, I found these useful:

http://myskype.info/username

http://www.icq.com/people/userid
Member Avatar for Dani

MySkype.info is not affiliated with Skype, and the information it gave me about my account was wrong.

Member profiles now have a new Activity Streams tab. Additionally, my question just pertains to focusing on community in general and the direction that I'm headed in ... with respect to greater emphasis on avatars everywhere, the new activity stream being the main attraction on the homepage, our live chat feature that's been out awhile, our reskinning from a few months back, etc.

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