As Bob Dylan once said 'The Times They Are A-Changin' and if you are a regular user of the BBC message boards you will have noticed that in recent weeks they too have been altered. But as is often the way with change, it does not always attract immediate support and courtesy of a few bugs in the system, the new message boards have been prone to a few minor problems. In the interests of ensuring that all users, both old and new, are fully aware of the recent changes and why they came about, Robin Hamman, the person responsible for the new boards spoke to Roberto Perrone on the BBC Three Counties Radio Breakfast Show. People seem to have struggled to cross over from the old fashioned message board to the new ones, have you been aware of that cross over headache?
 | | Robin Hamman, message board guru |
Robin: We have been. There were a lot of different problems with the old message board which is why we basically had no choice. We had to change to a new message board system. The old system fell over all the time, the registration system was broken, messages went astray, and it was generally a bad user experience. What we've tried to do is improve that user experience by introducing a new message board. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of the people using it haven't quite figured out some of these whizzy, wonderful new features yet. Is it just a matter of time before people adapt to the new look message boards? Robin: I think there is a little bit of that yes. I also think that some of the new users haven't had the chance to re-register to use the new system. Registration is free and it only takes you a couple of minutes to do, but a lot of people are put off by the idea of having to give their email address. | "To be honest with you most of the Beds, Herts and Bucks messages the moderators don't touch." | | Robin Hamman praises our message board users |
We don't use that information for anything other than to contact them if they have a message removed, but to be honest with you, the moderators don't touch most of the Beds, Herts and Bucks (BHB) messages. I've had a problem getting to the right place. Do I go to the message boards and then select Beds, Herts and Bucks (BHB)? Robin: What should be happening is that when you go to the BHB Website you click on the message board link on the left hand side and it should take you straight into the BHB area of the new message board. It should say up at the top what people are saying in BHB and that is how you know if you are in the right place. Beneath that is what we call a 'tag cloud' and this is the thing that a lot of people haven't quite figured out yet. The 'tag cloud' is that list of different topics that you see half way down the page, it will say what are people talking about in BHB and beneath that it will say things like "cats", "3CR" and things like that. A lot of people haven't quite figured out what that is, but actually it is a list of different topics that people are discussing, so if you click on one of those you can get a list of all the different discussions about that topic. I've been going on to the message board and seeing topics from all over the country? Robin: We did have a little bit of a problem at the launch. When we launched this message board we had to do it as a Beta, which means it is brand new technology. It was fully tested inside of the BBC but we didn't know exactly how people would use it - what would break and things like that. When we launched it there was a bug in the system that allowed people to tag their discussions with multiple regions. This meant that if somebody posted a message in the BHB area, what happened was that people from other regions came in and participated in that discussion and it added additional regions to that same discussion making it appear all over the country. And lot of the criticism I've seen on the BHB message board has been that there is no longer any place for local people to have local discussions. We've had quite a few comments in about this. Mike from Bedford says "Sorry to be negative but I've found the message boards rubbish, I've persevered but judging by the low numbers of posting on the Beds, Herts and Bucks site it shows others are giving up"? Robin: The registration process is pretty easy. We've asked people to re-register for these message boards and they actually have to do a kind of half a registration process, but some people just simply haven't got around to it yet and there is probably a few people out there who haven't figured it out yet. But I don't really think that the number of posts have gone down. The number across all of England on all of the regional Websites has actually gone up since the new system came into being. Another question we received was; "Have we got the message boards that Robin thought we were going to get"? Robin: Yes and actually I think they are even better than what we thought we were going to get. They look better, I have to say the colour scheme is quite nice and it is easier on the eye? Robin: Well a few of the people who have sent us feedback it call it the NHS colour message board. I think it is meant to be calming, sometimes our message boards do get a little bit heated. Guy on a bike says: "If we are good can we have our old board back"? Robin: You can't unfortunately. Our old message board system Howard 2 went into retirement yesterday! He actually had a name? Robin: Yes he did. He followed his father Howard 1. Howard 2 was switched off yesterday and he won't be returning any time soon. Does the new message board have a name? Robin: We have kind of dubbed it 'Topic Tagging'. It is built on a system within the BBC we call DNA and that is because the functionality was built for the H2G2 website. So, for all the regular users who were maybe not keen on the look of Howard 2 but want to keep that localness, what they have got to do is go via the Beds, Herts and Bucks Website and choose message boards and select Beds Herts and Bucks? Robin: Yes - if they click on the message board part of the Three Counties Website, they should go straight into the BHB part of the message board. But just to check and make sure, they can look at the top of the page and if it says what people are talking about in BHB, then they are in the right place. There might still be a few messages left over from when we had this additional region problem, but if they can just ignore those for a couple of days they will go away. We have solved the bug and it is not happening anymore. Another thing they can do is look for names in the list of topics such as "Roberto Perrone" or "3CR", click on those and you will go straight to the discussion full of all the old people who were using the message boards before. The people who have used the message boards before are usually quite passionate about it and they use them repeatedly, but they can get very upset when they get moderated? Robin: Yes they do. A lot of people don't understand the reason we have moderators. But we've actually reduced the number of rules that people can break when we introduced this new message board. So for example, if somebody knows of a useful Website they can post up a link to it so long as it is not a Website that you wouldn't want your parents looking at! But we have lightened up on the moderation, we don't want to stop people having robust discussions and we don't want to stop people from getting into debates. But there are boundaries that we have to maintain? Robin: Certainly, people of all ages do use the message board so you are just as likely to get a teenager in there as you are an OAP, so we have to be careful. Finally Robin, what should people do if they are a first time user of the message board? Robin: For a first time user I would suggest that they just look through some of the discussions and see which ones they are interested in joining in. The next step is to click the "reply" link or at the top of the message board there is a button that says "Sign In". If they click on that it takes them through a process that takes about two minutes to complete and all they have to give us is a name that would like to be known as on the message board and their email address and that is it. We don't send them any junk mail, we don't charge them anything for it, and it is quick and easy to do. | 
