The eBay forums, groups and answer center were taken offline yesterday evening and are now back in their new format. Gone are many favourite venues for eBay uses to chat with names like Q&A and the Nags Head disappearing for ever although the Round Table survived.
The boards are now aligned more against business needs, e.g. Buying, Selling, PowerSeller, Postage & Payments although eBay have found space for a new eBay Cafe for those who simply want to chat.
The first thing you’ll probably want to do is edit your profile under the preferences tab, I went straight to general preferences to change the default “Topics per Page” and “Posts per Page” from the default 4, to the maximum of 50 – I really don’t want to be clicking after reading every fourth response to a post!
Unless you’ve been born on the planet zarg you’ll probably also want to change the default post order from “Newest” to “Oldest” first. I know the latest posts could be more relevant, but I’m used to reading posts in the order that they were written. Other options in preferences are to upload an avatar, biog, Skype ID, and signature file.
So what do you think of the new eBay community hub? Have you been on the discussion boards yet? Are you a member of any groups or do you use the answer center? Will the changes encourage you to use the community pages more or less than in the past?
12 Responses
As usual, eBay have taken something simple that wasn’t broken and wasted time, manpower and money by fixing it and making it complicated.
Their efforts would be better directed at fixing their messaging system and ‘best match’ in search.
Hmmmm. Just had a run of about 60 emails from ‘Community Adminstrator’ individually informing me of each member that has updated their ‘ebay Cafe’.
Wasn’t aware that I was even watching this – so I had to go in and change my subscription settings to staunch the flow. All I’d done was to change the posts preferences from ‘4’ to ’50’ as Chris mentions above.
If only incoming sales emails were so prolific.
“Have you been on the discussion boards yet?”
Nope, can’t find any. I used to look forward to reading the PS board once a day, how am I going to amuse myself in future?
What a cluttered layout.
Has the Business Sellers board gone? It was always useful for accountancy advice.
The PS board is the quietest it has been for ten years, it’s an ‘orrible layout.
My group has not yet been visted by any of it’s 300+ members other than me.
I have only just requalified to head back to the PSB. After a morning there I am beginning to wish I hadn’t! THe new layout is shockingly bad.
The web is awash with forums and discussion groups, so really how come they have gone out there and chosen what would have to be one of the worst models possible?
Talk about a pointless diversion of work, so much more needs doing and yet this is the best they can come up with?
If I click on discussion boards all I get is 5 user id’s, one of which I recognise from PS Board. Is that what everyone sees?
It seems to be full of features that I neither need nor want.
What I do need and want is to be able to read about issues and responses.
That has just got much more difficult.
Could be good for Tamebay though.
Exactly to issue. Signitures, images, emicons and all the other fluff on a message board do make them much harder to read. The old system was reasonably clean. The new system is a very hard read and really puts users off from using it and reading it.
Is this what eBay wanted or intended?
Tamebay is very clean and easy to use so I agree with JD’s claim that this could be good for Tamebay!