[owiej]

Hi,

I just thought that splitting the busy parts of the forum into subsections would make it a lot easier to browse. For instance, I don't have that much self concsiousness in a lot of situations now and am almost normal in that respect, but I still have very little confidence with making and keeping friends. It would be nice to have a sub section dedicated to that in the 'Coping with SA' section.

Also, in the busy part of the forum, new threads only exist on the first page for a few hours. Subsections would make it easier to browse and also each thread would exist on the first page of its associated subsection for much longer, giving people more time to see it and reply.

If people like this idea then perhaps we could use this thread to b rainstorm some ideas for subsections. I am think that the most important sections to divide into subsections are the busy ones, so:

- Coping with Social Anxiety
- Frustration
- Secondary Disorders (this could easily be divided into subsections by creating one subsection for each of the most common secondary disorders)
- Medication (Again, easy to divide into subsection by listing types of medications, just like how the 'Treatment Reviews' section lists different types of treatments)

Subsection for 'Coping with Social Anxiety' section that I have thought of (these are just off the to of my head so may not be that good):

Relationships
- Dating
----Meeting people
----Maintaining relationships
- Friendships
---- Making friends
---- Maintaining friendships

Social situations and coping with anxiety
- Anxiety in groups
- Anxiety when with one other person
- Nights out
- Family gatherings
- Talking to strangers
- Public places

Recovery
- Avoidance
- Safety Behaviours
- Self Esteem
- Confidence in other areas of life
- Dealing with negative thoughts

The cause of your social anxiety

Miscillaneous
- Facebook/social networks


What do you think? Would you like these sections of the forum divided into subsections? And if so, do you have any sugestions for the subsections?

 

[Things Unsaid]

I think further forum division would actually be pretty useful, as would some form of officially archiving or tagging the best threads that pop up. "Gold star threads," or something. Even threads full of advice get buried so fast that it's unlikely anyone in need of such advice is going to stumble across them, and the current search results just give a list of threads with the searched term that may or may not have much useful content.

Some pretty good stuff does seem to get posted, but it quickly sinks into obscurity and the posters obviously aren't going to keep posting their content in every similar thread that crops up.

"Similar threads" on the bottom of the page just seems to encourage necroposting by offering users random threads with the same words or phrases last updated anywhere from yesterday to years ago.

 

[Banzai]

This is a good idea! During the busier hours, threads only stay up on the first page for maybe an hour or so. However, I'm not sure about the idea of splitting the Coping Section into situations as I think quite often people's problems occur in more than one situation and having too many or too specific categories can be confusing as there is a greater chance of overlap.

The description of the Coping with SA section describes it as:

Ask questions, give advice and share your knowledge of how to cope with SA.

So maybe something like:

-Questions on SA
-Advice on dealing with SA
-Share stories of coping with SA (symptoms, relate to others)

I wonder if this were to take place, how it'd be implemented in terms of old threads. Would someone have to manually sort them into groups? Or would there x, y z categories and then all the threads viewable together below them?

Another possible idea to implement this, Coping with SA could have its own forum in the same way there is "Recovery" and "Discussion" forums? - And maybe get rid of the less active forums on here e.g Teens, Mental Health and Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) Awareness or merge forums together.

 

[owiej]

Things Unsaid, I like the idea of tagging too.

Banzai, I understand what you are saying but I think this is unavoidable in most cases, and the solution is to simply just look in all the categories that are related to what you are looking for. I personally think that this is a minor problem compared to how much subsections would help.

For instance, take the way I split up part of the 'coping with SA' section as follows (note, 'Social situations and coping with anxiety' is a subsection and the hyphens represent sub-subsections if you will):

Social situations and coping with anxiety
- Anxiety in groups
- Anxiety when with one other person
- Nights out
- Family gatherings
- Talking to strangers
- Public places

Now I personally think this makes things a lot easier to navigate. I may want to see what people are saying about talking to groups of strangers for instance, so I will have to look at two sections instead of one, but it is still easier than not having any subsections and having to browse through all the messeges in the 'coping with SA' section.

Maybe tagging would help with this, so that people will select the major themes in the thread (a search will show up if just one word matches, but this is often no the major theme of a message). So in the example above, you would look for messages/threads tagged with 'strangers' and 'groups' and know that these aren't just words in one message, but a major theme of the thread.

 

[Banzai]

Things Unsaid, I like the idea of tagging too.

Banzai, I understand what you are saying but I think this is unavoidable in most cases, and the solution is to simply just look in all the categories that are related to what you are looking for. I personally think that this is a minor problem compared to how much subsections would help.

For instance, take the way I split up part of the 'coping with SA' section as follows (note, 'Social situations and coping with anxiety' is a subsection and the hyphens represent sub-subsections if you will):

Social situations and coping with anxiety
- Anxiety in groups
- Anxiety when with one other person
- Nights out
- Family gatherings
- Talking to strangers
- Public places

Now I personally think this makes things a lot easier to navigate. I may want to see what people are saying about talking to groups of strangers for instance, so I will have to look at two sections instead of one, but it is still easier than not having any subsections and having to browse through all the messeges in the 'coping with SA' section.

Maybe tagging would help with this, so that people will select the major themes in the thread (a search will show up if just one word matches, but this is often no the major theme of a message). So in the example above, you would look for messages/threads tagged with 'strangers' and 'groups' and know that these aren't just words in one message, but a major theme of the thread.

Hmm what do you think about common threads such as "I'm so quiet", "how do I make friends", self-esteem/confidence related threads etc. I'm thinking in terms of more "general" SA problems which affect across the board rather than a specific situation.

 

[owiej]

Yeah I agree there will always be these general questions that could be put into lots of categories. But there can be a 'general' for these. There are lots of other topics that can be put into just one or two subsections and so I think it would make things a lot easier if we had subsections for this reason.

Mods: Please can we at least put subsections in the medication section of the forum. ie. SSRIs, MAOIs, benzos, etc. As this won't suffer from any of the possible problems that Banzai has mentioned since a paarticular medication will only fit one subsection. Also if you agree to this, can we have a seperate category for cycloserine since it seems to act unlike anything else and looks very useful for exposure therapy?

 

[SAS Admin]

Thanks everyone for your ideas and feedback. SAS has grown A LOT over the past couple years and I agree that the forum structure needs to be addressed. I'll definitely take your feedback into account and post updates to this thread when I start to address this.

Thanks again!

 

[Brasilia]

I'm sorry I hate too much change. I would probably adapt but I know people will end up complaining and "hatin" on the Mods.

 

[owiej]

I'm sorry I hate too much change. I would probably adapt but I know people will end up complaining and "hatin" on the Mods.

I understand, and some people certaninly would feel this way, but what matters is what the majority of people want.

Besides in order for things to impove, they have to change and people have to adapt to those changes. It may mean having to learn new ways of doing things for a smal amount of time, but the pay off is an easier, faster more efficient way of doing things in the long term.

mods: BTW can I add I thin the therapy sectionshould als be split up into the different types of therapy