Thank you all for your feedback. We hear your and other members' sentiments about the new community experience and we look forward to iterating on this with the community’s ideas in mind as we move forward.
We want to provide further clarity on the decision to migrate the Airtable Community to a new platform. We spent time listening to members and understanding the opportunities and pressing areas where we needed to improve to provide a community that enables customers to easily engage with their peers to be inspired, learn, and make valuable connections.
Overwhelmingly, a common sentiment among members was that there has been a lack of consistency when it comes to communication, product feedback, events, and recognition which has caused friction, confusion, and a feeling of not knowing how to get started among users. There was also a sentiment that people wanted more from the community than just a forum, and we feel it’s important to provide a unified experience to our customers. Our research team distilled that many Airtable users were not utilizing the community as a place to learn Airtable today because the previous experience felt overwhelming but wanted to find ways to utilize it more in the future and we see this as a huge opportunity as the community evolves. That being said, we all learn and engage differently, so I understand if that is not a sentiment shared by every user. I also want to acknowledge that many of the things mentioned are more than fair and less about the platform itself and more about UI updates and I promise that we are being creative about the best ways to solve these items. We are future-fitting for a world where we can have a vibrant community with numerous opportunities to engage and unfortunately, while we also love a lot of things about Discourse as well, it simply does not scale to being utilized for more than a forum technology at this time.
The process included the hard decision to migrate platforms and we understand how unsettling these changes can be especially when there are many initial bugs, however, we want to reassure you that the team is diligently working to resolve them as soon as possible. Transparently, the software version we went live on was a new version and our launch has uncovered bugs across the platform as a whole and not just the Airtable Community - we apologize for the friction this has caused, and we agree with a lot of things that have been shared here and we have tickets already submitted or in progress for many of them. We will make sure we are providing updates as we are able to roll out changes.
Our mission with this revamped experience is to provide a cohesive, engaging, and valuable community by expanding our capabilities to include but not limited to; education content, betas, enhanced support, groups, events, member content, improved search that allows people to not only search community, but the help center as well, and an ideas exchange with the flexibility we need to innovate over time that also enables the Airtable team to be more active participants in the community experience.
We are 100% focused on continuing to invest and iterate on the community to make it the best that it can be. With that, we are building this community together. Your contributions and impact as members are extremely appreciated and valued so we encourage your feedback. While the Feedback Form is our current process to capture input, we absolutely agree with your suggestion to provide visibility into the feedback submissions and we will be sharing a public-facing version soon where any PII is protected. We are asking for feedback to be submitted via the Airtable form so that we can streamline the process and all feedback will also be sent directly to the Khoros team. I’m also excited that @ChrisShernaman is here to support us through this transition - he is a Khoros expert and is committed to spearheading a lot of these updates.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we navigate these changes together - I hope everyone knows that we have nothing but the best intentions for the future of this community and are committed to getting this to a place that is effective for as many people as possible.
