23andMe Responds to Customer Complaints About Rebuilt Forum by Returning Old Functionality!

Recent Changes Made a Mess of the Forums

I don’t know about you, but when the new forum was created over at 23andMe I felt like I was hit over the head with a sandbag! I couldn’t seem to ‘see’ straight. I couldn’t figure out how to find anything and I had a huge headache after hours of trying. I kept trying for a week with no better success. I couldn’t locate new posts and I couldn’t figure out where to post anything. I finally decided that I hate the groups. I don’t want to have to click on each of those different buckets to find out what’s been said. It really slowed down my browsing and decreased my reading pleasure.

Of course the customer’s, led by Andrea Badger, found a more effective work around by starting a thread listing all the new threads with a link and a title. (Great job everyone who contributed to that thread and especially Andrea for setting it up and Alexand v3 2011 for thinking to add the thread titles.)

The customer’s outrage about this change got some attention even trotting out the programmer to try to explain it to the community. However, we never heard any more from 23andMe about it and this issue got washed away in the outrage over the now-reversed decision concerning losing RF matches if the match has let the subscription lapse after their one-year committment is completed. The latter outrage really brought things to a head between 23andMe and it’s customer base and I’m very happy with the sea change that seems to be occurring within the company. But lost in the bruhaha was the fact that 23andMe quietly added the newest threads functionality back to the forum on Sunday. I’m not saying they did a perfect job handling this issue — I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t post in the discussion thread that they were working on a programming solution weeks ago. But they did hear the customers through reading their forums and I consider that a step in the right direction.

Find The Recent Threads Again!

To find the newest threads you simply click on the “23andMe Community” on the left hand side of the screen and then click on the ‘All Recent Threads‘ tab at the top of the screen.

23andMe Recent Thread Selection Page

After you click the All Recent Threads tab you’ll see the following screen with all the threads listed in reverse chronological order with the newest threads at the top. But you aren’t just limited to the 20 threads on this page. There’s a button at the bottom of this screen to get 20 more threads, then 20 more, then… well you get the drift.

23andMe Recent Threads page is bookmarkable.

BookMark It!

Best of all, you can bookmark this page and go directly to the latest threads page. Here’s a shortcut just to prove it works!

23andMe Most Recent Threads

Screen Captures Credit: 23andMe