Hi everyone,

Moving forward with the next round of improvements from our forums co-design project, we're keen to respond to feedback that the layout of the forums is confusing.  To make a start on this, we're looking at updating the discussion categories in the forums to make it clearer where you can find things and post about certain topics.  

To set the scene: the SANE Forums currently are actually two forums - a Lived Experience and a Friends, Family & Carers forum.  Underneath each of these forums, you have identical sets of categories with really broad titles:

Lived Experience Forum

* Welcome and getting started
* Our stories
* Looking after ourselves
* Social spaces
* Something's not right
* Useful resources
* Special events
* Life after bushfires
* Forum news and updates

Friends, Family & Carers Forum

* Welcome and getting started
* Our stories
* Looking after ourselves
* Social spaces
* Something's not right
* Useful resources
* Special events
* Forum news and updates

So, we have 17 categories spread across two forums, with duplication as you can see.

When we examine the activity across these, we see that 97% of all posts are made in the Lived Experience forum.  Within the Lived Experience forum, activity is also unevenly distributed:

* 40% of posts are made in Something's not right

* 41% of posts are made in Social spaces

* 11% of posts are made in Looking after ourselves

* 5% of posts are made in Our stories

* 3% of posts are made in Welcome and getting started

What we are proposing is to reduce this to 10 categories in one single forum (lived experience and friends/family/carers all together). 

In the next post, I will set out the draft new categories we've come up with, based on a deep analysis of the themes emerging from the hundreds of thousands of forum posts made in the last 2-3 years.

What we need from you

Have a read of the categories below. How do they sound? Are there any big topics we've missed? How are the descriptions? We'll keep this thread open for feedback and discussion over the next month, until 30 June 2024.