Dear WCA Community,
Over the past first quarter of 2025, the WCA Communication Team (WCT) was working on a project to refresh the WCA Forum since its first launch back in 2020, given its wide range of topics and ideas hosted, and the growing number of users. WCT started this project by first sharing a [**survey**](https://forum.worldcubeassociation.org/t/feedback-on-using-the-wca-forum/58914) to hear from the community on their experience when using the forum and learn on what are the things that have been either working properly or not. Since then, WCT collected all feedback and used it to redefine the WCA Forum’s scope, purpose, use and experience, and ran a thorough evaluation of each category, to ensure that the new refreshed forum will serve the community needs and unlock the maximum potential of handling feedback from the community.
**Current issues with the WCA Forum**
Below is the summary of the issues found and reported when using the WCA Forum:
1. **Off-topic content:** many topics have been featuring content that is not relating to the forum’s scope of discussion e.g. posting results, CubeTalk topics, etc. resulting in spam and making the forum less serious and inhospitable for productive discussions.
2. **Poor category layout structure:** the forum category design is not oriented towards the user’s areas of interest, but more towards how the WCA structures itself through teams and committees. This makes it confusing for users to know where to participate and search for new topics that are already discussed.
3. **Categories with similar scope:** the forum currently has 10 operating categories and some of them with similar scope e.g. WCA Competitions, WCA Quality Assurance, General WCA etc. making it confusing for users to know which category to post in when a topic may fit in all 3 categories.
4. **Difficulty in navigation of topics:** the forum currently hosts more than 2000 topics that are not organized properly, which makes it difficult for users to search through resulting in duplication of topics.
5. **Unresolved proposals:** the forum has opened many new ideas, proposals and suggestions where some proposals with good potential were not followed up properly and left behind.
**The New WCA Forum**
The new forum refresh will introduce the below:
1. **New category layout:**
* Categories will be oriented towards the user area of discussion to encourage better participation and engagement which will be done by redefining their scope.
* New categories and subcategories will be added to allow a wider range of feedback and more participation in new areas.
* Removal of some categories that are irrelevant to the forum’s scope and don’t add important value to discussions.
* Reducing the number of main categories from 10 to only 5, making it easier for the user to navigate through topics.
2. **Feedback handling mechanism:** WCT will encourage teams and committees who haven’t been involved in the forum to participate in discussions and give more insight based on their scope of work and interest to assist with directing community members to better paths and advise the community on new trajectories and targets to build on. This will facilitate discussions making it more efficient and productive.
3. **Support:** the forum will now allow community members to seek support from other experienced members in areas of organizing competitions and technical support on using WCA tools.
**WCT’s work plan on refreshing the WCA Forum**
The transition to the new forum will **start** from **7th of June** and **end** on **1st of July** of this year. To ensure a smooth transition between topics and categories, WCT will halt participation in the forum until the new forum is ready to host new topics.
To learn more about the scope of work of the transition, view the [**work plan here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mgpPZJMrlgdTX_s2x-1yyeNIGISFgLa1/view?usp=drive_link).
Thank you for your time and input on using the WCA Forum. WCT is taking this step to ensure a productive space for the WCA cubing community and will continue to hear from the community on their experience on using the forum and develop according to how it sees fit to the community needs.
Baha Alshwaiki
On behalf of the WCA Communication Team
forum.worldcubeassociation.org
