Over the last several years, the EA Forum has been run on a volunteer-led basis. Given how much the EA community has grown, the volunteers who have been running the Forum have decided to transition primary responsibility for the EA Forum to the Centre for Effective Altruism. In practice, this should mean that things run much as they have done, but means that volunteers no longer have to be responsible for coordinating the technical maintenance of the Forum.
In the near term, we plan to maintain the Forum largely as-is. One change we do plan to make is to change the primary domain from effective-altruism.com to forum.effectivealtruism.org for more consistency across the websites that make up the effective altruism ecosystem. However, we’ll ensure that the old domain continues to work and that all existing links are redirected, as don’t want anything about this transition to disrupt the functioning of the Forum.
Who’s doing what
Trike Apps set up the Forum and will continue to provide free hosting for the Forum — we thank them for providing this!
Thanks to Ryan Carey for founding, managing, and moderating the Forum! Thanks to Rethink Charity (formerly .impact), including Tom Ash, Peter Hurford, Patrick Brinich-Langlois and many others, for maintaining and improving the Forum over the years. Going forward, volunteers from Rethink Charity will continue helping with tech maintenance.
Thanks to outgoing moderators Rebecca Raible and Alison Woodman for moderating over the past years! Larissa Hesketh-Rowe and I are coming on as the new moderators. We’d like to have more than two moderators, and especially moderators who aren’t CEA staff. If you’d like to volunteer or nominate someone, please let us know at forum@effectivealtruism.org.
We look forward to helping the Forum continue its role as a key place for original content and discussion!
EDIT: It's been over a week, and it seems particularly important that CEA answer this.
I see some significant disadvantages to this, to the point that it should be reconsidered.
EffectiveAltruism.org is designed around making EA welcoming and appealing to newcomers. The EA Forum is quite the opposite... it is in depth, can involve controversial ideas and discussions, and can sometimes have a less welcoming tone in the content and comments.
They're really polar opposites in terms of EA, and by bringing the two together in the same domain and with the same front-end you're closely associating them. This violates Marketing 101, bringing two things together that are positioned so differently.
By sharing the same domain, they two will be closely associated in search, and by changing the front-end the association will be much stronger.
Is the intention for the forum to have more newcomers on it? I fear it will become like the Effective Altruism Facebook page in depth of content and usefulness.
Or alternatively if the forum content doesn't change, it will turn off newcomers and detract from the utility of the main EffectiveAltruism.org site.
I'd like to further understand the plan for bringing these quite different things together, and how you might mitigate the dilution of the forum.
Small side note: Forum.effectivealtruism.org has some SEO disadvantages (v. EffectiveAltruism.org/forum), and the way you implement this transition from a technical standpoint will also affect SEO significantly, so I urge you to consult with somebody about proper ways to do so.
Hey Josh, thanks for the comment and sorry for the wait on a response.
The TL;DR is that I think that the branding changes provide a small amount of upside in terms of consistency, and have low risk of downside, because I don't expect that they'll significantly change discoverability, forum composition, or that they'll counterfactually change people's impressions of the different parts of the EA online space.
Our primary motivation is to reduce the proliferation of very similar domain names that all correspond to different things (e.g. effective-altruism.com... (read more)