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!
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 is the Forum, previously effectivealtruism.com was the Doing Good Better site etc). From our perspective it seems useful to consolidate community assets under the same domain, both from the perspective of users seeing them as part of a broadly unified whole, and in the longer term, from a technical perspective (e.g. easier to share logins between different sites on the same domain). I agree that it's probably good to keep some branding differentiation between the Forum and the front page of EffectiveAltruism.org, however I think it's disingenuous for us to pretend that there's no overlap.
Perhaps a good analogy is YCombinator/Hacker News — the front page presents a more welcoming, informative front, whereas Hacker News has a pretty intense community and may not always be welcoming to newcomers. However, I think people are generally pretty good at understanding that the organization and the user-generated content are different things, while understanding them to be part of the same broad sphere.
I wholeheartedly agree that the Forum is a more advanced part of the community, and it's certainly not our intention to try to dilute the quality of conversation or flood it with newcomers who may lack the context to meaningfully contribute to some of the more in-depth discussions or may find the tone unwelcoming. However, this seems like an issue of discoverability. The Forum is already pretty discoverable (fourth result for 'effective altruism' on Google), so if someone totally new is doing a wide survey of what the EA online space is like, they'll find it (and it already has 'Effective Altruism' in the name...). However, we're not planning on adding additional links to it from the www domain, or changing how we market it in other channels — I don't expect this change to significantly change the composition of people posting on the forum, nor do I expect that it significantly changes how people will view the broad idea of 'effective altruism' (especially not relative to the status quo).
Given that there's already a strong association between EA and the EA Forum, I don't think the exact domain matters that much. If we didn't want there to be any association, we should probably take the words 'effective altruism' out of the title and have a completely different domain. This isn't something we're currently considering.
I'd prefer to use a subdomain rather than a nested route because it's a significantly simpler DNS/server setup. I think the SEO point is a bit counter to the other points. I agree that it will have some SEO implications, but if the issue is discoverability, then actually making the Forum less discoverable in a random search seems to work more to your purposes (as above, currently the Forum is the fourth result on Google). In terms of implementation, we're planning to rewrite the old domain to the new one (using 301 redirects and keeping the old domain active to prevent broken links). I'd also planned to advise Google of the domain change using Search Console. I'd be very happy to hear from you if there are additional steps that you think are important here.