Voice Your Choice vs Choice Online Community

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Hi Choice

I am a confused about the difference between this forum and Voice Your Choice. Is this to be a replacement for Voice Your Choice (VYC)?

In an email I received it said:-
"As a contributor to the Voice Your Choice (VYC) forums, you will find these familiar categories created for you on choice.community:
Tell us about your good experiences
Tell us about your bad experiences
Ideas (Got an idea?)

We encourage you to use these as you have used the VYC forums and enjoy the more user-friendly platform we have created for you. When you post in choice.community you will be automatically recognised with a VYC badge. This way VYC members will be able to recognise each other and CHOICE staff (who will have a CHOICE Staff badge) will still be able to easily approach you."

So I’m guessing this community is designed to take over from VYC. Yet, the ideas section has disappeared from VYC and not appeared here. So where is the content? I would like what I have posted in VYC to appear here.

Further, why hasn’t Choice moved everything over here into one site and used pointers to redirect traffic from VYC to this new address? I would suggest that this should have happened before inviting people to use this new site. It would have been much tidier and more efficient for users.

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Hi @meltam thank you for your question about how VYC and choice.community fit together.

Voice Your Choice overall will continue. The feedback we receive from VYC members who participate in surveys, speak to us directly and contribute with their views and opinions to our investigations, content and importantly direction of CHOICE is very important to us; it’s essential.

It’s just that the VYC forums are now here on choice.community.

The VYC forums will remain accessible for VYC members as an archive.

I agree there are great conversations on the VYC forums. Because VYC forums were a closed and private place for VYC members only and choice.community is public we can’t move people’s posts across in bulk.

So to re-ignite those discussions here we replicated the overall forum categories from VYC (Tell us about good/bad experience and Got an idea?).

I like your point about better redirecting people from VYC to choice.community. There are a few pointers up on the VYC website, but we’ll review those to see how they can be improved. Maybe even put something in our next VYC survey.

Thank you again for raising this.

Regards
Christina

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Hi all,

as a first time user of this site I am slightly baffled as to there not being any ‘new user’ or ‘forum style’ linkages where you can see what types of issues are being discussed. I have three (lets call them items or issues if you like) things that I would like to put up but can find no ‘new items’ section where I can create or see if they have already been made. Anyhow, I will list them and see what happens.

  1. When I went to purchase a new ‘chip fryer’ the other day at ‘K-Mart’ (the only place I could find one) I noticed that the controls for the item were located at the back where you had to reach over the hot oil to work the controls. In any restaurant or takeaway that uses commercial equipment of this type the controls are at the front where the operator/attendant is not required to do this for safety reasons (oil fire for instance). How come imported domestic products are not checked or even allowed to be sold with these serious safety shortcomings? Needless to say, I did not purchase the item and am still looking for a safe one.

  2. In addition to the chip fryer issue, I also needed a new ‘toaster’ and when checking the imported ones noted that the electrical cord was extremely short and if you did not have an electrical outlet really close you would need to have some sort of extention cord which is obviously not ideal nor safe. I also found (having already purchased the item) that the toaster does not toast the full height of some commercial types of bread (i.e. tip top/buttercup breads) leaving the top part uncooked. What gives?

  3. Having read a couple of items in here before starting I note that some people are happy with places such as ‘Aldi’ and their cheapness when compared to Coles or Woolies… I would say that it pays to compare items seriously, I checked some items and (as an example) found that if you purchased the Aldi jar of coffee then you should have compared not only the price but the amount of coffee held in the jar with those purchased at the other two, I found that if you purchased two jars of coffee at Aldi then you would have gotten less from purchasing one big jar at either Coles or Woolies which makes no real sense if you consider Aldi a big deal in the consumer stakes.

Thanks for your time,

Regards

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Hi @oldsalt2,

Thanks for getting involved in the new choice.community platform, and for the feedback. We’re still toying with the categories, so there’s lots of room to grow and develop options like you have suggested. I’m also passing on your experiences to our investigations team as well - thanks for sharing.

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Hi @oldsalt2 and thank you.

We’re still finding out how people would like to use this community – it’s only a few days old! If you want a general overview of what’s going on you can go to the home page and then hit LATEST (or follow this link). We could actually make that the home page now that there’s so much going on.

On figuring out where to put things: We’ve brought across the big categories from the forum that we ran for Voice Your Choice research participants behind closed doors. We couldn’t bring over the posts because we don’t really have the right – those posts were made in the expectation that only the other VYC members and CHOICE staff would see them, whereas posts on this community can be read by anyone.

But the category names we can, and they’re Good Experiences, Bad Experiences and Your Ideas. We’ve added two more so far: Q&A, and also a Digital Rights category when we invited some of our digital rights campaign supporters. Although as it turns out, our VYC invitees have plenty to contribute on that topic too :smiley:

But it’s true those categories don’t cover everything. What if you want to tell a story about an experience that started badly and ended well?

So our plan is to watch what people post in the broad categories and then make new categories about popular topics. If we had a Groceries or Supermarkets category, do you think your posts would fit there? Maybe an Appliances category too. Those seem to be emerging as early candidates. What else?

If we were to make a new category for grocery/supermarket shopping how are the titles below?

  • Groceries
  • Supermarkets
  • Shopping
  • Some or all of the above, but separately
  • Other

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I would suggest a hierachical system, so for example you would lead off with shopping. Under shopping would be some general categories such as groceries, electrical, electronics, etc. Under groceries might be something more specific like supermarkets, packaging… etc.

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