Hello,

It was strange to see all the Pinned Posts gone from the 1st to 4th Gen ES Forum, and now it's even more strange to see 5th and 6th Generation ES all being bundled into one mix. I would like to find out what led up to this decision, and why was it never mentioned anywhere that all 3 are about to get Merged Together?

Being most active around ES Forums, it was already tough as is to work out which car is the OP talking about, seeing that it could be one of 4 Separate Models, each of which had a very distinct Facelift along the way, making them all quite different from each other when it comes to some more specifics. That said, 2nd to 4th Generation ES at least have some things in common, 5th Generation and beyond, however, are very different cars in terms of Engines and Electronics used on them, and therefore in the approaches to the Troubleshooting of a given system.

From the standpoint of a user that has been around 1st to 4th Gen ES Forum for the better part of 6 years, I am struggling to see any benefits of this decision, only issues. All it does is creates even more confusion, especially if people will still keep forgetting to mention which car in particular are they having troubles with. At that point, why even bother trying to split forums into Generations?

Something like this could be of benefit around 1st Gen GS Forum that barely get any traffic, so if someone posts there, said post is very likely to go completely unnoticed for a good long while. In this case though, all the Forums that got merged had both their own individual Traffic and their Dedicated Users, making this merge even more confusing.

It would be nice if someone can provide at least some information on how it came to be, and what were the reasons for this change. It is possible that I am missing something, but so far, I don't see how it would be of benefit.

Thanks for the answer!

 

It's confusing. Some post don't mention the year of the car but that was ok before because it was posted in a generation specific forum. Now that they are combined it's much harder to tell what generation is being referred to. Note these are long lived cars so people still post about older models.

Please uncombine.

 

hi, as one involved in this decision, here's the background.

ClubLexus has over 200 forums, which is pretty crazy. no doubt there were 'reasons' for each and every one added but over time many many of those forums become barely used, not found by new users, or just obsolete. so consolidation of forums seemed in order, and we have developed a plan we will be implementing going forward.

as you may know, we recently made a decision to combine the popular 'car chat' and 'ev chat' forums. in early electric vehicle days the 'debates' in car chat (ice vs ev) got very heated, so ev chat was added, but we've now gotten to a point where ev's are not going away and almost all manufacturers are committed to them to some extent plus we have hybrid, plug-in hybrid, etc., so we decided to merge the 2 forums back. some disliked the move but more (esp. active users) were very positive, and it has resulted in some great pros/cons discussion and mostly good natured exchanges.

back to the ES... personal story, i've been around long enough to have ridden in an ORIGINAL ES300 a co-worker bought (new). i was simply blown away. the smoothness, the bright white needles on the gauges, the build quality, the very comfortable seats... just excellent. but that was a very long time ago now! we simply can't have separate forums for each 'generation' of each lexus vehicle (some no longer sold) because it makes the forum page structure very challenging to navigate.

search is also important... people can and will find what they want no matter where it's located.

anyway, we cannot reverse this change and this and coming changes have been discussed and decided by the community leaders team.

thanks for the feedback.

 

Combing forums is not going to increase traffic all it will do is create confusion and dilute discussion. You'll find out, engagement is going to go way down.

 

we went from 5 to 3 ES forums. we agree that going to ONE would have been a bad idea.

 

What was working perfectly got eliminated.

 

 

This seems like a dumb move to me. Far worse that merging the EV and Car Chat forums. Are there only 3 mods "community leaders" now? I guess that would explain the consolidation efforts.

 

I would argue that you have achieved the polar opposite actually. For me as an average user, despite your consolidation efforts, it still takes me the same Two clicks to access the forum for my dear old 3rd-gen ES, it really doesn't make any difference at all in terms of finding the right forum for my car. On the flip side, however, just like with a jar filled to the brim with all sorts of fasteners is not of any use even if the particular fastener you need is present in there somewhere, trying to find what you are looking for, and then spend even more time to work out which Generation it applies to (seeing that most users completely neglect to mention it in their threads) is not the smooth experience that you were envisioning.

And even then, why get rid of all the Pinned Threads for all the forums involved? They were there for a reason..

Search is an important tool, but you can go quite far with that logic, why not get rid of all the forums then and just have people rely on the search function to get what they need. This is the shield that you can hide behind only for so long, as already mentioned, most of the users that only stop by to solve their specific issue neglect to mention any details about their cars, having the boundaries between forums at least helps to get sorted into the right niche, eliminating most of the guesswork. Even if we were to do a Google Search it would be just as overwhelming due to this glut of all the irrelevant threads that you will have no way of telling apart, instead of heading to the right aisle at a local Walmart, you will have to dig through the entire store to get your sandwich spread.

Can you explain in your own words why is it good to combine 8 forums into 3 is a good idea, but combining 8 into 1 is bad? Going by your logic, one can always simply use a search function to get what's needed. My hope is that if you try to think of the answer to the question above, you will see at least part of the issue.

As mentioned earlier, I see the use of combining 1st and 2nd Gen GS forums, as, again, the former barely gets any traffic on it, so a lot of thread end up going unnoticed for weeks. In case of the ES forum, that had both clear boundaries and solid traffic, I am still struggling greatly to see the point behind this mindless merge.

I can't help but think that there were different reasons behind it that you are not going into, and even if there are, please at least consider the consequences before proceeding. If you are indeed in a dire need to combine Forums together, at least do it with some logic in mind.

Below is how I personally see the structuring of the ES Forums, with my reasoning being it. As you can see, I also ended up with only 3 separate forums, but at least it separates bolts from the nuts in my jar of fasteners.

• 1st to 4th Gen ES - There are barely any threads about the 1st Generation, it is important to combine it for the same reason as with the GS Forum, to avoid missing any new threads. 2nd to 4th Generation do share a lot in common, they have the same Engine, the same auxiliary components, and at times they do share a lot of issues. This combination worked flawlessly, which is why I am still confused as to why it got restructured.
• 5th to 6th Gen ES - In terms of their construction, 5th Generation is quite the departure from all the previous generations, it has an entirely different philosophy behind it .. for better or for worse. As for the 6th Generation, while I may catch some heat for this, but it's basically the same car as the 5th-gen, just a deep facelift, with majority of options, as well as general approach remaining the same.
• 7th to 8th Gen ES - Same as earlier, those cars do share a lot in common, not to mention that 8th Gen is not even fully released just yet, there is barely anything to discuss.

Is it to say that they are all gone now, or that people no longer have any issues with them? I joined this forum all those years back only because I've had an issue with an erratic behavior of my alarm system, and then decided to stick around only because there are interesting cases to troubleshoot around here, and most of the new users that register here only do so because they have a pressing issue to resolve, not because they are looking for a new way of arguing about upcoming Lexus designs.

Well, it is nice to know that our input on the subject is so valuable to you guys.. Was there a point of me spending all this time on this post..?

 

@Arsenii



Maybe a poll would help in these situations with future changes. It could prevent an echo chamber.

I'm actually having a very hard time finding threads specific to the 6th gen now.

I've been on here awhile... mainly lurked and used the forum for information. There is so much valuable information on the forums that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

 

Arsenii - i'm not going to respond point by point through your lengthy (and rather condescending) post.

you may not like going from 8 to 3 forums (i guess you're including the sub-sub forums like hybrid and vendor products in the 8) yet you propose going to a different set of 3 forums instead because it fits your use case.

having LOADS of sticky threads just fills half or more of the screen before any visitor can see actually new content.
however, we've now thought of a compromise idea - how about we have ONE stuck thread that has links to other useful threads (with a description of each of course)?
if you want to pm (or post here) links to threads you want in that sticky, i'll make that happen. and we can add/edit/delete as we go.

[quoteI can't help but think that there were different reasons behind it that you are not going into[/quote]

no, i already stated the issue... over 200 forums is too much.

 

Change made usability much worse, this is coming from people that post in that forum on the regular. Does that mean anything do you? Did you ever post there? Now you're telling us it was broken and this is much better. Maybe listen to users instead of ***** nillly making changes and insisting things are better when they are not.

Also it's not cool that you are attacking @Arsenii accusing him of being condescending. He took the time to post in great detail his thoughts maybe look at THAT instead of just throwing jabs. @Arsenii has helped many people with highly detailed posts including links, part numbers, procedures to follow. But sure chase him away that will make this community better.

 

i did read all of his post, did not 'attack' him. Arsenii's and everyone's contributions are of course greatly appreciated.

we are making changes (not "***** nilly") to simplify the forum structure.

 

You are making changes for the sake of making them. Nothing needed to be done, zero. People that heavily post in that section of CL are telling you this straight up, will you listen? We know the answer.

 

not going to keep going back and forth (you've made your blunt points) but we can't go back because there's no way to automatically put threads back where they were in the prior structure.