I hate Kai. It give you the option to “Skip Forever,” but it’s a lie. It pops up constantly no matter what you do. Hate, hate hate it.
I had the extra box and selected ‘skip forever’ - about 5 times in a row. Whenever I clicked on a new thread, the Kai box popped up and gave me the option to explore or skip forever. Forever to Kai seems to be about 20 seconds.
I hit “skip forever” also. It did nothing. The blue box is still there.
What was the point in the “skip forever” if it wasn’t going to work??
It’s been interrupting my typing, switching me to its page.
Confused as there is a “skip Kai forever” box and having clicked it, Kai continues to appear every time I log in. So not only is there no way to stop it, there appears to be an option to permanently eliminate it, worsening frustration.
I don’t even have a Skip Kai Forever option. Ugh
Guys, just to confirm, the “skip forever” option only refers to the Kai video pop up. It does not make Kai go away. Is this not what you are seeing? Meaning, if you click on “skip forever” does the video pop up disappear?
As @CCadmin_Jon mentioned, we have shared your feedback internally and we’ll inform you as soon as we have updates.
What video message?
Why isn’t this more intuitive? It all cycles back to not fully considering the needs of actual users. And if the work to create this was hired out, you’re that much further from the end user experience. Next time, why not beta with a few posters? Or ask for input in the early thinking stages.
Just saying.
I tested Kai by asking some questions, and was given answers that didn’t make sense. And this is supposed to be useful how…?
I’m probably jinxing but I haven’t seen the blue box yet today on my IPad. Good.
Sorry…it’s popping up again…
Now in addition to the blue box floating around on my iPhone, I have ads popping up while I’m trying to respond to posts that are covering the reply box. Today’s was from the American Red Cross.
It seems to me that the move to implement “Kai” is a tacit admission that the forums are not what they used to be, and that your future lies elsewhere.”Kai” is antithetical to a system of forums that uses personalized input from parents, students, and professionals to guide users. It is as if the owners of this website do not understand why the forums are (or were) such a draw.
Instead of using scarce resources to implement and promote “Kai”, perhaps you should use the resources to address the concerns and complaints (that are mostly ignored) from real live veteran posters that come up during each revision to your website. Retaining current posters, acquiring new posters, and trying to get longtime posters to return should be your focus. This is what will increase your web traffic (currently about half of what it used to be), not an obnoxious reinvention of “clippy”.
Well said, @dadof2d. The new format and all the added bells and whistles don’t seem to be working. I remember when I used to come home from work and read the “latest” posts. I could never see them all because there are only 10 pages of latest posts. So then I’d go into all my favorite forums to see what else I missed. Now there are maybe five pages of new posts. I wasn’t on for about 48 hours over the Labor Day weekend, and there still weren’t ten pages of new posts.
We certainly don’t want to replace the forums with Kai (or any other automated system). The guidance people give to other people is the distinct benefit of CC and we don’t want to sacrifice that. And we’ve certainly noticed the forums are in decline. It’s not lost on me that a significant problem with the forum experience right now is that it’s very difficult to navigate. The [Forum Index feature](Please test the Forum Index page - Parent Cafe - College Confidential Forums) is a small step in the right direction, but only a small step.
Bots are good at very specific and mundane tasks. For instance, I can ask when the FAFSA is due and Kai can give me that information along with a link to find out more. As people use the bot, we can learn more about what questions people have and change the site itself to make that information easier to find. This is the sort of thing that can make the forums themselves more interesting for all participants. If I’m not asking about FAFSA deadlines, I can ask deeper questions that come up instead. That said, most of the benefits will take time to bear fruit.
I’ve had a number of discussions internally about the feature and how we released it. We’ve learned a lot from reading your feedback and we are making changes internally to do better in the future. (We’re also planning a specific change that I think will address the problems raised here.) Something that might not be obvious is that CC has been building a new development team in 2020. The designers and developers working on the site now are not the same people responsible for the most recent redesign. We’d like to think we’ve learned from the past, but we’re still suffering from growing pains.
My heart is to serve you, the community of College Confidential, to reduce roadblocks to exchanging knowledge. Technology such as chat bots should always be in service of people and not the other way around. I’m sorry our actions communicated something else. We know that actions speak louder than words, so I’m going to ask for some patience as we work to make this right.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply @CCadmin_Jon , and I for one certainly feel your heart is in the right place. I will reiterate what I said on page one, though. Technology is emphatically not what is going to save CC, or make it better. The absolutely critical element is the interesting discussions held among interesting and intelligent people.
Specifically to that end, I would strongly urge you to put your money into paid moderation. This will make it possible to have threads that are on the big topics of the day. It is not a coincidence that the steep decline in CC traffic happened at the same time you decided it was not possible to allow discussion of COVID19, the single biggest crisis in our lifetimes. The ONE thing that was on literally everyone’s minds! Now, I understand and believe you when you said that the problem with the COVID thread was that moderating it was difficult. That’s why I am suggesting you pay people to do the job. That, or find another way to solve the problem. I know you think paid moderation is bad, but volunteer moderation is not working in that they cannot moderate fast moving threads. So fix that issue. A bot, or a forum index does nothing to advance interesting discussion.
I also don’t understand why it is necessary to close all the older threads. What is the harm if an old thread is revived? (Again – because we want to encourage discussion, not discourage it). I don’t feel strongly about this, but I do think tweaks like these are what will increase your traffic.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything @dadof2d said. You need to retain current posters, acquire new ones and get some of the old ones to return!!
My own foot is halfway out the door; I spend much less time on CC than in the past. I feel that you only have a relatively short amount of time to turn this around, because coming up is a tipping point – once you lose a certain number of interesting posters, everyone else will stop coming. No amount of gizmos or indexes or what have you is going to fix that central and overriding problem.
My foot is halfway out the door because the kids seem less inclined every year to do the work in identifying colleges and the work that takes.
“Find colleges for me” or “what major” *from hs seniors * are easily resolved via the same resource materials we’ve had for decades, plus a little googling or other inquiry. (And these questions come from kids who think they can aim.high.)
That’s not resolved via a bot. The other risk to using a bot is if some policy is changed (eg, a Fafsa deadline,) It’s up to CC admins to identify and update.
If Amazon and Microsoft can’t make bots work effectively, why follow that trend? I have never gotten a satisfactory response from.an M auto answer page and the Amazon back forums are full of complaints about non-info gibberish.
User advice can be flawed. But there are posters with high depth of knowledge about different topics. Build on that.
Yes, I tried a fafsa question and the answer was good. But on release, imo, you should be able to point to 10 effective categories. Or 5-10.
First of all, it was possible for me to make Kai go away forever via uBlock. But I suspect that that sort of outcome isn’t what CC wants, because that may tempt me to block some of their ads, you know?
Second, what is going on with whoever’s running the CC forums that there appears never to be any beta testing? I mean, even to the point that (right at the beginning of this thread) it took the moderators by surprise and kept them from doing their jobs! The repeated untested rollouts seriously boggle my mind. What’s the rationale for that, is what I want to know?
Were any of the new people around in the past?
Yes! I know that for some never really articulated reason you don’t like paid moderation, but what you’ve done here so far since your arrival at the beginning of the year isn’t working. You have ambitious plans to make volunteers do things like contribute to (and do most of the work for?) ambitious special sections for college applicants and volunteer to do parent webinars. Things that would make the paid CC staff look good to the bosses and generate more clicks for ad revenue. I haven’t seen any success with those initiatives – if there was any, they would certainly have been rolled out by now. (I have seen a few Ask A Parent threads take off, so good on you for that.)
CC has always been about the wonderful advice given in forums by the experienced parent posters and the bonds created by thoughtful and informative discussions on all sorts of things including the major topics of the day. The general covid thread was invaluable. But then it was no more because the mods couldn’t keep up with it.
Don’t keep pushing CC to become something it isn’t and can’t ever be. Bots and badges and grand ambitious schemes dreamed up by the paid CC staff aren’t the essence of what makes (or made?) CC great.