Heads Up: Community Groups Refresh (May 2021)

[TeamBIC]

Hey BIC! We’re excited to share new enhancements coming to the Beauty Insider Community. To help minimize bugs in the long-term and ensure the BIC is in tip-top shape, we are refreshing our Community Groups! Don’t worry – your favorite existing groups will remain in-tact (stay tuned for snazzy new group descriptions and a rebrand of our “Moms Only” group to “Parents Only” 😉). This change mainly involves slight design tweaks and major under-the-hood improvements. Please note that during this transition, all Community email notifications will be turned off - once we have confirmed that the refresh is complete, we hope to have emails back up and running ASAP! 🙏

The move to the new Groups experience will occur in two phases. In the first phase, we will launch a refreshed Groups look-and-feel. In the second phase, we will start the process of moving existing posts to new groups. Read on for a breakdown of what we have planned!

Phase I (5/4/2021 - 5/5/2021)

As we kick off our move to the upgraded Groups experience, we will put current groups into “read-only” mode. While you will temporarily be unable to start new conversations, you will still be able to search, heart, and reply on all existing Community posts like you normally would. Putting groups into read-only mode will get them ready to go for the refreshed Groups experience!

The next step in the process is to launch the new Groups experience. This will take about 5 hours to complete, and during this time, you may see the new Groups experience appear. When the launch is complete, there are a few key things you’ll want to know:

• Click Groups to navigate to the new Groups landing page experience
• Click a group in Trending Groups to navigate to the new experience for that group
• Once you’re in the new group experience, you will be able to start a new thread by hitting the “Start a Conversation” button just like before
• NOTE: If you join a group between 5/2/2021 and 5/4/2021, you will need to re-join that group in the new experience

Phase II (5/5/2021 - 5/17/2021)

The next step in the journey is to move 10+ years of Community posts to the new, upgraded Groups. You can imagine how much content you’ve helped create over the years. 😊

Moving posts to the new Groups first involves migrating the most recent 40 - 50 posts to each new group. This process will take up to 12 hours, so as the day gets started on 5/5/2021, you will begin to see about 4-5 pages of posts in each new group. Then, we’ll continue to move all posts to the new Groups over the next 10-12 days. We know this will take a while, and we appreciate your patience! Remember, if a post has not yet been moved to the refreshed Groups experience, you can still find it via search.

We’re thrilled to make these changes that will help improve the BIC experience overall! We thank you for your patience as we push these new changes along. ❤️

[TeamBIC]

Thank you @lmaster and @SportyGirly125 for mentioning this! The same issue that seems to be affecting the Empties thread (as @RGbrown flagged) seems to be impacting the 100 Days of Lipstick Challenge thread. If you have any other examples of specific threads you've noticed are now gone, please don't hesitate to call them out! We are passing along all of this feedback to our vendor partners so they can help troubleshoot. 

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC @SportyGirly125 @lmaster 

There seem to be variations to this problem:

The Empties thread I reported earlier doesn't show either on the main feed or in its group, nor does it show via search.

The 100 Days of Lipstick thread *is* on the main feed, as is The Party Thread. Neither shows in their Group though, nor do they show up via search.

(ETA:) MAC Love and Releases is on the main feed, and shows up in the Brand Loyal Group. However, it does NOT show via search, even when I use the exact title.

If a thread is on the feed, but not showing up in its Group, that means it hasn't been moved yet, yes? That's my interpretation of the current mess at least lol. If I'm reading the OP correctly, that's an ongoing process through the 17th, so perhaps there's no glitch with those (other than search doesn't seem to work), they just haven't migrated yet? But this is still a separate issue from the Empties thread, as it isn't even on the main feed at all.

[TeamBIC]

Hey there @RGbrown! Thanks for telling us about these three different experiences where threads were not showing up in:

1. Home/group feeds and search
2. Group feeds and search
3. Search 

This helped our vendor partners identify an issue where the threads you named, along with about 60 other threads (out of over 429,000!! 😲), were "stuck" in the move to the new Groups experience. Those threads have now been manually moved, and we are seeing them appear in search:

• Empties
• 100 Days of Lipstick 
• The Party Thread
• MAC Love and Releases

Hope you're seeing the same on your end, and that the threads are also appearing on the home/group feeds! Please let us know if not. 

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC 

Yay, happy they were able to fix it! I did a search for a few of my faves yesterday and found them just fine, but if I come across others, I'll be sure to let y'all know ☺️

But now I'm puzzled over the 429k threads figure. The main feed shows 10 posts per page, and says there are 9595 pages...meaning just under 96k threads are on the main feed, nowhere near 429k. 🤔

(And btw, I'm fairly certain that 9595 figure was over 10k before the move started, but have no concrete evidence, as I never took a screenshot of it that I know of. 10,364 sticks in my head for some reason though...).

Screenshot of the main feed today:

 

[TeamBIC]

Thanks so much for this detailed clarification, @RGbrown! We're noting the nuances between the examples you provided - this will be very helpful information for our vendor partners.

[SportyGirly125]

@TeamBIC this happened to the MAC thread and the Party thread. 

[eshoe]

Hi @TeamBIC! A quick observation; I’ve noticed posts/replies I have made in addition to hearts that I’ve given have disappeared. Specifically from the Hermès thread, although there could be more. 

Just something to note if others are experiencing it too!

[TeamBIC]

Uh oh, thank you for bringing this to our attention, @eshoe - it's good that we are aware! We'll look into this disappearing posts/hearts issue. 

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC 

An issue, and a question!

The issue: the Ulta thread Ulta GWPs is alllllllll sorts of out of whack. A post I submitted just this past Tuesday is all the way back on page 410 of 446 (post count set to 50 per page), while posts from 2016 are at the top of page one (and also at the end of the thread). This happened sometime late this afternoon or into the night, as it was fine around 4pm Central. Can this be fixed?

The question: right now, all that's on the main feed/Conversations homepage seems to be threads that haven't migrated to the new system yet. Will there be a new main feed once the transition is over? I'd love to poke around and see if other big threads have experienced a similar issue, but hunting through groups, trying to remember what's where isn't all that appealing either. 

(ok, so I did look for at least one more example, and found it in the April Hauls and Spring Savings Stars 🌟 ...posts are all out of order here too. It may be less of an issue for that thread in particular since a new one is posted monthly, and that one is out of date now, but it's still an example of a larger issue with at least some of these threads being moved)

This feels like the move from BT to BIC all over again. It'll be fine, they said. Nothing will go wrong, they said. Hahahahahaha...

😋🙃 

ETA: another one: Fragrance Junkie Central 

[TeamBIC]

Quick update on your question @RGbrown: all threads in the new Groups experience should now appear on the homepage feed! 🙂 Please let us know if you notice any other oddities. Thanks again for your feedback! 

[RGbrown]

Thank you @TeamBIC!

I do have an(other) oddity to report. This thread:

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Insiders/Empties/td-p/589003

doesn't show up in search, doesn't show on the main feed, and doesn't show up on the Insiders group page; I can only find it by going through my post history or clicking on a heart/reply notification on my notification list. It's not out of order (so far, lol), so I don't think it has been moved to the new system yet, but I'm slightly confused as to why I can't find it without a direct link. It has been in this "hidden" state for several hours at least, as I had to hunt for it to make a post there earlier this afternoon. 

[TeamBIC]

Very odd indeed - thanks for flagging, @RGbrown! We reported this to our vendor partners so we can investigate further. 

[TeamBIC]

@RGbrown @itsfi Uh oh - thank you for flagging these examples of out-of-order threads! We have brought this issue to our vendor partners so they can investigate what might be going on here. 

And @RGbrown, we also noticed that the main feed is currently only display unmigrated threads! We're looking into the way the main feed is currently set up.

We appreciate your patience as we work on resolving these issues during this big transition! Thank you again for keeping is in the loop on the experiences you're seeing - it's very helpful for us to hear directly from Community members. 

[itsfi]

Thank you @TeamBIC! There are bound to be some issues with migrating such a large amount of data from one platform to another. Very much appreciate being able to share them with you to help get them resolved. Happy Friday! 😀

[TeamBIC]

Appreciate you @itsfi 💜 Happy Friday! 😊

[itsfi]

@RGbrow@TeamBIC, the misplacement of new posts is also happening on the Mask of the Week Challenge thread - https://community.sephora.com/t5/Skincare-Aware/Mask-of-the-Week-Challenge/m-p/5433327/highlight/tru...

I posted yesterday / last night and this morning the post is on page 458 after July 3, 2020 posts. Page 1 of the MOTW Challenge thread is now an October, 2020 post. I've chalked it up to the hiccups of migrating from one platform to another, but thought I'd add this to RGBrown's post. Here's a screenshot of the post appearing out of order:

[eshoe]

This is good to know, @itsfi. I have not seen new posts on the mask thread since being able to reply, now it makes sense why not!

[Buootiful]

Wow,  exciting....and daunting...10+ years of posts🤪. Thank you for your hard work @TeamBIC ❣️

[darkiceis]

Thanks for the heads up and looking forward to get back into the community. Xoxo 

[Titian06]

Thanks, @TeamBIC , for keeping the site humming along!  💖💖💖

[itscarin]

I read that, and I'm still not sure if it's going to effect me.  I'll just wait until 5/17 to see if anything changed.  My sense is that it's mostly back end stuff and won't really effect users except for some outages at certain points in time, and the rebranding of the moms group.