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. ❤️

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC 

There's something hinkey going on with my account (and perhaps those of some other folks as well?) 

When I try to go to this thread:

https://community.sephora.com/t5/VIB/PROMO-CODE-NOTIFICATIONS/td-p/2507260 

I get this error (on both mobile (android) and desktop (windows), Chrome for both)

But in talking to @ohheyitscindyk, she can see it just fine. Knowing that it is in the VIB group, I tried to go to the VIB Group page, and was kinda shocked to find that the VIB Group doesn't even exist for me. Aren't there over/around 40 groups, IIRC? I can only see 36, and while I don't know exactly what all is missing, I do notice that Rouge isn't showing up for me either. 

[TeamBIC]

Hi there @RGbrown! Our vendor partners have implemented a fix they believe will solve these access issues in the Rouge and VIB group - are you able to get into this thread now: https://community.sephora.com/t5/VIB/PROMO-CODE-NOTIFICATIONS/td-p/2507260?

Please feel free to let us know if you continue to run into issues getting into the Rouge/VIB groups! 

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC 

Thank you! I can see both VIB and Rouge groups now ❣️

[TeamBIC]

Yay!!! So happy to hear that @RGbrown ❤️

[TeamBIC]

Thanks for reporting this, @RGbrown! We are aware of this issue and our vendor partners will be investigating now that it looks like many of the out of order threads are sorting correctly. We'll keep you updated! 

[SportyGirly125]

@RGbrown @TeamBIC I can see this group and thread 

[TeamBIC]

Hi all! For those who may not be aware, it was brought to our attention that some of your favorite Community threads' replies were jumbled out of order during the Groups refresh. Solving this issue is a high priority for us and our vendor partners, who are actively working on a fix. We've compiled some examples of threads we noticed are sorting out of order and would like to ask you: any other examples you can share with us? We tried to grab all the threads members have called out so far, but may have missed a couple: 

1. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Brand-Loyal/Tom-Ford-Updates/td-p/1903440
2. https://community.sephora.com/t5/VIB/PROMO-CODE-NOTIFICATIONS/td-p/2507260
3. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Haul-Stars/April-Hauls-and-Spring-Savings-Stars/td-p/5801338
4. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Nailed-It/Show-Me-Your-Nails-2-0/td-p/3431045
5. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Everything-Eyes/100-Shades-of-Eyeshadow-Challenge/td-p/4378235
6. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Skincare-Aware/Mask-of-the-Week-Challenge/td-p/5433327
7. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Clean-Beauty/Feedback-Wanted-NEW-Clean-at-Sephora-Makeup/td-p/57582...
8. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Fragrance-Fans/Fragrance-Junkie-Central/m-p/2222170
9. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Besides-Beauty/THE-UNICORN-MAIL-THREAD/td-p/3645731
10. https://community.sephora.com/t5/Trending-at-Sephora/Beauty-Insider-Community-Feedback/td-p/2826082

@blackkitty2014 @RGbrown @itsfi @eshoe - tagging you here since you helped bring this issue to our attention. Thank you for that! 

[itsfi]

Thank you @TeamBIC for all you efforts to work through these bugs, and for keeping us updated on the progress. 😃

[eshoe]

Thank you v much @TeamBIC - I appreciate that you are working on this already! I haven’t noticed any others but will post if I do:)

[blackkitty2014]

Thx you @TeamBIC . I’ll report back if I see anything else. 🌹

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC 

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Lip-Lovers/100-Days-of-Lipstick-Challenge/m-p/4103047

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Beauty-Confidential/What-are-you-wearing-today-Pt2/m-p/5633300

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Brand-Loyal/THE-PAT-McGRATH-THREAD/td-p/2418816

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Savvy-Shoppers/Ulta-GWPs/td-p/2570769

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Beauty-Confidential/Sephora-Favorites-Sets-share-your-thoughts-ques...

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Brand-Loyal/Chanel-Updates/m-p/1940873

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Besides-Beauty/What-are-you-watching-Don-t-be-a-spoil-sport-spoiler...

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Besides-Beauty/THE-PARTY-THREAD/m-p/2498454

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

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Makeup-Is-Life/Empties-V2/m-p/4343686

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Brand-Loyal/Urban-Decay-Thread/m-p/2147187

https://community.sephora.com/t5/Fragrance-Fans/What-are-you-wearing-Fragrance-edition/m-p/1172503

I'd wager nearly every single "megathread" is affected, though I'm not sure exactly what the cutoff is for that. A couple of threads with 500ish posts looked fine, but is it post count that knocked these out of whack, or is it because they're picture heavy, or because they're older than many others...who knows? And this certainly isn't comprehensive, of course; I went back through 12 pages of the main feed, then searched for a few from memory, but I'm sure there are more!

ETA: I did NOT get an email for this tag, btw (and I double-checked spam and even my trash, just in case I had deleted it without noticing, but nope, no email). I did get emails for two other tags made after this post though, so maybe it was just a temp glitch.

[TeamBIC]

So helpful, thank you @RGbrown! We're passing off this list of threads to our vendor partners for reference as they work on a fix.

Also appreciate you flagging what seemed like a hiccup in your email notifications - let us know if you experience the same thing again! Hope you get an email for this reply ... 🤞

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC 

So weird, no email for this notification either 🤔 I didn't get any other tags overnight/this morning to compare, so I can't really hazard a guess as to what's going on there.

I did notice, however, that the Nails thread seems to be back in order, at least the few pages I checked. THANK YOU!!!!! 💕💕💕

[TeamBIC]

Hi friends! Community email notifications have been re-enabled as of this morning, Wednesday, 5/19. Please let us know if you notice any issues receiving them! 

@lnum @eshoe @SportyGirly125 @greeneyedgirl107 Hope email notifications are back up and running for you all ... fingers crossed you get one for this tag 😊

[PrettyPaint]

@TeamBIC  I still don't seem to be getting notifications for some reason. 

[Buootiful]

Hi @TeamBIC ! I am still not getting email notifications:(

[TeamBIC]

So sorry to hear you're not getting email notifications as expected @Buootiful @PrettyPaint @RGbrown. ☹️ Thanks for letting us know, though! We've let our vendor partners know so they can take a close look at what might be causing the issue. 

[Buootiful]

No email notification for me for this reply 😭@TeamBIC 

[RGbrown]

@TeamBIC 

No email for me for this tag. I did get an email for the post you tagged me in today at 5:51pm (central), but out of four tags from you between last night and today, that's the only email I got. So weird.

ETA: I got tagged three times in the nail thread tonight by one user, but only one email came through (for the middle tag). 

[PrettyPaint]

@TeamBIC  Maybe it took a bit to kick in, because I just successfully received this notification. Yay - Thanks! 😘