The International Schools Review Forum

Why has the TES removed the entire Community of forums? It is simply gone, with the Community button now gone as well.

Humph. I had been hoping their “maintenance” story was true.

sid wrote:
> Humph. I had been hoping their “maintenance” story was true.

If it were just 'maintenance', I think they would have kept the button and arranged for a message explaining the maintenance to appear when you clicked the Community button as usual. But the button is gone.

A shame if they are truly gone. The TES boards had been much diminished since their "upgrade" a few years back (e.g. getting rid of Opinion, resetting everyone's status/post count, etc.) but were still better than nothing.

Agree with WT123, though if they were really to be retired, I would think TES would make some sort of announcement.

My thoughts? They pulled the boards down. They are going through each forum to make sure it is in compliance with whatever Brexit says needs to be there. Maybe a revamp while they are at it.

I think they'll be back. It keeps eyes on the site, which increases value of TES.

I hope they are. Aside from the Teach Abroad forum, there is a wealth of advice and support for teachers on there particularly in the Wellbeing forum - I've seen posts in there from teachers literally on the edge where the support given has helped pull them back. For that reason alone I hope they return.

For me I loved the OTT forum! haha

I speculate that some big-name school, hired a team of lawyers, sued tes, or at least made them cease their activities for the time being until they cleaned the OTT forum due to the negative and easy to make out school reviews. I suspect there is widespread abuse of contract terms in this covid scenario, and the community might be a reflection of that.

Update, it has now gone forever, and not coming back.

here's the text from Tes

"You may have noticed that Community has been under maintenance for the past few weeks. This was due to some essential work to ensure that this separate platform was in line with the compliance standards of the rest of Tes.

This work raised several other issues and as a result, we wanted to let you know that Community will not be returning.

Today, there is a need, greater than ever before, to ensure security, safety, data integrity and reliability. The nature of the Community platform, its set-up, and how it has evolved, has made this a bigger and bigger challenge. Of course, engagement and interaction is still available through our many other channels.

Community has been part of the Tes website for several years. However, we have also seen that as people engage with information differently, fewer and fewer people are using Community. At the same time, we have seen more and more subscribe to other information sources, such as newsletters and websites, or simply engage with us and others through our social media channels.

Forum platforms like Community also come with justifiable legal and ethical responsibilities. This means that every comment and every subject on Community rightly comes with an expectation for Tes to ensure compliance. Over recent years, this has become increasingly difficult for us to support and so it risks some conversations moving from healthy debate into potentially offensive territory.

The combination of these factors means it simply isn’t viable to maintain Community going forward.

We know that there were still a number of people that used this forum on a regular basis, and we hope that through our other channels we can still offer you the opportunity to engage and support each other in the same way.

Of course, although this facility may be closing, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t looking at how we can host this kind of engagement again in the future, using new technology and a fresh approach.

Thank you for the many conversations."

Good night, good bye, so long, and thanks for all the fish....

This is quite sad.

I think this is pretty shocking from TES.

Many will be gutted to hear this news as this community was fun and invaluable for exchanging information about international teaching.

They messed everything up a few years ago when they revamped the site and lost thousands of users who found the site too complicated to use.

Where do you think people will move to now? Do you know of any other similar forums/communities that could replace TES?

L

In terms of where people will move to... I wonder if reddit will become more popular. There already is an International Teachers subreddit on there. I actually think reddit is perfect for international teachers to talk and I'm surprised more don't use it.

It has anonymity and it's too big of a company to be bullied by international schools the way ISR or TES can.

reddit is a pain in the bum if you're not familiar with it, and there's quite a lot of dodgy stuff on there.

A couple of ex-TES posters have set up another forum on Proboards, and quite a lot of familiar names have moved there.