Changes to Local Talk

[LornaMumsnet]

Hi all,

We wanted to give you a heads up that we've made the decision to close the MN Local sites in their current format, and will instead be focusing on making Local Talk as useful to you as possible.

Our Local Talk boards will remain and we've made some changes so that it will be easier for you to find local talk threads that are more relevant to you. If you go to the Mumsnet menu and choose Local, you'll be able to either search for the area you're interested in, or you can allow your browser to automatically read your location and pull in threads based on where you are at the time. You can also adjust the radius of the search results to look at Talk threads for a specific area.

This geo-search facility is a beta function and only available on desktop and mobile at the moment, not the Mumsnet Talk apps. We’d love to get your feedback on how it works for you so that we can make it as useful as possible. Once we’ve made any changes based on your feedback, the plan will be to release it to the Mumsnet Talk app as well.

Please do take a look and let us know any suggestions for how we could improve the user journey or experience. Many thanks!

Is this why I can no longer see the MN Local topics on the (iPhone) app?

For one short, glorious period I was able to "see" MN local on the app, choose "MN Local - Glasgow" as one of my favourite topics and keep on eye out on any threads started or contributed to.

Now it's gone again - which will add to the tumbleweed that blows through MN Local as I am amongst those that do the majority of my MNing through the Talk app.

HI prettybird,

Sorry about this - thanks for flagging! We're aware of this one and in the process of fixing.

I'm baffled by these changes. I use local talk for my "nearest" city which is actually about 15 miles away, there's another one the same distance away but takes much longer to get to so we never go there (if OliviaMN sees this she's going to know exactly which places I'm talking about!).

The new changes mean I just have to manually put in my 'nearest' city every time to get the local stuff that's relevant to me - stuff that's going on, questions/conversations around schools, traffic etc. Please sort out the ability to 'save' a preferred local as soon as possible. The radius stuff doesn't really help either, how is it picking those threads - my local site has a huge 'catchment' area as it's the biggest and closest city for people living in 3 different counties - is it going to just show me posts made by those who actually posted in the city?

I might have misunderstood how this all works now but it doesn't seem a particularly useful change from what I can see.

Is this why my active convos is now full of local threads that are the other end of the country from me?

In the past I was 'subscribed' (for want of a better description) to 'my' local site and only saw threads from that area. How do I stop the threads from the nation?

What a shame. I know lots of the Local Editors worked very hard to get their sites populated.

I'm also getting lots of random local threads which are anything but local to me popping up in Most Active, I'm sure I had all these topics excluded on Customise.

Is there any way of adding the area to the thread heading rather than it just saying 'Local'? It would save opening threads for Aberdeen if you were in Exeter!

I'd rather not see them at all, the chances of anything being relevant are minuscule.

I've found you can hide the topic, same as all the others in Customise. Problem solved.

Whoknows but that means that I can't see MY local threads, which is all I used to be able to see. I like trying to help others in my area.

@Seeline - in Customise I have a general Local topic which I have hidden, and Local - My County which I have kept, you could do the same. Although to be honest, mine covers such a huge area and is so quiet that there is only a thread relevant to me about once every two years, so I might as well hide the lot.