The Top Regular Savers Discussion Thread

Bridlington1

On the question of separate threads for each RS:

If I may give my tuppence worth, I would prefer to leave the structure pretty much as it is, although I'm always open to feedback on how the threads can be improved and have implemented some of these suggestions in the past.

To my mind I think it's worth considering why this thread exists in the first place, its main purposes are to provide a list of the top regular savers currently on offer and to provide a place for all forum users to discuss regular saver accounts and ask any questions about them that you may have.

I aim to make it as useful as possible to as many as possible, there's always going to be trade offs with any approach, moreover it is impossible for me to please everyone simultaneously, therefore it is worth taking that into account in any discussions.

If I were to please everyone simultaneously I'd have to be both in favour of having one regular saver thread only for everything to be discussed but at the same time be in favour of getting rid of the main regular savers thread entirely and having one thread for every single regular saver. I would also need to include a list of feeder accounts on the regular savers thread but also be firmly in favour of not allowing them to be included in the thread and redirecting people to the top EA threads instead. I'd need to guess and post any savings account application links I can find and share every way possible to gain accounts against the Ts&Cs but then clamp down on any discussion that so much as stretches the Ts&Cs of the accounts. Above all though I'd be a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.

One of the main advantages of the structure as it is is that everything you need is in one place and it's easy to know what should be posted and where, anything to do with regular savers gets posted here, if you want to state how many RSs you have then post in the League Table thread and if you don't want the discussion you can follow the archived thread and you'll be notified when a RS is launched or withdrawn or gets their rate changed.

Moreover certainly when my time is pressed, having one central thread is a heck of a lot easier to follow and get everything I need from than having dozens of different threads to have to sift through, I'd certainly find it harder to keep up to date with everything if information was dotted about all over the place so I would agree with the concerns raised by others that it could result in information being missed.

I would also pose a question of my own, which is how many instances do you have online where you have this sort of structure for RSs? There's parts of the internet where you have lots of short-lived threads about RSs, some about individual RSs, but I'm yet to encounter any other place on the internet where you have a long running thread (if you include its predecessors) that covers all RSs in this way. I'll leave it up to others to judge whether this is a good reason to keep the structure as it is, but I'd say it is worth bearing in mind.

I would also add that the current structure does make it easier to keep p1 of this thread up to date and ensure the lists on p1 are visible to as many as possible, if we did have a thread for each RS, then the job of maintaining this thread would become much harder. I'm not sure I would be the person to maintain it if this came to pass as believe it or not, I do have other commitments outside of the forum and other hobbies etc I could spend more time on.

On the point about labelling which RS(s) your posts relate to:

I would say this is a very good point, I try to make it clear in the first sentence of each post I make which RS(s) I'm on about, even if I don't necessarily put a header as such, e.g. I might say ``The Ts&Cs aren't especially clear in this regard, but when contacted Dudley BS" if I'm referring to Dudley BS etc.

Unfortunately there is a limitation of the forum that quoting isn't as good as it could be (the links in them instead of seeing the full conversation drive me round the twist sometimes).

Making it clear which RS you're referring to in the post is beneficial though I would agree, therefore I would encourage others to do so.

As ever though, if people wish to provide feedback on the way the threads are run, they're more than welcome to message me and I'll certainly consider them, but of course I cannot guarantee I'll implement every suggestion as I have to consider the wider forum and the needs of the community as a whole.

surreysaver

What I try and do is mention the name of the provider in my posts, and bold it too, to help it stand out

clairec666

I appreciate that it's nice having everything in one thread, the downside is that if you recall seeing something useful (say, which current accounts have caused problems with funding Buckinghamshire, to provide a recent example), you have to sift through several pages before you find what you need.

The search function on this forum isn't ideal for this. I've developed a few tricks to help me find stuff.

Edited to add…. I usually put the topic/account in bold if I'm quoting another post, as the main context is hard to see, but I don't usually bother when I'm commenting without a quote. Hope this is okay.

friolento

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82066207#Comment_82066207

I like the idea of a sub-forum for Regular Saving accounts, for the reasons you have given

clairec666

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82066282#Comment_82066282

Thread organisation etc….

Thanks, glad someone else thinks the same way as me, although it sounds like others like the single thread structure so I'm prepared to be outvoted.

Honestly I could never understand why ISAs got their own sub-forum but regular savers were not deemed worthy.

Example of how the ISA forum makes things work - there's still a "main" thread, but it isn't clogged up with endless comments along the line of "how do I transfer out of Trading212 when it doesn't have an account number and sort code" 😁 Anyone who frequents the ISA forum will be familiar with this….

masonic

Organisation

A couple of other points to remember are that the search function is rubbish regardless of forum layout, and we periodically go through periods where notifications stop working or are substantially delayed.

I personally don't like that there is a separate ISA sub-forum, as new threads there get a lot less attention. Often I feel OPs would get a better set of replies if they posted to the main section. Whereas it is almost certain that any relevant question posted here will be very visible to knowledgeable folk.

alfred64

One of the problems has been the interminable discussion of a single topic answered and argued against: gone over again and again ; repetitious back and forth answers that quite frankly had become very tiring to many members.

Bridlington1

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82066315#Comment_82066315

I'd agree with those points. On your point about ISAs having a separate sub-forum, I must confess I never noticed it till I'd been using the forum for a while, if I didn't notice it for so long I'd be surprised if I was the only one this applied to. If RSs had their own subsection, I almost certainly wouldn't've discovered @Special_Saver2's RS thread as early as I did.

We should also consider, and I find this is too often missed in these discussions but is an important one, that not all users of this forum have been frequenting these threads as often as we have, there are also brand new users logging on all the time who are unfamiliar with how the forum operates, where to find everything or might not even know what a regular saver is etc, we should also cater to them, and make it easier for them to find things.

Whilst it's good to have some structure to the forum (which the three main RS threads offer), I fear it could be taken too far.

username2026

I would like to make a suggestion, if I may. I’ve been following this thread and the previous iterations for quite some time, and indeed this thread was the reason I signed up for this forum - I hoped that I’d be able to sign up to be notified when a post was made in the no-chat thread, but it doesn’t seem that the bookmark option does that. I’m not sure what it does to be honest…

Anyway, my point is, could that thread be updated only when there’s an update to make, rather than also repeating it all at the end of every month? It seems to me that as it’s a “no-chat” thread, it already serves as a summary. Having long posts every few weeks repeating what’s just been posted seems a bit counterintuitive to me, and suspect this creates extra unnecessary work.

I’d also ask if it’s possible to revert to the old way of showing the basic facts of an account instead of the table? I only use this forum on mobile and it’s already very user-unfriendly, but where there are now tables, it messes up the screen and the previous way I found much easier to view.

Thanks for your consideration.

qbadger

Re the bookmark option, go to Notification preferences