I completely agree with the want for it to be less support tickets and more community. I have met some very good people through here and have made friends and i’ve gotta say that’s amazing!
However, good points have been brought up about the fact that we seem to get more responses here than the support team gives in an acceptable amount of time (especially with money on the line), even with their full team of people. While its reasonable to expect a delay because they have to deal with so many requests in a day, including not-suspension requests, I think the entire staff team on patreon needs to try to take on things with more forethought about expectations and realistic delivery of said expectations. The recent suspensions being a good example. From a user perspective it looks like they took on much more than they could chew for their team size, to get back to people in an acceptable time frame. (It looks like they’ve gone gung ho with doing continuous suspensions instead of batches that suit the team size.) It’s why people have come here to ask for help because waiting days to hear back where your account is now limited and some unable to get paid, is not an okay way to work on such a problem. People have come here for other issues too and feeling ignored when they’ve sent in multiple requests, spaced out in a month to get help from the support team and have heard nothing but the initial automated email, but when they come here, they hear back within a day or two almost guaranteed and things get settled. There is a reason people come here for help, because they know that they will actually have someones real and undivided attention for long enough to get the thing fixed or answered. This space is smaller so its easier to have a problem seen and be addressed when things get lost in the chaos that is answering support tickets. While i personally have not had an issue with getting things answered and have been happy with the service i have received, i have seen what others have gone through and so people are going to find a way to get things answered (especially when their payments are on the line, its the primary reason people use patreon…) one way or another until the service improves to have them not need to reach out elsewhere. So until that happens i doooooon’t think this place is going to stop being partially a support forum as well.
One of the things that most certainly has improved but could still be worked on, is the fact that this forum has seemed to be missed in updates about certain beta’s and features that we could be providing feedback for. (Heck i still keep learning about features i never even knew existed or work had even started on them and I’m attached to my phone, get all the updates from this forum, patreon blog posts, etc. I read them all as best i can. I assume maybe some have been in the works a while before you guys made the promises to do better here and actually keep us in the loop about features and use us for feedback but who knows.) I want to see more features and beta’s being posted here. More Topics started here for people to sign up to help test features you guys are working on. That’s one of the primary reasons this forum was even created if memory serves: To have a direct line to creators and get feedback -before- features go out with seemingly little real person feedback from your users. I know I’m not the only one here (but i wont speak for all) that has felt pretty much in the dark about a lot of things you guys have sprung on us in the past and it makes using patreon increasingly worrisome when stuff starts happening without even a courtesy call to let us know whats going on. Next thing you know something has been released or changed and it is negatively impacting users, FAQ are not updated or clear to include the update before it goes live so everyone is confused. This isn’t to say that improvement hasn’t happened. @carla 's presence here has been an amazing help and while it got off to a rocky start, i think we’ve all learned from eachother during some rough patches and are able to communicate better here. It’s still not at a level i’d like to see but it is much much better than it was and i thank all the staff here for that.
Interactive monthly things would be cool but i feel like they might just distract from the issues that still need to be worked on here. Communication, honesty, actually getting feedback on new features/changes (not just us complaining about our day to day issues and screaming about features that still have not received any changes even though they’ve been requested for an embarrassing amount of years) etc. If this suspension thing had been brought up here we could have given feedback on how to carry it out in a way that might have had less of a negative impact or freaking all the users out. Same with the fee debacle last year. There could have been better feedback before Lens came out because there was a flury of error and bug reports the moment it came out and many people not able to use it at all who did want to use it. I still feel like this forum is underutilized. Many of us are here because we want to talk with you guys, other creators and also help make Patreon a better place for all with feedback and help. We are invested in this platform but have very limited ways to actually help. Support tickets for sending in suggestions really don’t get answered which is fair, but here we have one on one with you guys for the purpose for suggestions and feedback and while i see you guys saying our stuff has been sent to staff for review, which is GREAT (this is one of the improvements that Carla started and is much appreciated) it just seems like our opportunities to actually help with specific features you guys are developing is very low priority and sometimes forgotten. There’s been a couple of good threads asking for people interested in testing a feature/give feedback but for how often features and updates come out it feels like we only get to give feedback on very few and of course when new things come out you guys get crazy amounts of feedback on it here but usually in a less productive manner than it could have been.
My 2 cents anyways. As for the layout changes i’m in agreement with Joumana, the coloured banners are a little strong but the emotes are good. 
