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Could/should the forum be split into more sub-sections?

  • #21
If you open a thread that you don't want view, just hit the escape key to kill the pictures loading then the "back" button on your browser. Or just hit the "back" button. How lazy can you be?

Having administered forum and bulletin boards in the past, as well as working with databases for a living it is always easier to start out with too many categories than to split them later when there is a large number of posts or records. Sure, Andrew can create new categories and say "from now on posts about x go in the x forum" but that violates my sense of data integrity because of all the previous posts on x are now mis-categorized.

As JC pointed out people should just tag properly their topics to begin with which would make it a lot easier to filter out what you don't want to read. That's why these features are there.
 
  • #22
I agree that it is better to start out with too many categories, as it is always easier to combine rather than split. Sometimes though it is better to change things to make future things better, even though the old way is still lurking in the background. I know that it means that older threads could be mis-categorised but who goes manually searching that far back in forum categories? Surely if you was looking for a specific subject you would use the forums search facility rather that sifting through hundreds of threads in a forum category? Even if tagging was used properly and the forums tag searching was up to the job, that would still not achieve my desire to get notified on a new thread for a specific species.
 
  • #23
Well, of the people who shared an opinion, I appear to be the sole proprietor of the status quo. If the forum is split, we lose 'data integrity' (unless someone volunteers to go back, assess each thread & place it in the correct forum). As noted, most people use the search feature to locate past threads/posts (although not always true) so the data integrity issue would seem to be small (as were my petty objections - apparently). :blush: As with most elections, the very vast majority has not felt the need to weigh in at all - likely that they either don't care, don't think they will be impacted or believe the status quo will continue & this issue is just slight noise.

Looking through the posts, it would seem that a reasonable compromise would be to take Cephs & Heli's & give them their own forum. It would be even better if one or more folks would volunteer to move threads for at least the past 1-3 years..... :poke:

However, we have yet to hear from the Grand Poobah himself. So what say you - Oh 'Man-behind-the-curtain'?
 
  • #24
I would not mind helping out with moving stuff.
 
  • #25
I'm not a fan of having everything sub divided. And I can't really come up with what would make Heli and Cephs special enough to have their own category from Sarrs and Darlings, it seems odd to me that sarr, heli, darlin, and ceph would be divided in any way without completely dividing them out which as I said, I'm not a fan of.

As far as not having to move the topics since they'd be found by search anyway- that's not entirely true if you use (as I do) the "Search this forum" feature when you are within a category to rule out topics in general and trade for example, or select certain forums in the advanced search engine.

Since this topic has come up, I've been looking into a few things with the tagging system in order to get our forum up-to-date with tags as far as getting all the old posts tagged and will help make sure new posts get appropriately tagged as well, but that still wouldn't help the couple of people that would want to subscribe to ceph/heli forums solely so I guess that really wouldn't solve anything in this matter.

Andrew
 
  • #26
Since this topic has come up, I've been looking into a few things with the tagging system in order to get our forum up-to-date with tags as far as getting all the old posts tagged and will help make sure new posts get appropriately tagged as well, but that still wouldn't help the couple of people that would want to subscribe to ceph/heli forums solely so I guess that really wouldn't solve anything in this matter.
Otoh, if the subscriptions worked with the keyword tagging (and people actually used it appropriately**) - it could/should provide a functional solution ...


** - hmmm, after I wrote that I realized that although I use tags extensively in my Firefox bookmarks (...and now would not want to live without them), I have not used them at all in threads I've started here. In some I started recently, I considered using some but stopped because I thought I might violate some unknown set of rules that everyone else has ... :0o:

So - if we had a thread that explained what the great uneducated masses should do to use tags appropriately and Andrew modified subscriptions to allow the use of some basic search-function logic - - - everyone could be happy .... :banana2:
 
  • #27
The ability to subscribe via tag is not a feature that I know of (official or unofficial hack). I had thought about suggesting it to the forum software people, but even if that was put through to a feature, it wouldn't be put into effect until I forked out the $$ to get the new version of the forum. :blush: Maybe I can get a coder to create this... But then we rely on him to keep it updated as the forum updates (which lots of them don't do) so the feature could go away at any time.

Ron, what I'm talking about would automatically go back and set up tags using the master tag list, and will automatically add tags to new topics when created as well. So it wouldn't be something that people would have to remember anymore.

Andrew
 
  • #28
I'm not a fan of having everything sub divided. And I can't really come up with what would make Heli and Cephs special enough to have their own category from Sarrs and Darlings, it seems odd to me that sarr, heli, darlin, and ceph would be divided in any way without completely dividing them out which as I said, I'm not a fan of.

As far as not having to move the topics since they'd be found by search anyway- that's not entirely true if you use (as I do) the "Search this forum" feature when you are within a category to rule out topics in general and trade for example, or select certain forums in the advanced search engine.

Since this topic has come up, I've been looking into a few things with the tagging system in order to get our forum up-to-date with tags as far as getting all the old posts tagged and will help make sure new posts get appropriately tagged as well, but that still wouldn't help the couple of people that would want to subscribe to ceph/heli forums solely so I guess that really wouldn't solve anything in this matter.

Andrew
OK, I guess that that's the end of that then. It's a shame in my opinion as I would personally find it very useful to be able to subscribe to forums that are of interest to me. I am reluctant to subscribe to 'mixed' forums which contain threads of species which I have no interest in, as I fear that I would have to filter through the 'noise'.
 
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