Promoting useful threads.

Phill Dyson

Western Thunderer
Editors note: I've copied these posts from http://www.westernthunder.co.uk/index.php?threads/br-mk1-limabuild-coaches.32/page-12 as I think it is an important discussion in it's own right about how we keep track of the valuable contribution from members. @adrian.
Back to Phill's original posting:



Could I ask the Mods if some of these inactive threads will drop off the forum eventually? .....I don't know about other members, but I find them invaluable & will save some of this stuff myself if nothing is being done?

Regards Phill
 
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Dikitriki

Flying Squad
Hi Phill,

There's no intention (or need for space reasons) to delete inactive threads - and they would have to be actively deleted to disappear.

I agree, there's a lot of outstanding information and inspiration in such threads and they form a valuable archive.

Cheers,

Richard
 

Heather Kay

Western Thunderer
A proposal: a sticky or pinned post with links to such threads, acting as a form of index to make them easier to find.

Suggestions for the threads to be included would have to be collated, of course.
 

Phill Dyson

Western Thunderer
Hi Phill,

There's no intention (or need for space reasons) to delete inactive threads - and they would have to be actively deleted to disappear.

I agree, there's a lot of outstanding information and inspiration in such threads and they form a valuable archive.

Cheers,

Richard

I was not suggesting that anyone would deliberately delete these threads, which is why I enquired if they may simply drop off at some point through lack of activity &/or space?......if all threads are safe indefinitely then that is fine.......
 

Heather Kay

Western Thunderer
You could argue the search engines have indexed the forum for us. Whenever I search for something related to a build I might be documenting here, guess what appears in the results!
 

adrian

Flying Squad
A proposal: a sticky or pinned post with links to such threads, acting as a form of index to make them easier to find.
The problem we have found with sticky threads is that once you have more than half a dozen they then obscure any recent activity in that section.

.if all threads are safe indefinitely then that is fine
I can categorically state that all threads like this are safe - we have not and will not delete these threads. Obviously I cannot state all threads are safe because if someone starts a libellous thread then I would have no option but to delete it. However in terms of disk space on our hosting package we are currently running about 30% of capacity so have no need to delete any of these valuable threads. I appreciate the time and effort people have made in contributing to the forum and these have made the forum the valuable resource that it is and it would be sacrilege to delete them.

I've often wondered if it would be able to create an index for the forum, but in a way that would be 'open source'.
It is something I have been wrestling with this year. There is an incredible wealth of material on the forum but it can get lost. There is an optional extra for the software known as the resource manager, see https://xenforo.com/community/resources/ for an example how it works. This allows for users to create and categorise resources. We would be able to create a resource from a thread and the subsequent discussion is attached. The categorisation I think would be useful as it allows people to quickly filter on a topic. However I had a few reservations about it, trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. The resource manager being geared towards a "resource" in terms of forum software it works well because they are dealing with specific plugins, or documents. I experimented with it on a development area but I felt it just didn't work for our needs. It started to separate threads from resources and discussions on resources seem to be a poor mans cousin to the main forum.

They have just released an update to the forum software which has a number of interesting and useful improvements, one of which is thread tagging. I'm still not sure if this will give us the forum indexing required but it seem like a step in the right direction. We would then be able to apply tags to reference threads like this which then may make it easier for users to filter and find these threads. I'm testing the update on the development area at the moment and if it doesn't show any problems then I'll look at updating the forum to this version of the software.

Any suggestions or comments on anything I've said is more than welcome. I'm trying to guess what's useful for the members and how they are using the forum. I'd like to think that I've got a reasonable idea of what people are comfortable with but more than happy to be corrected.
 

Steph Dale

Western Thunderer
I'm interested in seeing how things like keyword searches would work here, but as a database owner in real life I find they tend to fall over if you have more than, say, 20 keywords.

If I need to do a detailed search here, I tend to use the Google domain search, like this;
"<searchterm> site:www.westernthunder.co.uk"

Steph
 
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John Miller

Western Thunderer
The problem we have found with sticky threads is that once you have more than half a dozen they then obscure any recent activity in that section.

Then why not gather all the stickies in a particular section and put them all in a sort of master sticky - that way you'd only ever have the one sticky at the head of the section.

A kind of 'Sticky for Stickies' if you like .... :)
 

Simon

Flying Squad
At the end of the day this is "just" a forum.

The only way to properly achieve what is being talked about is to build a separate/parallel website without all this glorious interactivity.

Any volunteers?

Simon
 

adrian

Flying Squad
An interesting idea Graham, one I'll have to think about. I am often on the Xenforo forum and browse the various add-ons and I will see if anything similar has been discussed.
I'm just testing the next update to the software and I think the thread tagging might provide an easy way to index the threads and also just as importantly manage the tagging. Have a look through this thread https://xenforo.com/community/threads/thread-tagging.100267/#post-949779 if you are interested. At work we have an intranet and they have attempted to create an alphabetical index and to be honest I struggle at times with it, I end up flicking between different letters, what I might call "facilities" other people call "services". Not a particularly good example but what I'm trying to say is that things aren't always listed under the letter that might be obvious to you. If you have a look through the tagging thread you can see that tags are searchable and might give a more free form method of finding threads. I suppose we could always create a tag called "sticky"!
 

daifly

Western Thunderer
And will there be an index of indexes (or indices)? I can't help but feel that intelligent use of the existing search engine will find required items of interest. Indexing is potentially a very difficult task with so many possible key words and phrases. Would every thread be indexed or just those of e.g. 'modelling merit'? If some threads are to be excluded from the indexing, who decides and who polices it?
Dave
 

daifly

Western Thunderer
Put 'drilling tiny holes' into the search box and you get 3 hits, one of which is Jon's thread. That's good enough for me!
Dave
 

Neil

Western Thunderer
One man's meat and all that leads me to think that it might be more worthwhile to compile our own, individual indexes or to be able to collect threads and posts in some place. I notice when I hover the cursor over my mug shot that a long list of features drops down. Is it possible to add a 'stuff I like' feature (rather like a browsers bookmarks or favourites) where we can save links to useful bits of the forum that drop off the front page and are consequently hard to find.
 

adrian

Flying Squad
Thanks Neil - another interesting suggestion. There are a couple of add-ons we could try to to allow users to add bookmarks.

The simple one just allows people to create their own bookmark list.
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/bookmark.3970/

A slightly more comprehensive one allows a few more options and flexibility - it will also generate a list of most bookmarked threads from all users to indicate which are the useful threads to other users.
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/bookmarks.272/

I will look into these a bit more - in the mean time though to go back to my earlier post I do think that the thread tagging could well help to index threads, it's very simple to tag threads/posts so I hope that people would be likely to use it. I just need to find the time to apply the software update! However youngest son is in the school rugby team so most of Saturday will be spent down in Liverpool and then he is in the U12s at the local club and is in the team for the Manchester Festival which is all day Sunday!
 
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