Forum Structure Questions

I was talking to Leonard about possibly threading the board a bit differently and he suggested I post a question and let everyone respond. This is, after all, a community effort.

The board is currently set up to ben in the form of a running list with messages threaded in a number of ways. It's not at all hard to use and should perhaps just be left alone. But being the type to try to fix something that's not broken, I had a suggestion.

How about organizing messages according to catagory? Perhaps have questions or discussions related to engines or engine runs in a catagory, actual flying in another, design , finishing or whatever catagories we decide would be useful.

I thought about this as I was scrolling through just about the entire board looking for a post I vaguely remembered was about Stalker engines. I finally found it, but thought, if this were according to catagory, this would be a lot easier. Also, some people are primarily interesting in certain topics, or are experts in them. Might make it easier.

Now, this may just be changing something that doesn't really need to be changed, but I thought I'd put it out. Leonard tells me it can be done fairly easily (all things are relative, I suppose), but it depends on what the users want.

What do you think?

In the real world, everything is hooked together. For a data manager, that is a right ugly mess. In our world, line size might be related to engine size, and wing area might be related to the size of the flyer. Everything is hooked together, no matter what might be your priority at the moment.

People who fly C/L are oddballs in the real world. We don't organize data the way others might. We fly! We often see connections that sane and boring people miss. That is why we love this hobby.

No, child, we don't want to organize our data. We want to fly. Everything is truly hooked to everything else.

Well, I've been online since the Commodore days on Quantum Link (about 1978). I've seen boards threaded a thousand ways. My thought was just to make it a bit easier to find something or to easily determine what is most recent without having to scroll though a hundred topics.

As I noted, it's fine the way it is. It was just a thought about ease of use.

Randy, if you make sure you are logged on--which you have to be if you are posting--then there will be a "new" (in yellow) icon appearing for every new thread or posting since the last time you arrived on the scene. When you are done looking at all the threads, back out of everything (the fast way to do this is to simply click on "Conferences" at the top just above the dark blue dividing line) go to the top of the forum, and click on "mark" or "mark all".

If you are still having to scroll through a hundred topics to find the latest, you have it ordered wrong. At the top of the forum is a dark blue bar in which is written " Sort Topics by..... Topic ID | Discussion Topic | Author | Last Updated Date/Time | Views | Rating "

However you click on this will be the way the board will be ordered for you until the next time you click on this and change the order. You can have the topics sorted by "topic", by "author", by "views" (the most viewed would come up on top), by "rating" (the highest rated threads in the viewer's opinion--you are clicking on the rating at the very bottom of each thread, aren't you?) or, the most common, by "date/time". If you have the threads ordered by "date/time", then the most recent will always be on top and you don't have to scroll through the hundred postings to find the most recent.

This program has the most options and versatility of any that I was able to find, but it can get a bit confusing to some until you see and learn all that is available.

Click on the "helps" section at the top to learn a few of the features. I plan to expand that a bit in the near future since there are some things that aren't explained that probably need to be.

LF

So we can do a lot of things with it, including establishing additional categories. But I purposely left it with one general category feeling this would work best, until and unless there was too much traffic in one area. Iskander's board seems to have worked well as one category, and even RC Online only has one category for CL stuff (unless you include the engine shop as a separate category. You very seldom see anything there that is CL related, however.) Of course there is, also the "Tips 'N Techniques" section (see, I am coming up with additional categories, already) but we CL types seem to just include this all in one general category, anyway.

At the moment it is set up as one. If, however, anyone has suggestions for additional categories that you feel would benefit the system, feel free to pop up and say so. Things are fluid. We can change if changes are warranted. I want to set this up so it will work the best for every body.

It ain't broke, don't try to fix it. Cheers, Geoff