Cleaning up General Discussions

Website · Post by **coyote1980** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 4:21 pm

Well, we were convinced cleaning up General 480 Discussions would be a good idea for 2 reasons:

1) General Discussions contains threads that would be better situated in one of the technical fora.
2) Lots of threads in General 480 Discussions have nothing to do with the 480 in any way.

But since some people started posting it would be a shame if threads from General Discussions got deleted I decided to have a poll... Cleaning up General Discussions can always be done in the future, putting back removed threads is close to impossible.

We would appreciate it if everyone could vote and, those who want, are welcome to motivate their choice in a reply. We don't need discussions about each others replies, just your 2 cents on this matter. Thank you!

Kind regards,

DaniÃ«l

strangegame · Post by **strangegame** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 6:15 pm

Yes, delete threads / posts in General 480 Discussions that are NOT 480 related

just wondering why they would be there if there not 480 related

Website · Post by **coyote1980** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 7:48 pm

strangegame wrote:just wondering why they would be there if there not 480 related

Well, not everyone reads the title of the category or the charter before they post, so sometimes you get junk-threads in there... Not too big a deal, but pretty worthless for someone who would be browsing through the category trying to learn new stuff

dragon · Post by **dragon** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 9:14 am

It's a tricky nut to crack in my honest opinion; whilst I see how having a set of forums which are purely technical for searching would be a great benefit, I also see how removing all the surrounding discussion can make the place feel very sterile, and in some cases actually make understanding the tech stuff more difficult.

So, here's my idea for how to solve this, which you may or may not like - I won't be offended if you don't - this is an open forum, and this is just one idea, so comment away:

Hows about we have the forums as we already have, split into rough sections as it always has been - this is where people ask questions, things get discussed and solutions get formulated, just as it always has been.

THEN

we have a set of forums which are not discussion forums, but are purely technical answers to questions, these will not be open to comment (i.e. will be locked) and will serve to answer most casual browsers queries. If they need more info, they can pick up on threads within the discussion forums and get more understanding, or ask further questions.

The basic premise here is that instead of moving posts from a "chatty" environment into a factual one, posts are *copies* - so the original discussion remains in the dicsussion forums and the factual content is replicated in the factual forum - that way fact does not automatically become disjointed from the dicsussions that led to them.

The downsides of this are:

- Forums will duplicate info (not a problem as far as space or processing power is concerned)

- The moderators will be more involved as they will need to monitor threads and decide what is good factual content for the factual forum.

Anyway, just a crazy monday morning idea

Big Brother · Post by **Big Brother** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 10:16 am

Thaâ€™s what I had in mind Gaz, I did suggest it to Daniel. An archive if you like of technical info where users use the search facility to find what they are looking for.

I honestly don't think there will be any need for moderators, you and Daniel manage this forum fine by yourselves, I'm not a moderator remember just temporary abilities to carry out clean up tasks.
Cheers

Adam

dragon · Post by **dragon** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 12:39 pm

Something that isn't clear from my earlier post is that I entirely agree with Daniel and Adam about removing or moving to the wastegate posts within a thread which are nothing at all to do with the thread - but to clarify where I would personally draw the line, consider this hypothetical thread:

original post, person 1:

hi, I'm having problems with x not working, can you help

response 1, person 2:

hi, have you tried y? I had a similar problem last year when my x broke
when I was on my way to football

response 2 , person 1:
Hi - thanks, I'll give that a go tonight as it's been really bugging me.

response 3, person 3:
(quotes) I had a similar problem last year when my x broke when I was on my way to football(unquotes)
Did you go there too on that day? I was there - wasn't it a rubbish game ...

response 4, person 1:
yeah, that worked - thanks!

OK, to me, all of the thread above should be left intact except response 3, which has picked up on an ofdf topic part of a previous response and carried that on with no regard to the original topic. Response 1 has off topic stuff in, but it's putting the thread into context - this I find perfectly OK, and is part of the whole "family feel" of the forums.

So, if it were me deciding, from the above thread, I would do this:

1) Move response 3 into the wastegate as a seperate topic
2) Copy the original question, and the answer which seemed to fix the problem into the technical forum if the problem isn't already there
3) Leve the thread as is (minus respose 3) in the discussion forum.

That way we keep the family feeling by allowing people to be chatty, whilst on subject, but we also end up with a technical, forum for people needing answers quickly, and a discussion forum for those tho prefer to find the answers along with the thoughts that went into getting that answer.

martinholmesuk · Post by **martinholmesuk** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 1:23 pm

1) Move response 3 into the wastegate as a seperate topic

Your going to have lots of topics about not much then I think. The posts do go off topic all the time but most of us are friends in person or online and we do use the forum for friend to friend chat.

Not very good but it's going on.

I just can't see anyone stopping it going off topic.

Or did I not understand you right?

Big Brother · Post by **Big Brother** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 7:29 pm

I see where youâ€™re going with that Gaz, it would take a while to read through all the topics and then split the ones which need to be split. I like the idea, sort of clean up the threads rather than the forum (simply deleting threads), when a topic is completed whether it be split or not and is very useful, lock it and put it in an archive forum leaving the other forums for the family chit chat, that way anyone who is just browsing can look up what they want and if they need anymore help they can post in one of the other forums.

If we did that what would we do about moving more recent threads? Leave them until a certain number of days/weeks have passed since the last post? Or add the information to the topic in the archive (if one exists).

What do you think to that?

Adam

dragon · Post by **dragon** » Tue Jan 18, 2005 8:15 am

Good question, which I don't have an answer just yet - let's see if anyone else has better ideas

Ettore Bugatti · Post by **Ettore Bugatti** » Tue Jan 18, 2005 2:16 pm

well, I dont favour the idea of splitting up topics. If someone browes back the cannot find the red line in the discussion between the members.
It is perhaps a better idea to make the FAQ up-to-date and bigger (least answered questions)

but that is MHO

Richard

martinholmesuk · Post by **martinholmesuk** » Fri Jan 21, 2005 9:24 pm

How many posts has the forum lost due to deletion of posts?

Website · Post by **coyote1980** » Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:33 am

I am totally behind Gaz's suggestion of cleaning up threads, but there is a problem: it will take a LOT of time to go through all the threads and all the posts in the thread. PHPBB luckily has good functionality for stripping messages to a new thread out of an existing thread. In time I think we should perform a thread-cleanup, but I don't think we should do that right away. For now I think category-cleansing as more of an option, moving threads from General to the Wastegate that really don't belong there, and relocating threads that belong in technical sections or tuning sections etc.

If there is the fear of losing threads in a clean-up: don't worry, moving things to the wastegate doesn't mean they're in the bin.

So far we haven't deleted a thing from General Discussions. We did delete some threads from "In Depth", but those were some threads without replies and without any serious question in them. This to answer Martin's question.

Having a look at the poll results it seems the majority is in favour of a cleanup of the General 480 Discussions category. We'll leave this thread here for a while to see if some good objections against a cleanup can be made.

volvofox · Post by **volvofox** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 10:52 pm

hahaha, the majority of the persons who saw, or were interested enough to answer it..

bin not here for quite a while...

what happened to this site... it used to be such a coherent club ...

Were have all the club members of the early days gone ?

noone here can judge really about a thread...

I think the number of threads you people can delete will be far more less as you think..

(...)

You know there are other ways to archieve your goal...
hmm..

bye for now..

Website · Post by **coyote1980** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 8:07 am

volvofox wrote:Were have all the club members of the early days gone ?

I know some of them no longer drive 480 and some others left to the Belgian 480 forum. Don't know about the rest (might have gotten children or so

)

volvofox wrote:I think the number of threads you people can delete will be far more less as you think..

And that's exactly what we don't want to do! All we're after is to move threads from General Discussions to categories that better fit their content. Questions without replies that are of no use is the sort of posts that could get deleted in the process, but no one is seriously going to tell me that he would search the forum for questions without replies about subjects that have been dealt with several times and answer them.

I am not someone who wants to change things just for the sake of change. In this case I think relocation means improvement. We're talking about putting messages in a new place, not people or something else.

This is a club-forum, all 'important' stuff about changes to the club. website or forum will be announced / polled in the announcements/club issues category. If people don't check the forum regularly (monthly) there is indeed the risk they will miss having a say in this matter.

The main reason for this poll was to see if someone was able to point out any disadvantages I have overseen when it comes to cleaning everything up. So far we have taken a step back in deleting non-480 related posts because it would hit the soul of this forum so to speak.

At this moment I don't see the problem with:
- moving threads with loads of technical information from General Discussions to a suitable technical category
- deleting threads where a question is asked that has been asked several other times and which has gotten zero replies
- moving non-480 related threads to the wastegate (NOT deleting them)

If anyone can point out to me why the above would be a bad thing, please do so!

Regards,

DaniÃ«l

Volvo 480 Club Europe

Cleaning up General Discussions

Time to clean up General Discussions?

Cleaning up General Discussions