I’ll be adding some more categories to the forums and will be breaking up the RSU forum into these. Below are the categories I came up with, please let me know if I missed something or about any other changes you recommend. This also affects the newsgroup and email users as they will be sent to RSU with the different prefixes to help you all sort through it all.
Beginner Help - sent to RSU with prefix [Beginners] MUni and Trials - with prefix [MUni] Freestyle - with prefix [Freestyle] Commuting and Long Distance - with prefix [Commuting] Games - with prefix [Games]
Building Unicycles - with prefix [Building] Product Review - with prefix [Products] MarketPlace (for sale, wanted) - with prefix [MarketPlace]
Events - with prefix [Events] Multimedia (Videos, Photos, and Websites) - with prefix [Multimedia] Stories - with prefix [Stories]
Miscellaneous Unicycling Topics - with prefix [Misc] Just Conversation - not sent to RSU
Sounds good, sir. My suggestion is that you may have too many categories. These forums are, compared to ther online forums, fairly low-volume (either that or the other forums I visit are super-high volume). I think that if you have too many categories, everything will be spread too thin. It might be a bit awkward to flip through 13 categories and only find 8 threads you want to read.
I like the current set-up, but I can see how others might be bothered by the off-topic chatter. I would suggest maybe 4 categories. All of the categories you have listed are kinda divided into 4 basic groups - maybe they could be combined into 4 singular categores:
1)Advice/help/questions/technique:
post here to ask for or offer help in muni, trials, freestyle, distance riding, or basic skills. Also post here for questions or advice about unicycle related games (hockey, basketball, quidditch)
2)Hardware:
post here for discussions about unicycles, unicycle hardware, product reviews, and equipment maintenance (suggested moderators, john childs and harper )
3)Community hotline:
post here for discussions about events, war stories, or if you have pictures or multimedia to share (suggested moderator, yoopers)
4)Potpourri
As always, Gilby, you are my captain in this area. These are my humble thoughts.
i like the idea of only having 4 basic groups, but i’d be willing to put the more detailed brackets around the threads that i start, then put those in one of the 4 main groups
right now it seems as if we have a pretty tight community, and i dont want to see us spead ourselves too thin, esp. since so many people are into all the different types of unicycling, all at the same time
How about you have all those categories where those exist, but also have a category where it has all the categories, for all you people who like to see what is happening in the world of unicycling, or for you that want specifics. I know it depends on the time for me. thanks Gilby, that is my advice.
Again, I may not know how all the many aspects of contributing to the newsgroup work together but I have to agree that the proposed sub-categories seem like an over-abundance. If I’m imagining things correctly, it would take quite a bit of work for the Unicyclist.com user to sort through all the categories just to see what’s there. Is that how it would work? I really like seeing the messages all in one place so I can sort through them mentally and get the big picture of the conversation on the newsgroup.
For all you guys who want to see a high-volume UBBFboard with lots of categories, check out this home theater site that I frequent:
This site is way overcrowded (so much so that I don’t go that often anymore) and even then, there seems to be a lot of categories. I only ever look through 3 of those categories - the rest would be too much.
Gilby, that’s awesome to have it set up so that we can look at all threads unsorted even after the category system is set up. That should make everybody happy.
Thanks for the link, Rod. I did check it out and it seems to be very organized, easy to find info. I think the general search function Gilby proposes will work for when I just want to get a general feel of what’s bubbling up in the newsgroup.
I would like to state that I favor the multiple categories that Gilby has suggested. It would only necessitate a few extra clicks of the mouse and save me time from having to sift through what interests me and what doesn’t.
As work begins next week for me, I need to minimize time on the board. The multiple categories will help me, anyways.
I could live with the changes with the link to all recent posts, but checking lots of small groups with not many posts in each would probably make me revert to using the newsgroup.
Would keeping the same groups but just trying to use the “Just Conversation” group more help? At the moment it’s used very little, where I think it could be… most of the recent Marmite thread could be in there, for example.
At the moment I only read that on rare occasions, but if it were used more I’d start reading it regularly…
My main problem with the current structure of the Forum is watching an on-topic thread zoom off the front page relatively unaddressed, to be supplanted by sandwich spread and questions of sub-terrarian ornathology.
Still, it may be Marmite and feathers that bind our socioty together. Perhaps another mechanism… maybe a tag. We could brand non-uni threads as OT. OT threads would not be bumpable by reads or new posts- so they would slide off the board relatively quickly. The guardians of Spam could brand a thread as OT… or maybe this calls for a new department, with new officers, and they could hold meatings with the Spam officials and form sub-committies for reviewing just how far OT a thread was, and take expert testimony on how certain essortaric aspects of a post are actualy topical to cycling.
Humm… considering the responce rate to tripe, I think I’ll repost some of my cycling posts under the subject ‘What is your favorit flavor of Cool-Aid to snort?’ It could only backfire.
And that brings me to my point, sometimes threads will start out about one subject and transgress into another through the conversations that occur on the board. If we have many different sub fourems where would you put threads that change topic. Into the original thread topic, or the topic that it currently reads.
I just want to save you guys some work, I dont find the board too complicated to sort through stuff myself. If it’s not broke dont fix it. Now if this isnt the case I would say use sub groups sparingly
i’m kinda curious to find out why the changes were suggested
i agree with the ‘if it aint broke…’ aproach, there may simply be factors that we dont know about that will make a change of some sort inevitable
i quite like the set-up as is at the moment yet am more than willing to adapt to whatever comes up
as long as there’s an 'idle-chatter-wickedly-witty-waaaay-off-topic category
or u can just call it the harper category
The problem is that the people who subscribe by email get an overwhelming amount of email from RSU that is hard to sort out and follow. Some people just want to stay current with what’s new in unicycling, but don’t want all the added fluff that comes with it. Some people have dropped from the email list because of this. So, this is an attempt to make RSU managable for everyone no matter what medium you decide to read RSU from.
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