The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #66876 Message #1115180
Posted By: Joe Offer
13-Feb-04 - 03:46 AM
Thread Name: Mudcat, Please organise these threads!
Subject: RE: Mudcat, Please organise these threads!
A number of good ideas have been expressed in this thread. I'm sure Jeff is watching, and he'll most probably incorporate some of them.
When we split the Forum into Music and BS, we talked about dividing the Forum Menu into categories, and we decided that we didn't want to split more than just music and BS. We think it adds diversity to our discussion. We want all the day's thread titles to be seen by all the people, and don't want to break into separate song/instrument/politics/gardening/chit-chat communities. We're very familiar with the type of forum setup Nicole describes, but we made a conscious decision not to use it because we've found that our setup seems to create a very lively forum dynamic. The other system of thread organization may be more "civilized," but we think our way of doing it is more fun.
This forum is different from others because of the volume of traffic we get here. On many Internet forums, a thread may get one message every two weeks. Ours can get dozens in a day. So, for the general forum menu, we have a list of just those threads that have had traffic today. If you want more, just use the Filter or the search engines. We add keywords to thread titles when needed, and we do a lot of crosslink work - all to make our filter and search engines work better.
Categories are a good idea. We've considered adding INSTrument and EVENT, and we've talked about SONG in this thread. I'm convinced, though, that we should remove some categories before we add others. Also-please remember that if you really think we should adopt a category, you can put any tag you want on a the title of a thread you start. Just don't choose anything from the dropdown menu, and type in what you want. If you start using a category and we like it, we'll adopt it.
Now, if I could ask a couple of rhetorical questions:
How many of you use the Filter?
How many have changed the title of a message before posting?
How many have read at least the first seven messages of the FAQ? (the first message covers searching)