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Richard Niemiec
06-10-2008, 5:48 PM
With the recent (last 9 months or so) of several new forums to SMC (actually making it difficult, at least for me, to navigate), its interesting that the third most popular forum is "Off Topic."

Keith Outten
06-10-2008, 10:05 PM
Richard,

Why would the number of Forums or adding new Forums make it more difficult to navigate The Creek?

.

Ron Dunn
06-10-2008, 10:51 PM
I'll add to Richard's point ... the more forums (and worse, sub-forums) you have, the lower the usability of a site.

I've been watching another forum recently ... devoted to expensive, green tools ... waiting for the elephantine gestation of a post about the Jointmaker Pro. Lately the owner of that forum has gone crazy with structure ... adding forums, renaming forums, and even trying to remove features that help users find posts ... and the number of content-heavy posts has dropped off accordingly.

If I could beat something into the head of every forum administrator it would be:

"LEAVE IT ALONE!"

Keith Outten
06-11-2008, 4:25 AM
Ron,

Leave it alone was our policy for a very long time however the activity here can produce 800 new posts per day. This kind of traffic can push a new thread two to three pages back in a couple of hours, particularly in our General Woodworking Forum. We have been trying to reduce that traffic and to improve our archiving capability by organizing topics in a couple new Forums to make it easier on everyone.

This approach has had excellent feedback from the majority here.

.

Gary Max
06-11-2008, 4:46 AM
Keith ---I for one really like the changes you folks have made.
It only makes sense that the site should grow with the higher traffic.
Thanks for all the hard work and time you and the others have put into making Sawmillcreek the best woodworking site on the net.

Richard Niemiec
06-11-2008, 8:33 AM
Keith: its just that the forums are not in any particular order and are not intuitive. Just my view.

I think the more profound implication of the slicing and dicing of the various topics (CNC, Workshops, for example) is that this tends to dilute content in the sense that I know more than a little about shops, but won't be able to share unless I just happen to visit the shops forum, which I don't, and thus you have folks with knowledge not being exposed to the question. And perhaps this is not in the best interests of those seeking the information. That's why less in some cases is more. Just my point of view.

Jason Roehl
06-11-2008, 9:00 AM
Richard, "New Posts" (center of the blue bar above) is your friend.

I'm hoping that Keith/Aaron will enable the feature that I believe is present in this version of vBulletin that allows a user to select which forums appear when they click "New Posts".

Ron Dunn
06-11-2008, 9:12 AM
Keith, I understand your reasoning, and one of the reasons I prefer SMC is that you have limited the forum sprawl as much as you have.

Just don't create any more! *grin*

David G Baker
06-11-2008, 9:44 AM
Keith,
You have done an outstanding job of updating SMC and I am very happy with the addition of the new threads. Some folks resist change.

Jason Beam
06-11-2008, 12:02 PM
Richard, "New Posts" (center of the blue bar above) is your friend.

I'm hoping that Keith/Aaron will enable the feature that I believe is present in this version of vBulletin that allows a user to select which forums appear when they click "New Posts".

HEAR HEAR!!!!!


And, Jason, you already CAN do that filtering already (have since I've been on this forum, actually). It's just not in a handy interface that you can click around to do. It's a little cryptic, but you can read some details about it here:

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=83973


Keith and all:

I really like the structure myself. Having Workshops in its own forum is very nice. Generally since I use "New Posts" I don't feel the fragmentation nearly as much, but I do still use the forum name as an indicator of what kind of thread it might be. The balance feels just about perfect, I think.

For those who feel it reduces their efficiency - maybe it just exposes an inefficiency that was always there? :)