I'm not sure, but I think that astahost, who used to be very organized... is starting to resemble Trap17 (not that it's very bad)... I mean not because there's spam or queued posts or anything, but it's the descriptions of the forum... they seem a bit unattractive when they are not unified... like the fonts are bold and theres links etc. I'm not sure if I'm right, but I think it wouldn't make a difference if the bold words and colors were just converted back... I mean, they either read the whole thing, or not read it at all right? I may be wrong...

I actually tend to agree with you on that. It is just begining to look a little like my office/cave at work. Jumbled...

I used to anvigate by the different forums, now I just look at the bottom of the site to see what are new topics, I think we need to undergo a restructuring, forum by forum, making a cleanup of each forum and if necessary a reorganization, starting with the staff section, which seems jumbled.

~Viz

And I agree, but to start that project (which is one I nagged about during the summer break) we need people to do it, and I had no one respond to the topic, also I had to get the green light from OpaQue.


So now that that's off my system,

we need a plan for that one folks - a line.

- Which forums first?
- Action plan? Who does what, how and where?

Stuff like that..

Definitely start with this forum, the staff section. Two reasons:

1) It's a mess, and how can we expect to clean up the other forums if we can't be organized ourselves.

2) It's only for us, if we make a mistake, or need to shut down the forum temporarily, only staff are affected, not the whole site.

As for your summer reorganization, I though I replied with a comment that it was important, but I was gone and not able to help. Well, I'm back now and would be glad to help, so, let's see how many more people repsond, then we'll set up work details. I think if we can get 5 people to agree to help, and Opaque's permission, we could start.

~Viz

Thanks Viz I knew I could count on ya

I'm willing to help; no problem. Hehe... I actually tend to get anal when it comes to organization, and I suppose now that this is my forum as well, I should care for it as such.

So... what to do, what to do...

HTML_Guru

That's three, we need two more! I tried to get vujsa to look at this post, but I don't think he did.

~Viz

We revamped the forums at IPBGaming and when It came time to move things and create new or different categories, I created a temporary category called "In Transit" I set it to allow replies but no new posts so that any existing discussions could continue. Then I moved any orphaned topics to the "In Transit" category. After the forum was finished being rearranged, the staff cleaned out the "In Transit" category and moved the topics to the related category.

But that isn't the hard part. The hard part is the outline. Nobody ever has an opinion on the outline until you say it is the one we are going to use.

I've aways thought that we should move the tutorials to the related category instead of it's own.

like so:

• programming
  
  
  • scripting
    
    
    • php
      
      
      • discussions
        
      • tutorials and how to's
        
      
      
    • Perl & CGI
      
      
      • discussions
        
      • tutorials and how to's
        
      
      
    
    
  
  
• Designing
  
  
  • Animation
    
    
    • discussions
      
    • tutorials and how to's
      
    
    
  • Graphic Design
    
    
    • discussions
      
    • tutorials and how to's
      
    
    
  
  

Tutorial sub-categories will be a little more difficult to moderate but I think it will make finding information easier for users. Also, each of the various tutorial sections would need to be set up individually for the credit sytem to automatically give more credits for the tutorials.

There are other things that have been added that don't really clean things up for us.
We have a hosting questions area presumably for non-hosted or new members but it gets the same type of questions as the host members category. Why do we have two different categories for BBS. One in the software section and one in the hosted members section.

There is a lot of resistance to organizing the forum properly. Not sure why but there is a lot.

vujsa

I think we just have a bunch of lazy staff around here, ! No, really, it seems like some are interested in the project, and others - well, others could care less.

Like I said, I'm all for it; point me to the right direction.

HTML_Guru

Here are my 2 cents from the optimization point of view.

Keep the important forums on top. Staff forum for our discussion can go down.

The forums which are on top are indexed faster by search engines which is key to the traffic that we recieve. Please make sure that Guests have READ access to the forums except the staff forum which demands privacy.


Yup, Me. I have been very lazy about the forums. I truely agree with this. But recently, I have lost trust with the techs for monitering and I have now started monitering the servers and setting up new boxes. Also, many of the support queries are all answered by me. Plus, there is billing issue too which I have to take care of.

If you need any help, please contact me on sales-<at>-xisto.dot.com

Jeez, sounds to me like your techs do barely anything at all! In which case, that wouldn't make you lazy, just pressed for time.

I'm not a hundred percent sure but it looks like OpaQue just told us to "Git R Dun". So as long as we follow that huge list of guidlines he just gave us, we can do as we please.

OpaQue, are there any reall problems associated with moving the various Tutorial sub-categories to the related category?

vujsa

Unfortunately only Administrators can organize the forums... moderators are responsable for the queued posts! lol... and the moving of topic etc., but the overall view is all the administrators' problems... lets point and laugh! lol... joking, but some of the descriptions are a bit... detailed and long

Hmm.. if that's the case, it's a good thing we have moonwitch working with us. Moon, you do have forum move and whatnot priveleges, right? Haven't you been made a full admin by now? Anyway, I'm working on creating a text representation of the current situation that we can mess with, we really need to plan before we do anything. Keep posting ideas.

~Viz

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