Something to think about

E

Eric the Red

Team HuskerBoard
Guys....gotta promise you can not take this the wrong way. I swear this is not aimed at any individual (Lance :lol: ) ...no seriously, I want to throw something out to you guys and see what you think.

I've posted a few new threads in the past few weeks that had already been posted. We did what was logical and merged them where the initial discussion took place.

Now I think I'm a lot like many of our members. I might be on maybe 30 (Maybe an hour) minutes a day during the season and 15 minutes or so a day in the offseason. I look/scan the first page of the Main football forum for something that stands out. Some interesting news/rumor (regardless of how ridiculous) and scan/read the article, view a reply or two and move on to the next thread. I try to get my Husker news quick, see if there is anything urgent or interesting in our forum and then move on with my day or actual night. I spend an equal if not more time viewing our Leadership forum and reviewing our compeitions sites. I wish i could spend many hours on here, but wife, kids, job sort of get in the way.

Now, on to my point. When I posted those, I looked throughout the entire first page,...didn't see anything that related to what I wanted to post....so I posted it. We merged or moved it because we are well aware of where this was posted. I will never look through that SUuuuuhh thread flipping through 13 + pages to see if the article is posted. I think the other thread dealt that was moved dealt with a bowl possibility. Again didn't see anything related and I wasn't going to flip through pages to see.

Question: Is it the members responsibility to look through threads and replies to see if something is posted or is our responsibility to make things as easy as possible for our members to see all info, threads, titles as quickly as possible? Or a combo of each?

PS....I didn't need a bunch of 'yes' men telling me what I need to hear on this (BTW, i don't think you are, but always good to repeat). My goal is to help this board be the best board ever. Tell me what you think.

 
yes. :)

It would be helpful if members would glance at the first page first, just to limit the number of duplicate threads we have to deal with, and not as a responsibility to be punished for not living up to. Maybe there's something we can do to make it easier for members to do this, but duplicate threads are an unavoidable issue to a fair extent, and we will just have to merge them. Unless it's obvious, though, merging is often a judgment call. I think the Suh thread was an especially tough call. That giant 13-page thread seemed like a catch-all for various Suh updates, but something specific and more newsworthy like a major article talking about Suh (with fiery quotes from Slaus) should have deserved it s own thread. On the other hand, the same topic was also discussed in the catch-all Suh thread.

I think the other thing to pay attention to is sometimes people get confused, or maybe feelings hurt, if their threads disappear. If good (albeit parallel) discussion is happening in two places at once I think it's sometimes OK to leave it, depends a lot on the initial post. I think generally, news articles can get their own thread. Threads about the same article should be merged. Other stuff is either/or. I merged a thread this morning into Nexus's bowl discussion thread.I forget now what it was. Normally I might have left that well enough alone, but the discussion wasn't going anywhere because all the posts were pointing to the bowl thread anyway or "IBTL" (I deleted a few of those after merging).

I guess as a general rule I let where the discussion is going dictate whether to merge or not, and err on the side of leaving threads up. You can go crazy trying to perfectly streamline and organize anything, and also, we don't want to make members feel like they are always doing something wrong by getting their threads merged. Tough to balance that against keeping the board clean sometimes, though. Sorry if that didn't say too much one way or the other.

 
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There definitely is a balance to the merge/not merge situation. I believe that it is incumbent on the member to check to see if the subject is already under discussion before posting a new thread. If the situation is more than 30 minutes old, you can almost bet it is. However, those drive-by posters that you're talking about, Eric, often don't take the time to do that. They want a quick discussion and they don't want to go through the hassle of digging through the forum.

Unfortunately, that annoys other members, and you inevitably end up with people linking to the first thread and griping at the new thread guy for starting a new thread. That led me to post "To merge or not to merge" in the Board Feedback forum. Every person replying said to merge.

 
As zoogies said, it's a balancing act. But as knapplc noted, he's asked specifically about merging and the members that responded all indicated they wanted it.

My take on it is this - if we don't do some merging, everyone will eventually stop trying to see if the topic already exists, and someone visiting, say, once a day, will have pages of unread topics to wade through.

If you can catch a duplicate topic early enough (say, the original post and perhaps only one or two replies), then I'd recommend locking it with a note that it is continued in THIS THEAD, with the words THIS THREAD being a hyperlink to the other topic. However, if two threads have been going on for a while, you almost have to merge them or lose some good discussion.

Obviously, all of that goes out the window under certain circumstances. For example, after a loss there are always tons of duplicate threads. At one time, my goal was to merge them and clean up the board. Of late, I've changed that - let the threads stand as a way for the members to work through the pain of the loss. Later, if necessary, merge them. But that's me.

If memory serves, when we haven't been fairly strict with merging, the board just jumps out of control, and people start bitching about it being difficult to read.

Perhaps what we need is a sticky about posting - please check to make sure that there's not already a thread on the subject you want to post. If there is, please post to it. That kind of thing. Won't stop the "fly-bys" as knapplc noted, but it might help some.

 
This is great but frustrating....all of you make great, valid points.

Let me look around at other boards and see what i can find. I'll look at any random boards that have to do w/ football or nothing. Maybe someone else has fgred this out.

i want the board to be clean, organized and intelligent, but cater to many different types of posters.

 
I think the thing all of us want to avoid is 4 different threads of the same topic with no discussion going on in all the threads. If our members would look around a little bit more I think it would help the problem. We merge those threads and we usually have a decent discussion going on.

 
knapplc said:
Who are you talking to, ISRP? Eric, zoogies or me? Or all of us?
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All valid points. I tend to side with leaving the topics unless they are truly duplicates. Many topics that seem identical on the surface can have very different conversations within which can lead to very contrasting discussions.

 
Here's a thought:What do we think about locking the Suh thread and others like it? i'm afraid the casual message board fan will shy away from coming here because they can't get the latest Husker news quickly.

 
Eric the Red said:
This is great but frustrating....all of you make great, valid points.

Let me look around at other boards and see what i can find. I'll look at any random boards that have to do w/ football or nothing. Maybe someone else has fgred this out.

i want the board to be clean, organized and intelligent, but cater to many different types of posters.
Click to expand...
I can't find sh#t

 
Locking the giant Suh thread?

Maybe - at some point it gets too big and is unweildy.

Or maybe we can move it to another forum and keep it for the little things, like "hey! he did this in the game 5 minutes ago" and "hey! he did this other thing in the game" and "hey! they talked about him on sports center" while specific news articles can get new threads. Helu gets his own thread for being the starting RB, and his own thread for his TD run, etc - but any news on Suh is in page 12, 13, 14, or something like that, for people to dig through.

 
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You have to strike a balance, and that's going to be hard to come by. And you will definitely not please everyone.

Right now we have three threads in the Football forum about Defensive Coordinators. The monster thread about our current DC, Carl, one about Mike Stoops, and a new one about Kevin Steele. The tendency has been that, once these copycat threads start, they proliferate until there are five, six, seven of them on the front page at once. The argument is that they are not similar threads - that thread is about Mike Stoops, and my thread is about Kevin Steele.

The Carl thread should just stay about Carl. But the other two, about Steele and Stoops, could be merged. I would merge them, but we could let them go as an experiment and see what happens. It won't be conclusive, but it could be enlightening.

As far as the Suh thread, why would we lock it? Just to reset? I don't get the "too big" point, because if there's anything you're looking for, the search function will find it pretty easily. I would have merged the Helu threads but this discussion is underway and I let it go while we're making this decision.

Not necessarily related to this subject, but I think the Suh & Helu threads are a good example of why we should have a Former Husker subforum again. I think that's a feature we're going to need as we grow, and there's no benefit to making it after we absolutely need it.

 
I think the threads about different DCs can stay. They are talking about different people so it would be confusing to have those conversations jumbled together.

I don't know if the Suh thread needs a reset but it isn't that easy to look stuff up. You would have to click through a bit of stuff to find where a particular discussion starts.I think in many cases there is an argument you could make for consolidation and organization, but it may not be necessary. Threads tend to die naturally. I think one thing we could do, to make things easier for people to sort through, is reduce the number of topics displayed per page. And many prune the 'pinned topics' list in the main forum even more aggressively, but only if we figure out a way to work the 'Articles' feature of the board.

But yea, reducing the # of topics could make it easier to sort through, and let the uninteresting threads die a quicker death. Users browsing won't be quite so overwhelmed with options. It's set to 50 topics right now. How about 25,30?

As for Former Huskers, I think the problem is having too many forums. I think this is a good argument against it:

topic view.png

 
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