Something to think about

All those stats show is that 1) Football is the primary sport that people are interested in and 2) If you keep everything in one place, that place will have the most hits.

Despite the fact that there is already an ongoing discussion in the Suh thread about his latest accident, gobiggergoredder started a new thread about the accident. The new thread has 257 views, while the original Suh thread has 23,846 views. If we're going to use the chart above as a guide, then without question the new thread should go in the original Suh thread.

The Steele thread and the Stoops thread are about different people, but they're about the same topic - our next Defensive Coordinator. But wait, there's more! Because we don't just have those two threads already discussing the next DC, we now have a third - Do you think Eckler will come back started by huskerjch.

The question is, what is the best way to foment discussion? Is it to have individual threads, where you go from thread to thread to talk about the next DC like having a lunch of several different dishes at the food court in the mall? Or is it better to have it all in one place, like getting lunch at a buffet line?

I don't get the point about "hard to find" parts of the discussion. If you know what you're looking for, how is the search function not finding it? And how would having each subject in a different thread make it easier to find?

Let's say you want to find info about Suh's contract. Is it easier to find it in its own thread, buried 130 pages back than if it was all part of the giant Suh thread, and if so, how? If you're not using the search function, you're just hunting and guessing, right?

Edit - that's now four threads about the Defensive Coordinator position. LINK

 
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Forums

I think those stats show that one forum completely dominates all others in terms of "eyes on."

If we segment off former huskers discussion to their own separate forum, it is not going to get near the amount of traffic as "Husker Football". The same doesn't really apply to threads. The most recently posted in threads are going to get the most traffic. Husker Football gets the most visits because it's always up there, and whether Former Huskers exists or not, it is going to be the one visited most often.

Segmenting off Former Huskers just means more work to reach discussion of Suh, Helu, etc. Do we want or need that? They are not too distinct - I can see an argument for this if we had fewer forums to begin with. If we were a Husker Football board only, we could have "Football" "Recruiting" "Former Huskers" in the Sports section, and be done with it. Adding another forum for people to browse through means that still others will also take hits.

Maybe as a "Husker Football" sub-forum? But how many threads is that going to get per year? 20? 30? Many of which could be consolidated. One for every former Husker? I think there are some other issues with Former Huskers (maybe we should start a thread just for that in here :) ), like the confusion it causes ('when do players become former Huskers?' even when we had that forum, pre-draft talk stayed in Husker Football).

DC threads

Yeah, looking at it more, having one thread for potential DCs could make sense. Or we could lock all the current ones, make a new catch-all DC thread, and say from now on posts would go in there. Otherwise, merging them all would give you three pages of perhaps difficult-to-follow discussion. I don't know, just throwing ideas out there.

Locked the Ekeler thread by the way. Don't think it is going to go very far. I agree with you about the consolidation now.

Search Feature

Are you talking about the forum search feature? If you mean ctrl+F, you'd have to first navigate to the right page, which as threads get long, becomes unweildy.

If you mean the forum search, that returns threads. I mean, let's say the Suh car crash thread didn't exist and you wanted to find where in the Suh thread that discussion is. You can search for "suh car crash" and it would just return the giant Suh thread, among some other totally unrelated ones. You're no better off than you were before you went to do the search.

You could click on "advanced search options" and find the 'show as posts' settings, but is that amount of clicking really necessary when it could just be its own thread?

 
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Of course Husker Football dominates others. Everything about the most popular sport in the school is in that forum. But that doesn't mean that's a better solution, it's just putting everything in one bucket.

I don't know what to say about the search function. If it's too much work to use advanced search to find the subject you want.... is it really that important to find? You have to click your mouse what, two more times? Three? If you go to google and use huskerboard as a keyword, then search for your subject of choice, it comes up pretty easily. I just don't get the "too much work" angle. It's pretty easy.

For the record, I do realize I'm posing two opposite arguments here - that threads should be combined, and that forums should be separated. It just makes more sense to me.

 
I think the way most folks visit the Board is to go to their favorite forums and quickly scan the topics on the first page. If they see what they are looking for, they post to it. If not, they create new topics.

Personally, I would think all the information about Suh would be separate threads. Yes, they all relate to Suh, but they all concern different issues. When someone came to the board the last few days, they'd look to see if there were threads about the suspension or the wreck. Seeing none, they post 'em. I say let them, for those reasons.

As for the defensive coordinator, to me that would be merged into a single thread entitled something like, "Who will be our next defensive coordinator?"

Just my thoughts.

 
The question becomes, what is the threshold of "too many threads" about a particular subject. Presuming we decide to let most new threads stay, at what point do you say "Sixth threads and counting on the bowl game is too many" or six threads and counting (our current number of threads on the DC) is too many" ?

We already have people pointing out in the current threads that there is an ongoing discussion in a previous thread.

I suppose the bigger question is, do we cater more to the frequent users or to the casual users?

 
I think it's more based on events than person. By that, I mean that the defensive coordinator search is an event - one thread. Get all the names in there and all the discussion. With Suh, there are a number of events - each deserves it own thread. That's the best balance I can come up with between mega-threads verses too many duplicate threads.

 
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