Nailed topcs on this forum, Should we change the format? Options

[Pat Garvey]

Last night, as every other Friday for the last 12 years, I spoke for 2+ hours with my very best bud (35 years!), 1970 Neun vierzehn. We chitchat like old ladies every 2nd Friday about 914's, model railroad stuff, and ties to Cincinnati.

This time, a large part of the conversation was dedicated to the nailed threads of this forum. They are helpful (I hope), but disjointed (our opinion), and aren't a "ready reference". Oh, you can dig through them and maybe find the info you want, but you may need to dig through 2, 3 or more of them.

Here's our thought - and it means quite a bit of work, but may be worth it.

Instead or categorized 914 areas, which cover all years of 914's, what about re-sorting all the posts in those nailed threads to be model year specific? Instead of all engine compartments/interiors, etc being in one location, what about ALL items associated with a model & year 914 in one nailed thread?

Say you have a newly acquired, or in-resto 1970 914/6. Instead of searching through interior/engine/etc threads for info - we put everything in one nailed thread. You want info on '73 front bumper tits - go to the '73 models thread. Need to know what correct wheels are for a '72 four or six - go to the '72 thread.

With that in mind, what are your felings about the change? I would like to think of the nailed posts as a history binder for CW's of all vintages.

How would you structure it? All comments are welcomed and appreciated.
Pat

[smontanaro]

Guys, guys, guys... By setting up a static structure you're presuming how people are going to want to search the content. Also, by keeping all this within the 914world site you effectively require people to know about this site before searching. If you do something which exposes the site/forum to outside folk you stand a chance of snagging new people, make searches more flexible and provide the opportunity for this scheme to be easily used outside this one forum (garage, sandbox, etc).

Skip

[Pat Garvey]

Guys, guys, guys... By setting up a static structure you're presuming how people are going to want to search the content. Also, by keeping all this within the 914world site you effectively require people to know about this site before searching. If you do something which exposes the site/forum to outside folk you stand a chance of snagging new people, make searches more flexible and provide the opportunity for this scheme to be easily used outside this one forum (garage, sandbox, etc).

Skip

Skip, I'm a little unclear here.

Are talking about something similar to a wiki?

I can see the basic purpose, but Roadglue has done this & I doubt that it has increased the mebership there of any sigificance.

Please explain in detail to an idiot (that would be me) how this would work. Also, please help me understand how the World would have it's intellectual property preserved. I'm not challenging you, just need some help understanding your proposal.
Pat

[smontanaro]

Skip, I'm a little unclear here.

Are talking about something similar to a wiki?

Nope, just tagging posts/threads with meaningful keywords (meaningful to us, probably to other Porschephiles as well). I don't use del.icio.us much, but I do have a page with my bookmarks:

http://del.icio.us/smontanaro

Click on some of the tags in the right hand margin. I have two items in my toolbar related to del.icio.us. One allows me to tag the current page I'm viewing. For example, I visited this thread on front trunks just now:

http://www.914world.com/bbs2/index.php?showtopic=55355

I then selected the "post to del.icio.us" link in my Firefox toolbar. It prompted me with a form to enter notes and tags. I skipped the notes. In the tags field I entered:

porsche 914 1970 front trunk originality

It then returned me to the thread. I revisited my smontanaro page and refreshed. It shows me in the right hand margin that I have now used several new keywords (e.g., "1970", "originality", etc).

Now, once again on the smontanaro page I enter

porsche trunk

It lists the page I tagged as well as other pages tagged with those two keywords, none of which seem to have anything to do with 914s. Now search for

porsche 914 trunk

Voila! Only the page I tagged shows up.

Now, how might this work in practice? The easiest way would be to convince one of our friendly neighborhood admins to add a del.icio.us link to the page template for the thread display. That way anybody who wanted to could easily associate keywords with any and all pages that interested them.

Skip