There is an increased tendency for people, even some senior members, to post irrelevant topics in the wrong sub forum....ranging from accessories/mods in the Dealer forum to personal holidaymaking experiences in the E60 discussion forum.
The main impetus for this is the fact sometimes it's difficult to find something your interested in when you "Search" something. The search engine goes all over the place. This has been my experience from the past.

Anyways, apart from keeping our admins busy with increased workload/housekeeping, I get sometimes annoyed being faced with irrelavant topics because some people want immediate and/or maximum exposure in a high profile sub forum. Or are just ignorant, I don't know.

I'm not sure if I ever have done this myself (can't remember 2 years back), but surely it doesn't take much to evaluate the correct sub forum and apply a posting. Keeps subforums interesting, dedicated and easy to find/link with appropriate data.

Just a thought.

 

You're right Andy, but unfortunately you posted this in the correct sub-forum which means that very few people will end up seeing it.

Although you are correct in your points, I think the problem could be minimized if the search function was improved. For example, it would be nice to be able to search within a search results page. You should also be able to search on words that are part of an attachment's name.

Also, it would be nice to search by more than one member name -- for example, there are times when I know of a topic that two members participated in. It would be nice to put both the member names in some search field and return a list of all topics that contain postings from both members.

Sorry to hijack this thread Andy, I'm just venting about the mediocre search capability of the forum software. As this board continues to grow, I'm finding that it's becoming harder and harder to find specific topics using the search function.

Clearly, if people posted things in the correct forums as you suggest, it would be a big help. The other part of that is that people need to read all the forums and not just the "main" one. (Or use the "view new posts" feature which is, in my opinion, the only way to go.) I think that since many people only read the main forum, they figure that's where they should post anything they want...

 

I agree with both of you. And, Andy, yes, if we all would do what you say it would be great. Another problem is that even if a post is moved, it's "ghost" stills takes a line on, for example, the first page--resulting in pertinent posts being pushed over the falls before their time. Maybe the mods could indicate by sticky that if an acceptable post disappears, then it has been moved to the appropriate sub forum. On the other hand, if they didn't move/"disappear" posts frequently, then no behavioral change will occur. Maybe they could give authority to some they trust to move posts on their own volition. I don't know how to solve the problem of getting others to check out the sub forums regularly. Another possibility would be to close threads in the wrong place and add a standard message asking the post to repost in the appropriate forum. This approach would at least attach minor penalty to posting in the wrong forum. And, now that I think about it x points could be taken away for posting in the wrong forum. The close-the-thread approach doesn't obviate the problem of lingering ghosts. But also points could be taken if a post is "disappeared" rather than being moved leaving its "ghost."

 

Yep, correct points from both...

I have seen on other sites, admins being more strict on informing, closing and moving posts in a clinical way.
Although I prefer the more discreet "moved" from our admins, the other method really forces the point and it is imprinted in your mind to be aware where you post. I guess we as members are accountable as a total and whenever an obvious wrong post appears it should be politely mentioned in that post.

The forum is so great with a wealth of info - but if it is chaotic (ie. no respect for where you are posting) it loses out points from it's prestige.

And, yes Rudy, agree with the points on the enhanced search function.

 

I used to move posts around on a daily basis but I'm not sure what's happened now. Not so much laziness, but it's very very time consuming. We need to do a really major cleanup around here though. Perhaps it's finally time to add a couple new moderators. I actually had two to four specific people in mind, two from here in the USA and two from Europe. I'll need to talk to Dave about that. We'll probably add two moderators to begin with.

As for moving topics ... When a topic is moved it leaves a link in the original sub-forum however every so often I run a mass-prune to delete those links so moved topics don't confuse the search feature. I used to not delete those links but with IPB 2.0.x (or 2.1.x I don't recall exactly) they finally made it easy to do a mass-delete on them so now I do.

 

People really try to slog through without using that function?

 

Seems like a good idea Mark, obviously with such a growing forum, some admin help will make sure the forum keeps it's ongoing reputation.

 

I don't think the majority of people know about it...

 

I do. Well, just recently I've been using it for the past 2 months. Yes, it took me that long to figure it out. And, I wasn't a specialist 2 months ago.