I wouldn't mind seeing a category called CURRENT CHALLENGE SCORES (to house all the 'How we doin' questions). Then, I would like this new category added to preferences and made 'selectable' so as I could TURN IT OFF!
(Maybe this should have gone in the 'Rant' category)
That wold certainly allow users to optimize DPC to their personal preferences and to see faster what's going on in the forums that really interest you.
Like the idea of having that individual forums for that.
Also the idea of having a "turn it off" feature for all forums would be nice. Should be easier to program (I would guess) since there is already a on/off switch for rant.
Having spoken with Drew numerous times previously aboout creating new folders in general, his philosophy is the fewer folders, the better. Generally speaking, he does not want to create a new folder unless there is a significant amount of activity.
By way of comparison, each folder had the following number of threads which were active between 01-January-2005 and now:
Individual Photograph Discussion: 1,213
General Discussion: 774
Hardware: 764
Photography Discussion: 647
Q&A: 593
Current Challenge: 413
Challenge Results: 207
Out & About: 161
Software: 133
Rant: 132
Challenge Suggestions: 120
Web Site Suggestions: 103
Site Council Discussion: 102 **
Tips & Tricks: 94
Member Discussion: 83 *
DPCPrints: 42 *
The Critique Club: 30
Administrator Announcements: 9 +
Tutorials: 8 **
How'd They Do That: 6 ++
Member Interviews: 2 ++
* - Open to members only
** - Open to Site Council only
+ - Only Site Council may originate threads, anyone may reply
++ - One thread is automatically created for each tutorial, interview or how'd they do that article. No other threads can be created in these folders.
Now, the number of threads in the same period for a Challenge Scores folder would be about 26-30, and could never be expected to grow much beyond that for the forseeable future. Given that level of activity, creating a new folder just doesn't seem to make much sense.
-Terry
Message edited by Manic - fixing the * errors ;o).
Choose and hide certain forums? Are you guys all going lazy on me? I think we're all spoiled by the 'recent forum activity' box on the main page. Don't you all remember the good old days where you had to sift through the messages one by one -- if you wanted another category, you clicked on it.
To be honest, I wouldn't personally mind if there weren't ANY categories just one big free-for-all. When you create too many categories, there's just too many places to look -- which is the reason I like the 'recent forum activity' box so much. You all know you can set that to 30 posts, right?
A lot of message boards go through the classical 'I need more sections' disease and then their boards just get harder to follow and less likely to receive visitors.
I think the layout here is perfect. There's just the right amount for the traffic the site receives and I barely, if ever, go browse the forums by category any more. Of course I do check here quite often, but still.
I do use the recent forum list on my home page and have had it set to show 30 posts since that was available.
However, given that I am less interested in a number of forum categories, being able to specify that I'm not interested in them would mean more of that 30 would be of interest to me.
To me, it's not about needing the correct forum in which to post (and I'm not that fussed about whether additional ones are introduced or not, in most cases, but about being able to filter by type of content to better focus on what I'm interested in.
Better time management = more time to spend doing the things that interest me such as voting, commenting, reading threads of interest, relaxing in DPC Fanatics...
