Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

You raise a very pertinant issue GD. I understand that it can be rather frustrating to wade through a fair bit of superfluous talk when looking for a specific piece of information. And ultimately I would love to find a way to get all of the important information that may be buried within posts, into a more accessible location.

However, I don't feel it's right to cut out the general discussions surrounding the important 'snippets', often it can be this banter that leads to new ideas and the posting of important information. I've also been a member of other boards where they have tried to trim out some of the more general chat and people got quite upset...

This is after all a 'discussion' board, and no discussion is generally all gold nuggets of information, there's always a bit of padding.

It would be nice if we could come up with a method to make things easier to find, perhaps finding the important bits and posting them into some seperate sticky topic perhaps that are at the top of each section...
Each section, the fish section for example could have a couple of stick topics that always stay at the top, fish health, fish requirements, fish breed information. These stay permanently at the top of the fish section, whenever someone finds some info amongst a discussion they think is very important, they can copy it and post it into the top sections... I don't know, have I lost everyone....

I'm open to suggestions as to how we can grab the most important information and make it more accessable, does anyone have any ideas? This is your board, for you to discuss things, I want it to be as useful as possible for everyone...

Thanks for bringing it up GD, this is something that is only going to become more and more difficult as time goes on.

Joel

Discussion is good, but sometimes we go off track...

But sometimes the tangent (off topic discussion) generates great ideas.

How to sort the wheat from the chaff is a bit of a prob ...

Would it be worth flagging "important stuff" on a monthly basis.

Create a separate " FAQ directory" that cannot be posted or written to by anyone other than a moderator, a directory that has several categories ... the categories consists of titles and it ONLY contains links to posts and threads relating to the particular subject.

Only prob .. someone has to be prepared to read EVRYTHING, categorize it and post the link under the appropriate heading .

I would put my hand up .. but I got too many people wanna piece of me already!

I think it adds to the good feeling of the community that has formed here. It lets the personalities in the forum show through. I have really enjoyed reading all the posts.

I think digging for the golden nuggets of info is part of the fun. The couple of times I have searched for info I have found it reasonably quickly.

I have also learnt more that I set out to on certain topics and discovered bits of info that have opened up areas that I didnt realise were important.

My vote is to keep all the posts and add a Read Only FAQ section as johnnie7au suggested with important facts. Thats if we can get experts on different topics adding to FAQ topics.

I'll go with that too, I don't think its meant to be an encyclopedia that you look up "fish" and get all the info on fish.

J7AU is also right about the tangents spawning new nuggets of info, as frustrating as it may be to find a great fish food idea in the harware section.

I guess the best we can do is keep the general banter to its own section, as much as is possible anyway, i mean i don't think we have to set up a polish exchange student topic, a few "funny" comments in a serious thread are ok in my book

I think the locked reference sticky is probably the only viable option. It need only contain links to other sections where something has popped up that was more applicable in another section. Eg: a link in the fish "sticky" pointing to a page in the hardware section that mentioned a fish food idea

If the board had a "move post" function it would be a different kettle of fish.

Joel, i also find the "search" function a little.........well i don't think its specific enough, it does find references to your key words, but i cant seem to see that it actually pin points it to a page, more like a topic that may contain 17 pages Might there be another seach "mod" available?

I like the idea that newbies would hopefully try and start at the begining anyway, you get more of a feel for the regulars and what they do and "who" they are.

Would it be possible with this board software used here for the moderators to somehow mark informational posts with a gold star or something like that? That way you could scroll through the whole thread but easily visually distinguish where the informational posts are?

The Digg website uses a voting scheme, where users' votes determine which threads go to the top, not sure if that mechanism can be adapted to this board, and per-post. Maybe we could vote a particular post into the "Hall of Knowledge and Fame"??

Dave, problem is that most of the posts in the seperate sections ARE informational. People have generally kept purely coversational topics in the general banter section.

I think the issue is that within the 20 pages of some topics there is good information that may be also relevant under a completely different section. That and that sometimes in conversation many usesul facts come up and while they are in the right section eg "fish" the original topic of "silver perch" doesn't highlight it.

Thats why i agree that the "sticky" message in each section would be good as you coule have things like "salt treatment for diseases" and then link to any and all pages that may have talked about it.

I think thats what the idea was anyway

One of the major traps of discussion groups like this is that we are likely to end up going over the same ground time and time again, particularly as new users join and ask the ame sorts of questions as we were asking 6 months back. The benefit of having an area that has all the key information is that we can point them to that instead of having to repeat or point to all sorts of different threads.

I also think that once people get to the point of deciding they are going to put a system together, then they should buy Joel's book as this may fill in some gaps for them. If they want to trawl through all the posts on the bulletin board they can probably manage without it, but I would not be inclined to answer questions time and time again that would easilly be coverred by reading the book.

I also have an idea that I think it would be worth while considerring EB and Steve. A number of us now have threads that deal with our systems and represent a good chronicle of our experiences, failures etc. Chances are new users will have the same sort of issues and some may want to look at putting together similar systems. Maybe some of these system threads could be put as stickies in the systems section. For this to work though, we would need to clean these system threads out, getting rid of all the superfluous stuff. This cleanup could be done by Steve or alternativelly maybe EB would be willing to give a couple of us moderator rights on a temporary basis to clean out our own system threads in preparation for putting them up as stickies.

I agree with VB.

Stickies should be like a best of and recommended reading. So someone wants to know about fish they jump to fish and there is the jade perch thread the silver perch thread etc at the top.

Don't really need to edit them

I've waded through over 200 web pages just to get my head around the hydro/bacteria thing as I thought of it then, having no resources at all.

Readings not so bad for people. You'd be surprised what may happen.

Yep, I think VB has it right. I like to try and read everything but it is becoming more difficult to do because of the sheer size of it all. I have found that ignoring some threads because they don't sound interesting can result in missing one little gem of info.
It would be helpful though if we long standing members of the Forum refrained (as much as poss) from straying off topic..... too much. It would help reduce the clutter a bit, but would reduce the fun a bit too I guess.

Also I find it a bit of a waste of time following a thread that a new person has put up which is just starting to ask the same old questions, they can't be blamed for that, everybody starts somewhere, so I think if new people could be encouraged to follow some sticky threads first then that would save them a lot of difficulty, and a lot of clutter on the Forum.
Perhaps new people could be blocked from putting up new threads untill they have had say, 15 posts or something !!! Can that be done ??? Perhaps that will cause them to look through existing threads in the beginning.
I would also be happy to help with moderating in some areas, perhaps Systems, or, How To Kill Jade Perch (do we have a section for that?)
Muzza

A post could always be deleted by the author.
When they feel its been done....
Good facts being saved in archives.

Another forum I'm a member of has the new members not allowed to post in anythign but a dedicated newbie section. This let's old members avoid the repeat questions and allows those who are happy to re-show the newbies the way to do so. It also cuts down alot of the clutter. It also helps the actual newbies to introduce themselves, as it's thier section
But I also like the idea of J7AU's with the seperate gold nugget collection.

I don't think I said anything about eliminating the rivetting byproduct chat (who would want to miss Steve's pyromaniac adventures or Stu's treatise on how to assault a cat properly) that emanates from some of these posts.

I was simply suggesting that it gets a bit trickly when you're wading through the thousands of posts looking for a piece of information......while (at the same time) performing CPR on a fish.

I don't underestimate the amount of work involved and I would be prepared to help in any way that I can.

In my opinion a forum is a place where we talk and discuss/exchange ideas and opinions. But after going through a thread with 9 pages to read about 4 posts with helpful information, i see GD's point. (although at some times it was quite entertaining)

all the ideas above seem good, but i think a place for articles (or stickies), with all the summarised important information is a good idea.

Maybe the mebers could nominate "nuggets of gold" either by placing a link to the text, or qouting them and the thread its in, into a stand alone "GOLDEN NUGGETS" thread, mods could then decide wether the nugget stays or is deleted or moved int a particular catogory thread - a bit like the Aquiponics commandments thread

Warren

I do believe that there needs to be a way of "getting to the point" section. I enjoy a good banter like all the rest. I also enjoy reading what others are saying, but when you want specific information, it is hard to find, especially with so many posts going up.