Dave said:
>> I have some ideas on improving this system, but I'm not ready to do anything with it yet. ...
>> But we will have some ideas coming at some point in the future.
I'm eager to see what Dave comes up with: clearly he knows how to design websites to incline them toward particular purposes.
I had an idea, wacky and probably not simple enough to be usable, but I want to toss it out there. (I like keywords and filters.)
Give each large forum a short kist of keywords, maintained by the moderator to keep it short and relevant. Probably one keyword would be 'general' or 'all' that matches any filter. Probably one keyword would mean "mostly chat". Another might mean "gardening-related but off-topic to this forum".
When a thread is started, give the poster the option of specifying certain keywords for that thread. (Default to "general" or "all".)
Let the moderator add or subtract keywords from each thread (for example, to handle thread drift and new keyword additions).
Give each ATP member a persistent filter for each forum.
This would be the list of keywords, with a checkbox for each keyword.
Usually a user would set her filter once for each large forum of interest, and edit it only seldom.
One button in each forum would turn my filter on and off for that forum ("See All Threads in this forum" vs. "See My Filtered Threads").
When entering a forum, OR-filter the thread titles displayed by keyword.
Either hide non-matching thread titles, or just move them below the matching titles.
I had to get that off my chest even if it adds too much complexity for too little benfit. But it would let one go into the "Seeds" forum and filter on collecting, trading or germinating. Or go into an "everything" forum and filter on soil, compost and bio-organic.
Besides an aid to daily browsing, it would let one hunt through many forums for a topic of interest, keyword-based instead of plain text-searching.
There might also be a forum-wide search feature where you could check any keyword from any forum, and display threads from any forum that contained any of those keywords. (That would make it desirable for forums themsleves to select most of their keywords from a site-wide-list of sugegsted keywords.)
Text-searching is so seldom practical unless the search tool jumps you right TOO the matches. Finding 50 threads with a phrase of interest is not that practical if you have to scroll through the whole thread or use a browser 'find on this page' when the thread has multiple pages.
Corey
