Forum Hall of Fame

Galt · Post by **Galt** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 6:10 am

2 of the main components of a successful online community are (1) tons of user-generated content and (2) excellent filters. This online community currently has #1.

The mountain of content becomes incredibly valuable once users have the ability to quickly find what they are looking for. The SMF search feature is OK; I've used it with some success. One great way to filter online content is with user-generated tags. This could be complicated and costly (but it would be great). One filter that I think would be very useful to many members, and cheap to implement, is a "hall of fame". I challenge the SMF veterans to put together a list of the all time top 10 or 20 SMF articles. This would be a great starting place for new members!

If this works out, I'd be happy to share my ideas about other potential filtering mechanisms.

rustyblade · Post by **rustyblade** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 6:51 am

Did you just volunteer to go through 170,000 posts and pick out the best ones? Great idea, let me know when you are finished.

Alternatively, just look at all of Gordon's posts and you pretty much have the best posts...

Bob · Post by **Bob** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:21 am

rustyblade wrote:Did you just volunteer to go through 170,000 posts and pick out the best ones? Great idea, let me know when you are finished.

Alternatively, just look at all of Gordon's posts and you pretty much have the best posts...

LOL. I think you'll make the Duke blush, Richard, but there's a kernel of truth there.

salbev · Post by **salbev** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 8:15 am

rustyblade wrote: Alternatively, just look at all of Gordon's posts and you pretty much have the best posts...

i actually have done that. yasuo's as well. some of Joe Lerch's and also some of yours, too, Richard. i found it incredibly educational in terms of developing technique and dealing with newbie problems and very instrumental in choosing a lot of what i have now in my collection. and all from the comfort of my home in a chair.

rustyblade · Post by **rustyblade** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 8:33 am

salbev wrote:
rustyblade wrote: Alternatively, just look at all of Gordon's posts and you pretty much have the best posts...
i actually have done that. yasuo's as well. some of Joe Lerch's and also some of yours, too, Richard. i found it incredibly educational in terms of developing technique and dealing with newbie problems and very instrumental in choosing a lot of what i have now in my collection. and all from the comfort of my home in a chair.

And if you want a good laugh and educate yourself in literacy, Bargepole makes a good read. I think. I'm still trying to decipher some of his posts.

Cigar Dan · Post by **Cigar Dan** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 8:41 am

salbev wrote:i actually have done that. yasuo's as well. some of Joe Lerch's and also some of yours, too, Richard. i found it incredibly educational in terms of developing technique and dealing with newbie problems and very instrumental in choosing a lot of what i have now in my collection. and all from the comfort of my home in a chair.

I find myself missing John's participation. I consider him to be an early mentor in my Gillette education.

Johnnie · Post by **Johnnie** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:06 am

I think searching is where the fun comes in. It's like going to an antique store. If everything was in plain site, it wouldn't be as fun. If we posted the top 10 or 20 articles that contained all the information you need then we'd be wikipedia not a forum.

If you'd like to volunteer to search the top 10 or 20 articles please be my guest. We simply don't have the time. This is a hobby, not our daily job. If you'd like to do it let me know and we can talk further.

J

Pauldog · Post by **Pauldog** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 3:42 pm

How was the search function set up? Is it simply a built-in part of the off-the-shelf software that was used to build the forum?

Post by **VinceFX** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 4:19 pm

Pauldog wrote:How was the search function set up? Is it simply a built-in part of the off-the-shelf software that was used to build the forum?

Yup, the search is pretty standard. It's a core component of the phpBB software that powers this forum. I'm hesitant to tinker with it right now but I'll definitely put this on the roadmap.

I do believe in making it easy to find content. That might mean a 'hall of fame" as has been suggested or a more robust integration with a premium search engine. Time will tell.

Vince

With The Grain · Post by **With The Grain** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 4:45 pm

been a while since ive been over to the fountainpennetwork.com but i think they have simple sticky posts in each forum with links to informative threads that were posted at one point or another, something like that i think would work here pretty easily. The search function here is very useable but it seems to take some knowledge of what you're looking for beforehand, ie i can find nearly all of the posts i want becuase i can recall keywords within them that would only be used in that particular thread or a few others but i can understand how someone searching from scratch might find it a pain not knowing those keywords. Being able to search titles alone and this hall of fame idea i think are both good to keep in mind down the road.

Galt · Post by **Galt** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 6:43 pm

Thanks for consider my idea guys. What I had in mind was not a huge, time-consuming project. I was imagining that some of the old-timers here could probably name a few of their favorite posts right off of the top of their heads. Perhaps 4 or 5 of you could just list the links to those posts right on this thread. Then an admin could spend a few minutes throwing them together into a list and linking to it from one of the top-level pages. I do not know how much work that would entail, so please stop me if this is asking too much. I'm obviously proposing this because I'd like to find the best posts, but I'm also motivated by my desire to improve this community because it has helped me greatly.

Thanks,
Chris

Pauldog · Post by **Pauldog** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:24 pm

Now that I'm looking at it more, I see that there are some useful search functions that I had overlooked before. I can probably get close to the functionality I'm used to with Google and eBay.

verde · Post by **verde** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 11:34 pm

Vince & Johnnie,

I worked on a phpBB modification a few years back to do this exact thing. It worked in two parts.

The first part could be set up to either allow all member to rate threads thus allowing the mods and admin to flag "hall of fame" posts (I think we had called it favorites in production) the other option was a simple check box that users could click to recommend addition to the list.

The second part was an admin screen where mods/admin would quickly be able to preview the top rated/suggested threads and approve or deny their entry into the favorites.

The favorites were automatically moved to a separate forum which would generally be locked to prevent new threads from being started by users.

Did any of that make sense? Regardless, I'm sure I still have the code on one of my machines. I will try putting it up on a test site, and make sure it all plays well with the latest release of phpBB. If you guys are interested I'd be glad to share this feature with the SMF community.