New rides area on the forum

[Elliot M]

Discussion counterpoints: So would this be just for announcements about new CR type rides? What happens if they become regular rides? Doesn't this create another place you have to look at to find out what's going on?

[Ben]

Have a more general question

Out of interest is the architecture/ screen views fixed ?

Obviously in an ideal world, you'd post the message under the relevant topic heading. General, Training etc

But human nature being what it is, the general page is the main one that gets used/viewed and rightly or wrongly etc more things get posted there.

So to me with the current views, it requires posters to maintain a discipline or admin users to have to make judgment calls

So aka google if it's not on the first page, first few items, then your ......

Maybe a change in architecture / screen views may encourage the user to post in the relevant sub forum ? or ways to easily filter

i.e can you group, expand, sort, use different colours/fonts ?

For example the first page being the latest 5 postings ? for each summary heading. Then with the ability to drill through that summary heading, i.e a complete view of all General, or Training postings etc.

[Phil H]

Re. Elliot's points: we already have "Routes", "Sportives and trips" and the current weekly CR thread. Sounds like there would be some overlap there.

Ben: RSS feed? Or maybe not.

There are some links on the board index for active topics/latest posts. I've never used them though.

[Elliot M]

I believe you can list the latest posts within each forum -- and then arrange forums hierarchically and roll up the latest posts to the level above, so that at the top level you get a combined summary of all recent posts in all areas. Not sure I've explained that well...

[Ben]

A new forum, called rides, sounds like a good idea to me in principal. It's just, as mentioned earlier, I think with the current structure/views there's a tendency to post/view general.

I'm not that technical so I wouldn't know whether an RSS feed or the description given by Elliot, would encourage users to post/view forums outside general.

[Elliot M]

It's not a great example (as it's a site about China in German) but this site has an example of what I believe is possible with the phpBB software out-of-the-box:

http://forum.chinaseite.de/

So at the top of the page you have the last 8 posts across all forums. Beneath that you have the index of all forums, as we do now. But unless (as Ben suggests) there's a way of showing say the last 5 posts from *each* forum, the latest posts area could end up just mirroring the top of the General forum...

I think you may need plugins to go further. Bear in mind I'm still working through the phpBB (forum software) docs.

[Ben]

Thanks Elliot for the example. So it's pretty simple, you just need to re-design the forum software, to make it more user friendly. Then launch it out to the world, should be 1/2 days work ?

[Jon C C on a Bianchi]

[quote="Phil Hawkes"]Re. Elliot's points: we already have "Routes", "Sportives and trips" and the current weekly CR thread. Sounds like there would be some overlap there.

[Keith]

People tend to look at the first thing on any list.

So have a "Rides" section before the "General" section.

Rides
General
Training
Racing
...

[Jon C C on a Bianchi]

[quote="Elliot M"]Discussion counterpoints: So would this be just for announcements about new CR type rides? What happens if they become regular rides? Doesn't this create another place you have to look at to find out what's going on?

[Jon C C on a Bianchi]

[quote="Keith"]People tend to look at the first thing on any list.

So have a "Rides" section before the "General" section.

Rides
General
Training
Racing
...

[Elliot M]

Fair enough, so the Rides forum would be for all club rides, whether ''official" CRs (so the weekly CR thread would go there), one-off 'official' specials eg Brighton, and any ad-hoc rides arranged by members..?

I think that's fair enough. I think "Routes" is a reference area for route info only. "Sportives and trips" is for "away fixtures" - rides arranged by other clubs/organisations, and/or requiring UK/intl travel to get to.

Concur on the order too; although there's the argument that Sportives/trips, Racing etc are also important. So General might end up at the bottom. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Edit: sure, should be in all evenings except Fri

[Elliot M]

One other point: do we move some/all existing ride related threads to the new forum?

[Jon C C on a Bianchi]

[quote="Elliot M"]One other point: do we move some/all existing ride related threads to the new forum?

[Dombo]

Nice one, Marco. Great idea.