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[ravaught]

I for one get entirely disgusted with all of the bland, useless, unhelpful comments about *search the forum before posting*, almost moreso than I do with redundant threads. So, before I get fooked:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=31510.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=75629.msg1902465#msg1902465
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=28876.msg369503#msg369503


Without trying to rehash some of the taglines from the other thread, the short and simple suggestion is to make generic subboards within the forum.

Combat
Magic
Workshops
RAWs
Machines
etc etc, however you want to break it down, and then let one (or more) of us who are willing to bite the bullet and sort this mess out. From then on, you post your suggestion to the relevant board. Not only would this help with basic house keeping, but it would also add another layer of filtering to the search engine. If you are thinking of posting something about breaking tables in combat, you would search under combat for breaking tables without having to worry about the posts from some workshop thread asking about how to repair tables that break.

More to the point, hot topics for each category could be stickied in their respective thread to encourage ongoing discussion.

[NW_Kohaku]

Those wouldn't be terribly useful categories, as there would likely be plenty of overlap, like powered workshops functionally being the same thing as machines, and vice versa.  Further, almost any suggestion will probably have a raw component to it.

Anyway, a big part of the problem is that the "one of us" who has to bite the bullet would be the moderator of the forum, as only moderator power lets you do this sort of mass moving of threads, and the only moderators are Toady and his brother... and they don't particularly have time for much moderating, and they aren't hiring more moderators in here.

[ravaught]

So don't move them. Leave the old suggestions board as an archive, research only, and create the sub-boards empty. I know that the categories I posted up were rather useless, that is why I said "or however you want to break them down." The core of the idea is still valid. Toady & Threetoe can create new boards without moving anything of the old threads. They can set the categories in whatever manner Toady thinks will best accomodate his developers notes/plan. Hell, the way he breaks things down might actually be a clue as to how he is sectioning things off in the code itself and help us tailor our comments to suit.

[thisisjimmy]

What if, instead of making people choose a single category to post under, people were able to choose one or more tags to categorize their posts.  It makes it much easier to deal with suggestions that would fall under multiple categories.  For example, a thread about using magic in combat would be tagged with 'Combat' and 'Magic'.  There would be a fixed list of tags to choose from.

Then we could allow people to filter the forum by tags.

This is assuming Toady or someone else is able and willing to modify the forum's functionality.  It looks as though it was designed to be customizable: http://custom.simplemachines.org/