Finding things in a forum is too difficult, solutions?
One driving force behind the RLD web site redesign is how hard it to find information within a message board. The redesign will not really change the basics of a forum but I've been thinking hard about how to organize/group/manage information so that it can easily be found, shared and to avoid duplicate topics and separate conversations (this is the fun part for me).
A redesigned web site will help but the other part of the equation is how to rewrite/rework/modify content (topics and posts). Obviously, I don't want to rewrite someone's post but at the same time after a topic gets several pages long it can be hard to get the "answers" that are spread out across replies.
I'm solving is the trouble of hunting for critical information. Do you feel this is a problem in the first place? (Actually, data suggests this is a problem but wanted to get your thoughts eitherway)
Assuming it is a problem...
One idea I had was to add an "overview" section to each post that would contain the meat of the post at the top, followed by the thread as-is below it. So I would monitor a thread and once there was enough critical information I would write a sort of highlights/recap of the thread that would appear on the first page. Thus when someone clicks on the topic of "How to remove chrome" they would see the how-to suggestions immediately rather than having to scroll through what could be dozens of replies.
Another idea was to simply highlight key posts within a thread, like a colored background or something. This would give readers a cue as they scan through a post. Which posts get highlighted would be selected by me or a moderator. I'm not keen on the vote up/down that some message boards have...mostly because RLD isn't a straight up Q&A site...so I'd like to avoid that.
Ideally, either one of these ideas (or some other idea) would make it so when someone new comes to RLD wanting information they can find it easily without having to navigate pages of posts or jump from topic-to-topic.
Any thoughts or ideas you have are appreciated. I know some of you don't care and are happy with how things are, and that's fine, I'm happy that you're happy Yet I'd love to see RLD become an easy resource for racers in addition to a fun place to talk shop about our toy cars. Change is coming and I want those changes to be more than just a new coat of paint, your feedback will help.
Discussion
Had another thought! When you speak of forums, boards and the community (of threads) - what is your context? I spend most of my time in the community threads - the boars seem to be the same thing. One area you didnt mention is the blog - to me it seems to describe what you are waning to do in your post.
Sorry...the forum, boards and community are all the same thing, just different names. Thanks for your feedback on the search. I'm not putting to much focus on search in the redesign but it will work well, I think. Data shows the search function isn't used much. However, now the search will (eventually) encompass the entire site - so one search will find you posts, articles, cars and tracks.
The blog...currently that is separate from the message boards, yet the plan with the redesign is to combine them. So a new "blog" article will be posted in the forum where it can benefit from more comments and exposure. That means I'll have to rewrite many of the blog posts but that's all for the better, honestly. They're all due for an update.
I follow what you are saying, but I would more appreciate you working on the existing search functions. In general it seems you cannot search until you get into a forum community. Often times if I do a two or more word search - it cannot find anything. The advanced search works better, but it is hard to access and then you have to search again to narrow down the threads it does find.
Lately I have noticed that the latest button will not pull up any posts sometimes and mostly only posts made within the last couple of hours when you are logged in. If you are not logged in it seems to pull more threads ((same group as the recent posts button you can find in some forums.)