Design of the Forum

[arlrider]

I personally wish that this forum would have a little more division by topic. Generally (pun intended), everything ends up in “general discussion”. It’s OK now where in absolute terms there aren’t that many posts, but if membership grows it could be a bit unwieldy.

[Tim Kelley]

@arlrider 97966 wrote:

I personally wish that this forum would have a little more division by topic. Generally (pun intended), everything ends up in “general discussion”. It’s OK now where in absolute terms there aren’t that many posts, but if membership grows it could be a bit unwieldy.

So what’s your suggestion?

[rcannon100]

@Tim Kelley 97967 wrote:

So what’s your suggestion?

All participants with more than 2349 posts get a free bicycle!!!

[Tim Kelley]

@rcannon100 97968 wrote:

All participants with more than 2349 posts get a free bicycle!!!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]6910[/ATTACH]

[jabberwocky]

@Steve O 97960 wrote:

I was recently informed of a very similar forum in Chicago called The ChainLink.

Check it out. I like the navigation and front page look better than this one. Also photo albums and calendar are nice features. Our ride pics thread is fun, but it’s a challenge to go back and find old photos. There are other features that work better there than here, too, IMO.

This is not a criticism of our very fine and wonderful Forum providers (thank you!). Just a chance to take a look around and see if we can learn from others.

I don’t really care for it. Its a bit too cluttered for my taste. Forums should be clean and simple.

@arlrider 97966 wrote:

I personally wish that this forum would have a little more division by topic. Generally (pun intended), everything ends up in “general discussion”. It’s OK now where in absolute terms there aren’t that many posts, but if membership grows it could be a bit unwieldy.

Honestly, I feel like this forum has too many subforums already. I’ve had the situation a few times recently where I wanted to find a thread I remember reading a few weeks ago, and I had to click through a dozen roughly similar forums to find it. The number of subforums should be just enough to separate topics and aid organization, but not so many that you have to guess multiple times about where a thread will be.

[Tim Kelley]

@jabberwocky 97971 wrote:

I don’t really care for it. Its a bit too cluttered for my taste. Forums should be clean and simple.

Honestly, I feel like this forum has too many subforums already. I’ve had the situation a few times recently where I wanted to find a thread I remember reading a few weeks ago, and I had to click through a dozen roughly similar forums to find it. The number of subforums should be just enough to separate topics and aid organization, but not so many that you have to guess multiple times about where a thread will be.

So what’s your suggestion?

[rcannon100]

Permit please for me to say the positive.

I think this forum is great. Prior to this forum was a Bike Washington Yahoo group (which still exists) with a single stream of emails that bloated your in-box. It was good in its archaic primitive technological age but it was cumbersome.

Along came this forum and interactivity and complete wastes of time exploded. This forum has been a boon for the exchange of information for the oh 20 people who participate on it at any given time.

I very much appreciate Bike Arlington hosting and admining it. If it werent for Tim’s hard work, I would not be leading the DISLIKE leaderboard with Steve O disliking all my puppy pictures.

There may be ways to make it better ~ but first wanna say how much I appreciate this thing.

[dkel]

The Chainlink seems to have fewer divisions by category. I like that we have things like “Bikes & Equipment” or “Commuters.” Chainlink has a non-bike discussion category; I’m perfectly happy not having that (the only thing I am interested in is bikes, duh :rolleyes:). The calendar function on Chainlink is super; all our events just end up in threads that get buried and require additional posts to keep them visible. I noticed they have a “Missed Connection” thread that’s very popular (apparently there are d-bags on bikes in Chicago, too). One thing I really like about our forum is the lack of advertising. I would like it if the search function on our forum were a little more helpful; as it is, I use Google to search our site, because the native search doesn’t show which posts in the thread include your search term, and some of our threads are loooong!

[Tim Kelley]

So, we’ve got a calendar link, but it appears to be disabled. I wonder who did that. Do we think that is something we would use here?

[PotomacCyclist]

I think a calendar feature would be useful. As it stands, some of the bike-related events are posted in the Events sub-forum, but others are posted in the Group Rides, Family Biking, BAC and General Discussion sub-forums. The various sub-forums could continue to include announcement and discussion threads about relevant events and meetings, but a separate calendar could be a good way to see what events/meetings are coming up in the next week or two, without combing through all of the sub-forums.

I have to admit that I don’t look at the Calendar features on sites like BikeArlington, The WashCycle, etc. that much, but others might. And if it’s really good, I might start using a BikeArlington Forum calendar too.

[Anonymous]

@dkel 97978 wrote:

I would like it if the search function on our forum were a little more helpful… because the native search doesn’t show which posts in the thread include your search term, and some of our threads are loooong!

ditto^^^^^

[jabberwocky]

@Tim Kelley 97972 wrote:

So what’s your suggestion?

Honestly, I think the forum works well. I mainly browse by just going right to the “new posts” search, so I don’t really notice the threads scattered around except when I need to go back and look for something. If it were me, I’d consolidate some of the forums down (I count 17 separate subforums; I think the volume here could be accommodated in half that pretty easily).

Visually, I think the forums are great. Clean and simple. I wouldn’t really change anything.

[jrenaut]

@dkel 97978 wrote:

I would like it if the search function on our forum were a little more helpful; as it is, I use Google to search our site, because the native search doesn’t show which posts in the thread include your search term, and some of our threads are loooong!

Perhaps we could use something like the Google search plugin for vbulletin? Agree that the built-in search is kind of meh (though having worked on a search for a website, I understand that a good search function is not a trivial thing).

[PotomacCyclist]

The search function isn’t great, but I’ve found that between the site search feature and Google, I can eventually find almost all old threads that I’m looking for. I just have to remember the proper keyword or phrase.

[cyclingfool]

“site:bikearlingtonforum.com” plus keywords in a Google search tend to get me in the ballpark pretty fast. That said, I agree it’s unfortunate the native search isn’t more robust.

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