Just recently we have been contacted by a few members of the forum who have been having issues with the home page and we have also noted a few threads and comments on the same topic. The main concerns are that interesting topics may get buried and questions may go unanswered. As we cannot make any technical changes to the forum, we wanted to run a suggestion by you to see what you think about an idea that may help to improve things.
On the home page you will notice that we can make certain threads sticky. What we are proposing is that the moderators during their daily patrols around the forums select interesting threads from around the site and make them sticky for a day to allow ease of viewing. We would welcome your feedback on this idea.
Best wishes
Warden Intern at Otmoor.
Thanks Ian for taking this problem on board and trying to help.
I was about to say something similar to Doggie. Are you able to increase the number of Latest Posts on page 1? I know you have already done this once, last year sometime.
There are 5 stickies showing at the moment. How many interesting posts are you considering making stickies?
It would create a lot more work for the Mods, and what is "interesting" is very subjective.
What happens to "interesting" posts out of hours?
Cheers, Linda.
See my photos on Flickr
Unknown said:edit..as an experiment unsticky your post you will see how fast it disappears lol.
Its great that you are trying to solve the problem but I think stickys would make things worse not better, for the very reasons already given
Is it posiible to remove the site activity altogether and just make the home page longer. It does seem very irrelevant, to me anyway
Of all creatures, man is the most detestable, he is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. ~ Mark Twain
Generally I view 'unread' only and so click on the group threads and back again quick just to make them disappear (although they reappear very quickly at the rate people post to them!)! Missing lots of thing! I've no idea about the 'behind the scenes' with a forum so not sure what's possible or what to suggest!
"All weeds are flowers, once you get to know them" (Eeyore)
My photos on Flickr
Agree with all the above comments, but would suggest that some of the Group threads could be merged as their content clearly overlaps.
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" - Wlliam Blake
I agree with Doggie , Sparrow and Claire. It's clear that some people open new threads when they could use existing threads which are about identical subjects. We all know who is most guilty in this area.
My gallery here
Checkout the forums' Community HOMEPAGE for lots of interesting posts from other members.
I agree with what others have said - not keen on the interesting stickies idea but it would be good to remove the site activity list if possible, and merge duplicate and overlapping threads (presumably we can help by reporting these when we see them).
I also have doubts about the usefulness of the latest blog posts listing, though if we could tell which reserve/project they related to without having to open up each one that would help a lot.
My blog: http://mazzaswildside.blogspot.co.uk/
My Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/124028194@N04/
Thank you for the constructive feedback, we'll have a look at what we can do regarding changing the number of posts and the activity function. Will report back.
5 stickies and 7 group posts as I write. Not a lot of space left for other posts, whether interesting or not.
Posts crossed Ian.
Thank you.
I'll just go with the flow but it would be quite nice to know who started a thread I suppose.