ForumProjectOrganization

[EarlSmith]

Several of us have been carrying on a discussion about how to organize projects in the Puppy Forum.

You can read the whole discussion in the Survey-Usergroups topic in Suggestions.

We wanted to keep whatever method we came up with to be simple, open to all users, easy to find all post on each project, make it easy for a new person to come up to speed by reading all the previous posts. If you have an interest in Puppy Projects please read these posts and give us your input. Several of us are finding it difficult to remember where certain post were when we are trying to help new people. Maybe this could help!

[Flash]

Hey, Earl, for what it's worth I tried using the forum search feature to look for "ForumProjectOrganization" and got nothing at all. Even paring it down to "ForumProjectOrganiz" returned nothing. I didn't try the new search page in the Wiki, which also searches the forum, but if I remember right it is a hack of the forum search so it probably won't work any better.

[Mathiasdm]

To be honest, I'm not too fond of the Forum search. Thinking about my experience at other forums... Few are going to use this function.

[puppian_guest]

Hey, Earl, for what it's worth I tried using the forum search feature to look for "ForumProjectOrganization" and got nothing at all. Even paring it down to "ForumProjectOrganiz" returned nothing. I didn't try the new search page in the Wiki, which also searches the forum, but if I remember right it is a hack of the forum search so it probably won't work any better.

Words in posts must have number of letters equal to:
3 <= x <= 20

It's not what is entered in the search box that matters, what matters is the word in the post.
So if you have "ForumProjectOrganization" in your post, it will not be searched as it has 24 letters (more than 20).

Now if you enter "ForumProjectOrganiz" in the search box, it will return something because this post and your post above have "ForumProjectOrganiz", which only has 19 letters.

http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=12685#12685

[Flash]

Ah, so. That sucks.

[raffy]

It should be easy to change the numbers limit within the Wiki scripts (the admin can do it).

[EarlSmith]

To be honest, I'm not too fond of the Forum search. Thinking about my experience at other forums... Few are going to use this function

One reason I like the forum search; only the people who are really interested in working on whatever the project is will use the search option. Otherwise the posts are transparent so that everyone else can read them also. If you logon everyday and look at only the new post since your last time on, you will be able to see all the posts.

My other idea of using a prefix of "P" for project would not require a long word description. Only the people working on a project like " PAccountingH " (Project Accounting Home) would need to use it. Then if a new person found a post to be of interest and wanted to see all the other post in that project, he would just search on "PAccountingH" and would see all the posts.

I can not think of any other way to do this that is this simple. Everything would be right here in the forum we all seem to be happy with.

[Flash]

OK, it looks like Earl's scheme, of using the forum search to link together isolated forum posts that are associated with a project, is workable - as long as authors remember to include somewhere in their posts a project keyword that is 3 ~ 20 characters long. Now, how to publicize this scheme so that newcomers to the forum are aware of it?

Perhaps a sticky post in the Beginners forum which describes the way the scheme works? I don't want to clutter the forum up with too many sticky posts though; it's hard enough to get beginners to read them. Can anyone suggest anything that beginners would be more likely to notice?

[EarlSmith]

Flash, how about we try it out for a while without publishing it. Just to make sure it works and the search feature is going to work right. Give me a few days to get a couple of projects started and I 'll try it out first.

[Flash]

OK, I won't do anything until you let me know how it worked out.