Subjects for Tomatoes, Onions etc in Edible Gardening

Being a newbie I don't want to get above my station, but in the Edible Gardening Section...lots of new members post questions about a certain veg, that have been answered before. I have probably been guilty of doing that myself.

Would it be a good idea to collate them or not?:thumb:

 

On another forum I made a FAQ with links to usefully explanatory threads. That message was made sticky by the mods, and I edited it from time-to-time as new useful threads were added.

Folk asking recurring questions were directed, in the first instance, to the FAQ thread.

Just a thought ...

 

Yea, I like the 'pruning' ref, heh,heh. But as you so rightly say, to trawl through would be an impossible task.:thumb:

 

I think sub-forums might lead to things being in the wrong place - threads that "wander" and posts that cover more than one thing.

It also makes it a bit more work using the Todays Posts, or New, to try to follow posts in certain Forums - I don't read posts in forums I'm not interested in, increasing the number of forums would make the task slower, for me, to work out which posts are in forums that I am interested in.

Anyways, I would be happy to have a crack at an FAQ posting if you want to try that experiment.

 

"Then you can ignore the ones you are not interested in."

Indeed, but I am dyslexic (why is that so hard to spell!) and as such a greater number of forum names is a disadvantage to me. That's not everyone's problem of course.

My other main experience of Forums is a computer techie site [that's my day job] where I have around 16,000 posts. Folk there are technically savy, there are 15 or so forums, with very specific purposes, and you might think posters would get it right, but there are stacks of posts in the wrong place, often with short terse answers pointing that out.

Even if folk posted one-subject questions in the right specific forum I'm not sure how that will help. I think folk are unlikely to read posts in a forum to try to find a solution - any more than they will use the search :( so they will just be the usual questions repeated (or did I perhaps miss something?)

However, my experience which I described above has been successful in having a sticky that just contains links to "worthy" and informative threads which provide answers to recurring questions. Its simple then to point any already-answered-questions to the Sticky FAQ post, rather than several kind folk retyping the same info again.

I'm happy to create one as an experiment if folk want to see how it would look. (Its easy enough to Sort a forum's thread index by Views or Replies, and the ones with the most views are probably the result of people searching via Google etc., so that can form the basis of an initial thread-harvest, just need some cut&paste sheers!)

An alternative would be to add a Wiki (or somesuch) where canned answers could be maintained. I'd be just as happy to write a detailed canned answer about training Tomatoes and pinching out their side shoots in a Wiki as I would making a lengthy response to a post (or doing a search to find the one I wrote the week before). In fact in that analogy I would spend more time making a search for previous answers, pictures, contra-views, and harvest them into a single answer as I would know I wouldn't have to type most of it again tomorrow!

 

" I find that by clicking on 'User CP' it only takes me to the new posts on the topics that I have been posting on"

I haven't found a forum that works the way I would like to! I would like a forum to:

Allow me to mark a thread as "interesting" or "not interesting" - probably automatically marking it as "interesting" if I reply to it.

Allow me to just see "interesting" threads and "new" ones.

Allow me to opt-out of threads that become "not interesting"

I run the risk of missing out on a thread that changes from "not interesting" to "interesting", but I can live with that.

Currently I use the NEW (or "Today's Posts") and scan down for things that have an icon showing I had replied, and for the rest I try to remember whether I have read it and was interested, or whether it looks new (0-replies is OK for that, but not foolproof unless I check every minute :D)

 

"as long as I don't have to do the work"

hehehehe ...

... yes its true, setting them up takes a while. But after that its only a question of deciding that a new thread is "worth" of inclusion and adding it.

If I have a bit of time later on I'll have a crack. I can only help with the things I "think I know something about" ...