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Stewart said:
Just looking into it, the vBulletin reputaton thing only allows you to credit someone. So it doesn't work entirely like the karma thing.
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Still i think the karma thing works much better in for instance technical support forums. I doubt the reputation would be truly based on the quality of your posts in this forum. It probably would be more of an indication of how many people agree with you.
 
Zolipara said:
Still i think the karma thing works much better in for instance technical support forums. I doubt the reputation would be truly based on the quality of your posts in this forum. It probably would be more of an indication of how many people agree with you.
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This makes sense and I agree. I think members would be more likely to rate a post higher if it's 1. about a book they enjoyed 2. agrees with their personal opinion. On the surface this seems fine but members posting on lesser known authors or less popular genres would get shafted, while the members focused on the flavor of the day be it Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling would likely get better ratings. (Nothing wrong with either of these, just an example) Member "So and So" may have brilliant insight into an obscure author but his rating may suffer in the light of NYTimes best sellers. His lower rating might detract others from reading his posts. In other words I don't think opinions would be fairly distributed across all the genres and thus all the members. Personally I credit most all of our members with enough intelligence to determine which members we respect, trust etc...

Also what's the point of rating a member. Is this some sort of contest or something?
 
Kenny Shovel said:
Can we ban people from talking about themselves in the third person? It gives Kenny the colly-wobbles.
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You can give muggle a deduct in his rating. :D
 
Kenny Shovel said:
Can we ban people from talking about themselves in the third person? It gives Kenny the colly-wobbles.
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Abc has to ask if that's anything like the 'heevy-jeevies?":D
 
Dogmatix points out that in her neck of the woods it's the heebie-jeebies, not the aforementioned heevie jeevies.
 
Yep, same here. We once had to explain to Korean girl what they were on the first night of my old creative writing class after it had been put forward for one of those silly tasks where you put a bunch of unrelated phrases together and try to include them all in a written passage.
 
Dogmatix said:
Dogmatix points out that in her neck of the woods it's the heebie-jeebies, not the aforementioned heevie jeevies.
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Couldn't remember the exact correct phonemes involved..but my mom was convinced its a bonafide medical term:rolleyes:
 
abecedarian said:
Abc has to ask if that's anything like the 'heevy-jeevies?":D
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"Heevy-jeevies" actually has lots of potential - think of the gastric possibilities. Sorry.. ew.
 
Don't visit much anymore as my PC is down and I'm enjoying life without it for a while, but for what it's worth...

  1. Get the Mature Discussion section up and running; Agree
  2. Get the moderation sorted out; Agree, although I'd like to see "sorted out" defined.
  3. Remove the Testing forum - it's ugly; Don't see the problem. It's not an aspect of the forum that leaps out at you. If people find it useful, then leave it.
  4. Remove Harry Potter and Tolkien subforums - they aren't that busy to warrant them. The mania around them is due to decline (Tolkien now that the films are all out; Potter once the last book is released) Feel the same about this as the test forum.
  5. Add a News forum, for people to post stories relevant to books and authors rather then anywhere Agree
  6. Update the forum software to vBulletin v3.6.0 Why not, let's live a little.
  7. Add a hell of a lot of domains into the banning section to reduce the increase in spam that has beset this board in recent days. Agree
  8. Remove the link to Tech Interest until you've done whatever it is you have in mind for it. As it is, Tech Interest became the online equivalent of the Marie Celeste. Cliff Richard has seen more action than it since Concordia acquired it. Agree
  9. Blend the Horror forum with Sci-Fi and Fantasy. That way the main three speculative fiction forms are all together in one place. Not really my cup of tea. Up to Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy fans what to do.
  10. Remove the Historical fiction forum. It has seen little activity since its inception. If it doesn't attract people to post, then there's no point in it. Agree
  11. Start adding literary events to the forum's calendar. There is a forum calendar? Oooo let's use it.
  12. Bring in a naming convention for posts so that they are easier to find. My suggestion would be to encourage people to title threads like so: Stephen King: The Stand That way, when people do searches on authors or books the thread title will immediately be more descriptive and makes it easier to find content one wants. Mmm, this is starting to get a bit anal, but I do find myself agreeing that a naming convention for books and authors would be useful.
  13. Get some decent competitions up and going. A forum this size should be getting a fair number of enquiries for publicity and stuff from publishers. Make the competitions more interactive for the prizes, so none of these enter your name in the prize draw comps. Agree, what's a book forum without live foxy-boxing?
  14. Combine the Film and Music forums and form a Media forum. The focus should be on books but if you need these areas to branch off then try to minimise them. Again, I don't see the problem with a music forum.
  15. Remove post counts...from public view, at the very least. Agree
  16. Encourage the use of reputations (forum software). Disagree
  17. Remove the Comedy forum. It's not working. Agree with getting rid of this one.
  18. Trim down the number of Stickies floating about around the forum. Agree, stickies should be kept to a minimum.
  19. Put some PHP in to limit those threads marked 15 and 18 from being seen (or posted) by people under those ages. Agree
  20. Consider taking the forum a step forward in a Web 2.0 way by allowing people to tag threads with this hack. Agree
 
3. Remove the Testing forum - it's ugly; I think it's handy for new members (obviously). Did someone say something about hiding it somewhere?
4. Remove Harry Potter and Tolkien subforums - they aren't that busy to warrant them. The mania around them is due to decline (Tolkien now that the films are all out; Potter once the last book is released) I disagree. Why would interest in Tolkien decline just because the movies are out? Interest in books is supposed to last.
9. Blend the Horror forum with Sci-Fi and Fantasy. That way the main three speculative fiction forms are all together in one place. Disagreeeeeee! For no practical reasons, I just don't wanna :(
14. Combine the Film and Music forums and form a Media forum. The focus should be on books but if you need these areas to branch off then try to minimise them. Sounds good
18. Trim down the number of Stickies floating about around the forum. Yes please! Ugggggly


Or, heeeey...let's make a section entitled "Stuff Stewart hates and wants to see removed from this forum". Then you can just ignore it Stewart, and the rest of us will use it :D

But seriously...if these ideas were refined a bit more, couldn't we have some kind of vote so that the changes could represent what the entire bookforum community wants. Maybe voting could be restricted to those with over 200 posts or something, I don't know.
 
Stewart said:
My thinking around this is to encourage a tidy forum where it is easy to search for previous posts about an author or a book. Typing Kazuo Ishiguro into the search engine may then return a number of threads: Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains Of The Day, etc. - immediately I know which thread may yield the content I am after rather than has anyone read this book?

The bigger purpose, however, is making the threads have meaningful titles for the search engines out there (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) so that it can potentially bring more people here. Part of the search engine ranking is, afterall, determined by the title tags of an HTML page, making it one of the most important to get right. We want more newbies to harangue, right?
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Dude, I know what you're trying to say. And I get it. My point has to do with the audience the forum is meant to attract.

One thing we have to keep in mind is a lot of booklovers here are not versed with computer 'ettiquette', and don't see that as a prerequisite to joining a forum talking about books. If we start enforcing thread naming it's going to come off to the casual forum reader as unnecessarily stifling.

This place is a community first, a resource second. That's why I believe the emphasis on 'correct way' of doing things, while very important, should take a backseat to general courteousness. That's the way I see it, anyway.

What I'm afraid of seeing is newbies (or anyone, for that matter) who come enthusiastically posting about a book they like, but they get a post telling them that they should have named the thread 'Title Aye by Author Bee' to 'follow convention' and jibes about 'don't you read "Read Me First" threads?' These types of posts annoy me incredibly, and drive potentially great and matured contributers away simply because of the unfriendliness.

Let us all in the know start naming book threads properly, and when other people see this they will follow suit automatically.

No, it doesn't. But, when things get slow, it's up to the mods to keep the site active, encouraging people to post.
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I've given this some thought, and yes, I think I agree with you here. I think the moderators are doing a fantastic job, but if there is one thing that I think they could improve on is seeding topics to, as you say, keep the site active.

And when newbies name threads in a less than accurate manner, the moderator's job would then be to rename the thread, drop a polite note to the poster, and informing them what has happened. Everyone happy.

ds
 
ds said:
And when newbies name threads in a less than accurate manner, the moderator's job would then be to rename the thread, drop a polite note to the poster, and informing them what has happened.
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I agree with this. (Though to be fair to Stewart, he did say encourage consistent titling of threads rather than enforce.)
 
He did say that didn't he? Okay then.

It's just that when it is in any way written anywhere that forum thread titles should be named in a certain way, then it becomes enforceable. And let's just say there are various degrees of 'encouragement'...

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for tidiness. But after all, if someone wants to know what others have said about Guy Gavriel Kay for instance, and does a search, does it matter whether it came from a thread entitled "Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay" or "Authors I'd sleep with in a second" or "Book that suck eggs @*&%#*!"?

ds
 
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