| Author | Message | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
     Jackbequick |
Chevysolid - I thought the same until I figured out how to use the new message search utility from the Search page. Try this, from the login page: 1 - Click on Search (top right corner) 2 - Check Registered users, fill in you username and password, scroll down, click Perform Search That will show you all posts since your last search sorted by topics and subjects. Read what interests you. Do that each time you come back and after awhile you'll follow conversations easily and have a feel for the topics here. If you click on the Topics link (top right again) you can browse those for specific info. Or you can use the keyword search on the upper part of the Search page to search for specific words. I think it works real good once you get the hang of it. I'm going to go look at those sites you mentioned just out of curiousity, I've not visited them yet. Jack | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
I recommend having the search page bookmarked. ANB, Please be more specific. What is easier to navigate on the boards you mention compared to this one? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
John89147, We have capability to offer users access to a user's list that is sortable by bike model and other information. Been shy to implement that up to this point though due to privacy and security concerns. But now that we've hidden everyone's email address from public view, that might be a good thing to reconsider. Will run it by the other custodians and see if we can agree. Will get back to you. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chevysolid |
Blake Partly I guess it is the presentation of the material and the way the forums are set up. I've been having some difficulty following the threads that are archived, they seem to be mushed all together. Also the way the topic sections are divided. I am having trouble thinking of solid explanations on what I mean. I guess part of it could just be that if I would have found this forum first and then went to the others I would of found it awkward. Also, can you search for users and then view all threads they responded to?? that is a nice feature. PS. If you have time visit the other boards and navigate through their topics maybe it would be easier then me trying to explain everything. ANB | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| John89147 |
Thanks Blake. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
I think you nailed it ANB with your recognition that simply taking some time to familiarize yourself with the various topics and layout of this board is the biggest difference. I've looked at the other boards and could find little indication of anything organizational that they provide better than we already have here, which is why I asked for more specifics. Yes, among a number of other neat options to help optimize searches of the board contents, you can search for users. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tramp |
What I've told friends who I recommend Badweb to, is just to stick with the "Quickboard" for awhile, that way you gte to "meet" a lot of the usual suspects, then branch out and take a peek at the other sections as you gte used to the quickboard atmosphere. Going at it this way makes the site's organization and accessibility work for the first-timer, here. More and more ATC folks are over here, these days, because of that advice. Suddenly badweb feels rapid-fire when one stays in the quickboard shallows for a spell. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ezblast |
LOL | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chevysolid |
Blake, I think that I have figured out where my incompentence is or where I am having difficulty. I recently came across the FBRAT posts and the difficulty I am having is figuring out which archive to read so that it is in order. On other boards you open a thread and the first post is on top and then the posts continue and add on pages. To read a long post you just start at the top and continue through. Then when you add a post it is just posted on the end of the rest. My guess is that the capacity of a thread is limited here to 30 posts and then it archives??? I hope this makes some sense on what I am trying to explain. I am figuring it out. But as I stated it seems more difficult this way. Thank you for listening to my 2 cents. This board has been VERY informative and I hope to continue to get good information for a long time to come. Adam  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
Yes, it is klugey. And that is one of my complaints about Discus at this juncture. So I'll try to explain how best to navigate some of the troublesome thread structures on BadWeB, but at the same time I'd also like to tell you about some of the really unique and valuable features that Discus offers; features other boards don't provide. Concerning mal-organized thread structures/topics and archiving of posts: When clicking on a thread title as displayed in a main topic page listing or even on a subtopic page listing like the FBRAT one, this discussion board will always send you to the most current page of that particular thread, what is commonly the last page or highest numbered page in other discussion forum programs. Other forum programs do exactly the same thing if you click on the thread title instead of the little numeric link to that particular thread's page "1" archive. So in that BadWeB is no different. But BadWeB at this point doesn't provide any convenient title embedded links like the little numeric ones found on other boards, so we are forced to make one additional mouse click to navigate to the first archived page of any thread. From there you can simply click on the "Next" or "Previous" link to get to the next or previous page in the thread's archives and so on until you end up back at the current/active thread page. If you click "next" from the current active page, you will be sent to the next thread in the topic list (one hierarchical level above). What is really neat about BadWeB's board program is that unlike virtually all other discussion boards that archive entire pages when they reach a preset number of posts, usually 40, and starting off fresh with only a single post (the 41st in line or 81st etc...), unlike that, BadWeB allows only archives some of the posts rather than the entire page. For instance, BadWeB waits until there are say 40 posts on a page and only archives the oldest 30. Thus a significant number of existing posts (at least ten in this example) will always appear atop the current/active page. Don't you hate being the last to psot on a page in other forums (40th poster)? Seems like your post gets ignored most of the time. Other folks don't see it; since they are looking at the 41st post, the one that kicked off the new page, a page with only that one lone post until other new post in the thread later. I see this unique post archive buffering feature of BadWeB as being extremely helpful in ensuring that visitors and participants in a highly active/popular thread won't miss any posts as posts fall off into the archives. Specifically, BadWeB provides a buffer so that when the post count reaches 40, only the oldest 30 posts get moved to an archive page, thus we maintain the most recent 10 posts still active on the current page. Cool eh? We can actually set the number of posts for the buffer and for the archive pages to whatever we wish. Smaller pages save bandwidth, larger pages make for fewer cumberson lists of archives. Zat make any sense. It's kinda tough to describe and be sure you are able to follow. Some of the jargon is confusing... topic, thread, main topic, subtopic, archive, posts, blah-de-blah-blah. ![: ]](http://www.badweatherbikers.com/buell/clipart/proud.gif) Anyway, I think that the ability to buffer the archiving of posts is a very cool and valuable feature. I rarely need to backtrack to find posts that have been archived and that I have missed. There is always a significant amount of content on the active page in threads with archived posts. On other boards, I am always having to click back to the last archive page to catch up on posts I'd otherwise miss. We do need to create "Next" and "Previous" links at the bottom of each page as well as at the top. That will greatly aid navigating the archives in any particular thread.  Obviously the best of both worlds, and what we are expecting in the next version of Discus, the discussion forum program BadWeB has used from day one, is that we will get the nice tiny numerical links to archives in place of the cumbersome and klugey subtopic variety. In some form anyway. Maybe not embedded in thread titles, but at least at the bottom and/or top of pages instead of the cumbersom listing we now have. As far as figuring which FBRAT archive to read, we kinda convuluted the setup format for that topic, but for good reason, to provide meaningful opportunity for discussion concerning each day in and of itself. So we are stuck having to find and click on the "09/01/05 Thursday" thread (or whichever day you happen to be interested in), then if it has archived posts, click on the oldest of those. THEN you can proceed with reading and clicking on the "Next" link to navigate through that particular thread. When you are finished in that day's thread, you may or may not be able to click on "Next" to navigate to the next day's thread. The threads are sorted reverse chronologically in the "Tale Section" topic, so that the one with the most recent activity is always at the top of the list. So most likely you'll need to click on the "Ferris Bueller Rides Again Tour (FBRAT)" portion of the page title to take you back to the main FBRAT page where you will need to find and click on the next day's thread... and so on and so forth. If we had avoided creating separate new threads for each day's reporting (most excellent reporting ain't it? ) then it would not be so troublesome to navigate; one could simply click on "Next" or "Previous" to navigate through the entire epic story. But one giant serial thread would tend hamper interaction and discussion from all the participants and interested parties. It would also tend to mix a myriad of ongoing discussions into the thread, rather than sequester those concerning a particular day to that particular day's thread. Great question. And it begs to be shown that other boards do not offer the effectively infinite nesting of subtopics, meaning, sub-sub-sub-subtopics. Most boards only offer a set of main topics in which participants may post new subtopics. Beyond that there is no capability, or if there is I've not ever seen it utilized, to introduce further thread based sub-subtopics. Take our Classifieds for example. BadWeB offers the organizational layout of four sub-categories for classifieds, Bikes for sale, Parts for sale, Bikes wanted, and Parts wanted. Then within those categories users may post new threads, so we have in effect three layers. If we wanted to we could include a "Start New Thread" option on every single active page. But we'd probably end up with some very long convoluted thread structures. LOL. The posts in all topics in all threads except for the "Links" topic do indeed proceed chronologically from top to bottom. Not sure the archive lists follow that or not. In fact in most topics I think the most recent archive goes atop the older ones. Not sure if that is what you meant or not. Thanks for trying. Another alternative is to use the tree view and expand all pages within whatever thread/subtopic you may want to read. Then use your right click and "open in new window" browser option to simply open each successive page as you wish. I did just retitle Jerry's FBRAT daily threads to help make them a bit more easy to visually sort in chronilogical order. Since the Tale Section topic is configured to always move active threads to the top of the list, there is nothing we can do to keep the FBRAT thread listing in alphbetical order. It's one or the other. Hopefully in the future Discus will allow us to specify separate thread listing scenarios at the subtopic level instead of only at the main topic level. There are a few tricks that might help, not sure if they will work as desired or not. I'll play around a bit and see. You'll note that the KV main topic page is arranged alphabetically, but that within its subtopics new threads are place at the top. That is one case where we tricked the board into doing what we wanted. I think. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chevysolid |
Blake, WOW thanks alot for taking the time to try to explain everything... I'M sure it will help other newbie also. FBRAT=AWESOME  KV page does do what I think it needs to do I am able to navigate that pretty easily. I did not know about the next and previous option which I will now have to try out. Thanks again for taking the time. Adam | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tramp |
it's an impressively well-archived system. excellent for referencing technical tips, etc. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
Thanks for making me think about it. Good questions/points you raised. I appreciate the specificity. We will strive to continually improve the functionality of the board as time goes on. If you are interested in other features that Discus Pro provides compared to other popular discussion boards, take a look at the following... http://www.discusware.com/products/compare.html | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rhinowerx |
not sure if this has been bought up before, but it would be nice if, in th KV section, under > Dealers - Rate yours (good or bad)..., you could have state specific category listings i.e. find good/bad dealers by state. Just a thought Cheers -Jack | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Captainkirk |
Blake, et al; Would it be possible to start a "My Buell Garage" thread (or something to that effect?)There have been some excellent threads in the past moving in this direction regarding floor coatings, design and layout, etc, but they're kinda randomly dispersed among the many excellent threads in the archives. I was hoping the "Machine Shop" thread would go in this direction but it seems to have taken a direction all it's own. Perhaps this could be a subtopic of Machine Shop. We all work on our Buells to some degree or more, so I thinks there'd be an interest. Pretty please? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
Well darnit, okay... I guess. Forgive my lackluster enthusiasm. I'm just jealous, on account of I have no garage!  All you rich folk with houses for your vehicles! What this country needs is a garage tax! Yeah, that's the ticket!  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jerzydevil |
I second that motion Blake!! (The garage tax)  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Captainkirk |
Thats nothin...I's gots a house for my DAWG too! (Thanks!) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
Jack, That would be great. It only takes time. Anyone notice the new Google BadWeB option atop each page? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Blake |
In addition to google searching only BadWeB, if you also tack on the /buell/messages/topic ID #/ onto the end of the "www.badweatherbikers.com" entry in the Google domain entry field, you can have Google only search that particular topic. Here is a list of the various BadWB topic ID numbers...
So if I wanted to search only the KV, I'd simply tack on "/buell/messages/3842/" to the end of the existing domain entry. So then it would look like... www.badweatherbikers.com/buell/messages/3842/ It's very fast and most all the pages are cached. Use the cached pages and save on BadWeB bandwidth. Great stuff eh? |
