What I would like to see this site do...

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...is to tag threads with category id's. Let me explain.

Numerous times there have been debates here as to whether this site should enforce the posting of content in the proper forums. The most 'abuse' seems to be in the offshore books forum as it is, in reality, a catch-all for everything. Debates on whether this is good or bad would be endless and not the topic of my post.

What I would like to see is a mechanism to keep everyone happy. For those who like things as is, it would still look exactly the same. And for those who like to be presented with only on-topic threads in a particular forum...that would also be nice.

Now before someone follows up with the inevitable "if a topic doesn't interest you, don't click on it..." response, there are a few problems with this mentality:

1. Even if one doesn't click on a particular topic, it is still extra work to scan the ever-increasing number of threads in a heavy traffic forum like Offshore Books to find on-topic threads.

2. Occasional thread titles are too vague to even have an idea of what the content might be. For example, I see one thread titled "Need A Little Help..." right now. This could mean anything. Other times we see something along the lines of "What do you think of this?...". You get the idea. One has to click on the thread to see if the content is of interest.

3. Sometimes a thread starts off as one thing but evolves into something completely different -- something that might cross the boundaries of forum topics.

Ok, back to my suggestion. What if there was a mechanism to tag each thread with a category id? Now an immediate reaction would be, "well, that's why we have forums divided into topics...". Well, as we all know, this policy is not enforced. And while moderators will relocate occasional posts to the proper forum (and I'm not just referring to Rubber Room content), the reality is, most of the Offshore Books forum threads do not get relocated because, as I said above, the forum has become accepted as a catch-all forum. So, if I want to quickly scan for new threads on offshore books, I'm stuck with way more than I requested.

So, how would this work? Obviously, it should be something that causes as little burden as possible. Right now, there is a column with the attribute "Describes the mood or content of the topic". It's the second column and most probably never even notice it. This field could be used or a similar field could be created. With the mechanism I propose, it doesn't even need to be a viewable field. Let's say each thread was identified (in addition to the underlying forum id) by a category id. When someone creates a new post, the category field could be part of the input form just as "Post to:", "Subject:", and "Message:" are. The category fields would be a fixed set of ids with new ids created by site administrators as needed. Now, people are inherently lazy, so it would need a default value in case one doesn't want to be bothered entering a value. Presumably, the default value would be associated with the forum type. If someone wanted to post something baseball-related but place it in the Offshore forum for whatever reason (I don't know the reason, but we all know it's done regularly), perhaps the poster would be kind enough to set the category id to whatever the baseball id would be even though the post stays in the Offshore forum. If the poster doesn't want to be bothered doing this, perhaps a moderator at some point could update the tag to the correct id. This requires a little extra work by moderators, but perhaps wouldn't be much different from whatever mechanism a moderator currently uses to relocate a post. I'm guessing the current mechanism is to just click on a 'move' directive (or something similar), specifying the forums and particular thread in some fashion. Categorizing a thread could work the same way. The difference is that a thread isn't physically moved. The implementation could also allow more than one category tag to be associated with a particular thread. That would aid in the case of a thread evolving into a different category as I mentioned above. When a moderator notices this, he could add the additional tag.

So, if a category field is created, how does this actually affect anything? Well, while not knowing the underlying mechanism for the forum application, clearly there is a backend database with a forum id field in one or more tables. And when one clicks on a menu item in the forums' menu, this gets translated into a database query with the query consisting of the forum id (and whatever else the implementation needs). The database then returns all records which satisfy the query...which are the threads we see in a particular forum. My proposal would mean the software would also need to include a category id in the query. This way, threads that appear in a particular user's 'view' would be on-topic if configured correctly.

And that leads me to something important. Many don't like change, so the default should be the status quo. Users have individual profiles with configurable preferences. This already exists. I would suggest any new functionality be disabled by default so that nothing changes for those who don't want it. But for those who would like it, a field to enable this functionality could exist. Enabling this field would simply result in the underlying query including the category id in its selection criteria. Would this result in slower thread retrieval? Only slightly if it's implemented correctly (meaning the category id is an index). It probably wouldn't even be noticeable. And if a user has the field disabled in their profile, the user is unaffected.

Anyways, hope some consideration is given to this -- at least as a starting point for discussion. Effectively, it's a request to sub-classify threads, but only for those who want this feature enabled. By default, it would be pretty much transparent to users. Aside from actual implementation (which shouldn't be difficult though perhaps dependent on the software application provider), the only actual new 'work' involved is that of setting the category id by the initial poster (or by a moderator later on). And if this field doesn't get set (i.e. worst case), with the default being to tie the category id to the forum id, it just falls back to the current mechanism. I'm sure there are some holes in what I've suggested. But the goal isn't to make things perfect -- just to improve things while keeping everyone happy as I think many are tired of the off-topic threads that appear daily. Those who want catch-all forums get that. Those who want stricter classification get that.
 

The world would be a whole lot better if everyone
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