Forum Search/User Search (Read 891 times)

I would like to see some forum improvements (after the GPS uploading improvement ) 1) Search within a particular forum 2) Show all posts by a user 3) Forum rankings (how many times a person has posted) 4) Forum admins? 5) Other advanced searching features Awesome site and I appreciate all of the work you've done to keep improving it. Mikeb4789

3) Forum rankings (how many times a person has posted)

I'm afraid I strongly disagree with this one. Post counts have a tendency to become equated to "seniority" on a forum. This has at least two bad side effects: a. people make worthless, content-devoid posts just to elevate their post count; and b. people with low post counts are de-valued and/or made to feel unworthy to contribute.

4) Forum admins?

Why? All the forums have admins already (eric does the main forums, and group admins do the groups). Under the current system, the forums are in excellent shape. If its not broken, don't fix it. I do like your suggestions about searching, and I'm pretty sure this is already on eric's (already too long) to do list.

Hi Mikeb4789

1) Search within a particular forum 2) Show all posts by a user

I need to revamp the forum code soon to put in other requests and I will add these then.

3) Forum rankings (how many times a person has posted)

Berner brings up a good point. I wrote the forum code myself instead of using an existing package for a couple of reasons. The most important one is I want it to integrate seamlessly with the training log. If I went with an existing package, it may be too much work to hack that in. Many of these forum packages have some sort of ranking, whether it is by post count or some arbitrary title. I intentionally left out ranking when I wrote the code for the reason that Berner brought up. I want everyone participating in the forums to be equals, regardless of how many miles they run or how many posts they created. Typical rankings don't provide much information other than who is the biggest chatter box and we all know who that is

4) Forum admins?

Are you saying I'm not doing my job As Berner said, the forums as a whole do not require much governing right now. Thank you everyone for not creating more work for me! I will moderate the public forums and expect the owners and administrators of the groups to moderate their private forums. I will add this should there be a need for more moderators in the main forums in the future.

5) Other advanced searching features

See 1 above.

Typical rankings don't provide much information other than who is the biggest chatter box and we all know who she is

Corrected.