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80 Forums, Are you nuts?
f#

I started out with 80 forums here so that everyone would have an idea of the breadth of topics that I'd like to cover. This is not the right approach, i.e. 80 forums will be initially "too wide", will feel empty where not in use and will feel too busy otherwise.

I'm looking for suggestions. Some of you have emailed me. Put your thoughts here in replies.

Keep in mind the following goals:1. Useful for insertion, i.e. contributors should be able to use these for pertinent topics and the cost to insert new information should be cheap.
2. Useful for retrieval, i.e. those that want to study a topic should have an easy way to follow that topic throughout the thread of thought.
3. Useful for search, i.e. those that want to find stuff, should be able to do so, first by simple forum navigation and second through standard keyword searching.

.

Here's my input, moved from the otherthread:

See [link:www.wilmott.com]

What I note from this site:

- only ~10 forums. Good. That's what we need. Indeed I'd say start modest and go with 5. I don't run 80 different F# lists for a reason, and I see the forums as a real substitute for the F# list (they also augment - someone should send a summary of discussion titles and interesting blogs once a week to the F# list). You can always split forums, or gradually activate your existing list, but I and others just _hate_ clicking through multiple forums to get to interesting material. Users like me use visual search through masses of postings - late at night we think "let's check the hub", we type in [link:cs.hubfs.net], we click on forums, we scan for 5 minutes. We want to see a few full forums that we can scan quickly for latest activity. Like reading a newspaper. Empty forums drive us nuts - they are like blank pages in the newspaper, or books in the library that have interesting titles but whose pages turn out to be all blank.

By on 3/25/2006 4:48 AM ()

There, the "excess baggage is gone". Are you happy? I'm feeling lonely and uncluttered and most importantly, reminde of the Monty Python skit involving the cheese shop "Have you no cheese? It certainly is clean in here."

I'll clean up THCF in a day or two.

By on 3/25/2006 6:39 AM ()

If you haven't seen it, the right hand sidebar has a "posts you have not read" link for you. This will give you a page of everything that you haven't clicked through. This should save you a great deal of time.

Additionally, the forums support filtering, so you can do searches appropriately for stuff you consider must-reply or otherwise.

I'll occasionally insert a blank page somewhere for you to remind you of these good old days. ((sigh, remember when The Hub was small?))

By on 3/25/2006 5:46 AM ()

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