hmm multiple paths to answers...

[Bruce Nunnally]

I was reading a strategy article about website management. The point of the article was that people often arrive with a problem, and you should provide multiple ways for them to find the answers, since different means are intuitive for different readers.

So that got me to thinking, well, we have the how-to pages at http://www.caddyinfo.com/howto.html , and we have the Search of the forums here,

But what if I started collecting topics (posts) into some general categories, like coolant/cooling, A/C, wheels/tires/vibrations, noises, as subforums under the Cadillac Discussion Forum?

I would only "catalog" articles after say 30 days of no comments. The articles would still show up in search.

But the result would be that a user could hit the A/C subforum and read articles only about A/C.

Or the wheels/tires and only about wheels/tires, etc.

Does that seem useful / reasonable? Adds some work, but it would make for easy reading when someone arrives and wants to research A/C or Coolant or [whatever].

[TDK]

Bruce,

Personally I think that is an outstanding concept. The combination of maintaining active topics in the discussion area initially...and later sorting them by topics in a reference area - would appear to solve both issues elegantly. Perhaps 30-days is too long or arbitrary, maybe an activity-frequency counter would function better.

Along the same lines, is there a way to post a brief view of the most active threads or topic searches - like some major general-purpose sites do now for the most popular web-searches?

Keep rollin!

[Bruce Nunnally]

Thanks for your comments.

There is a view of Today's Active Topics off the board index, but it probably considers active=post/reply not active=read.

I don't see any data collected on what people searched for; I'll have to think that one through.

We like many boards often have guests >> registered , and the guests can't search; that is one of the benefits of registering, which is free.

But most frequently READ topics might be of interest. And as you point out, search terms would be interesting.