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ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-24-2005, 01:25 PM   #1
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ER Pearls of Wisdom?

We get a lot of rehashing of topics here, but we also get an ocassional well-written and well-thought-out Pearl of Wisdom, and even an ocassional Thread of Wisdom.

Can we find a way to cultivate these pearls? Perhaps a separate section with links to them?
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-24-2005, 03:05 PM   #2
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

The biggest problem is maintaining the list. We are a group of people who generally dislike work.

I think the best way to implement this within the board software would be for a poster make his own "best of" list or "wisdom pearl" list and have dory36 or a moderater "sticky" it to the top of the topic list. The original poster could then go back and edit the list as needed. It would probably be best to lock the thread as these things tend to get replied to a lot and then not updated in the first post and then you end up with a long and disorganized string of posts instead of an easily-referenced list.

If the original poster abandons the list or otherwise lets it stagnate, then a new volunteer might copy and update the list and become the new list maintainer with the help of dory36 or a moderator unstickying the old list and stickying the new one.

Those of us who have our own websites could also aggregate "best of" lists on our sites. I was thinking of this earlier when reading some of today's wisdom. It has the advantage of being easily ignored if it languishes and the advantage of gaining web traffic for the host if it is well-maintained and of interest to others.

EDIT: A seperate forum with pearl pointers could be implemented, but every which I imagine that the end result is unwieldy to read unless one person is dedicated and faithful to maintaining the list, but given a person like that any implementation would work fine. This whole post is just my opinion, of course.
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-24-2005, 03:17 PM   #3
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Yeah, I'm with you on making it self-maintaining somehow. Some boards have the ability to let users assign critical rankings to posts and threads. Ideally, you'd be able to make an automated list sorted on those rankings.
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-24-2005, 04:02 PM   #4
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Quote:
Originally Posted by wab
Yeah, I'm with you on making it self-maintaining somehow. Some boards have the ability to let users assign critical rankings to posts and threads. Ideally, you'd be able to make an automated list sorted on those rankings.
It's been a while, but I looked into this before. The board software has a karma feature, but if I recall correctly it's to rate users, not posts. It's currently disabled.

(Warning: if you think tech talk is painful or otherwise boring, skip the next two paragraphs, then I start talking like a human again.)

(going a bit techie here) SMF, the board software, is written in PHP and extensible through user-contributed modules or end-user recoding, but aside from the initial effort to make changes there are potential problems during future upgrades, template changes and disaster recovery that are much more complex than if you stick with the basic software package.

(going off on a techie tangent) I've been giving a fair bit of thought lately to this and similar (e.g. adding new function to a site while maintaining the same user authentication data) problems--for dynamic website building in general, not necessarily for this board. These packaged tools such the various forum software I reviewed in April are relatively easy to install, set up and maintain for a particular purpose, but are difficult to customize and maintain the customizations...customizations are basically forking the project and updating involves backporting the projects' updates. For the tech-savvy web builder I'm thinking the answer is a more generalized toolset with a stable API (I'm looking at Zope and Plone now and will check out Tomcat/J2EE/jboss/Struts/etc. soon) so you can customize and have much less worry about updating software affecting the customization. It's more difficult to set up and takes more knowledge, but it should be much more extendable, scalable and--with respect to customizations--maintainable.

(back to normal talk) In short, I'm reluctant to take it upon myself to go far outside the bounds of the current board software partially due to laziness and partially with an eye towards ongoing maintenance. But my word isn't the only word or even the last word. It's dory36's board, server and domain name. I'm just helping out because I think it's a great site and dory36 was stupid enough to let me help .

I was going to pooh-pooh post rankings because they tend to get used for political and other polarized debates, but even so I recall a number of useful posts getting "rec'ed" to the top at TMF, so it may be a useful feature still. I don't recall seeing an available mod for that, but maybe I'll check again. If the mods appear to be "bolt-on", then I'm not too afraid of them. If they involve much integration I get scared off real quick.
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-24-2005, 04:48 PM   #5
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Forking is painful, but so is building something from scratch within a new framework. I would stick with features that get rolled into the core by the forum software maintainers.
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-24-2005, 08:00 PM   #6
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

If I see something I think will be useful to me, I copy it right then and there.

As far as rankings, best of, etc., I would not trust any one else's ideas of what is valuable. So I likely would not pay any attention to the rankings.

An exception would be user reviews-of laptops, stereos, camcorders, digicams, etc.

Additionally, I think that all posts with pictures of callipygian women should have a warning attached. (Nota bene, Dan.)

Warning: “This may too strong for an old guy like Ha.”

Then I could just skip those and go read my bible. Or have a quick look, and then walk naked through a patch of nettles and jump into my frigid pond. Or bang my head against a wall.

Ha
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-25-2005, 12:02 AM   #7
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

I've always thought that a useful req system would allow each member to provide either a positive or negative req to any post. That way, political posts would carry high req marks in both categories, while actual ER posts would tend to have only positive posts. . . I think.
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-25-2005, 06:15 AM   #8
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Quote:
Warning: “This may too strong for an old guy like Ha. Then I could just go directly to skip those and go read my bible.
Pearls of Wisdom

A ZZ Top song comes to mind...* :P
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-25-2005, 09:45 AM   #9
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Quote:
Originally Posted by HaHa
callipygian
A good all-purpose word!
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-25-2005, 09:46 AM   #10
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nords
A good all-purpose word!
Shows a well rounded education to boot
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-25-2005, 11:20 AM   #11
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Maybe Pearls before swine would be a better title.
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-25-2005, 12:36 PM   #12
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

how about callipygious swine getting tatooed?
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-26-2005, 12:16 AM   #13
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Quote:
Originally Posted by ronin
how about callipygious swine getting tatooed?
That looks more dasypygal (dasy-pig-al?) than calli-pig-ious...
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-26-2005, 07:40 AM   #14
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

What looks like a pearl (of wisdom) to me might look like a pig to you....
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?
Old 10-26-2005, 01:30 PM   #15
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Re: ER Pearls of Wisdom?

Quote:
Originally Posted by wab
Forking is painful
I would recommend seeing a doctor immediately.

Is peeking painful too?
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