Ok, so we are at a cross roads where we have increased volume in our community and threads are either annoying people (Headline Spam) or members would like a way to group topics such as Eldercare. As we keep growing these issues are going increase and we need to discuss various solutions. The three solutions that I currently see are as follows:
Sub-Forums: Subforums are a decent choice to help organize forums. The biggest drawback is as we evolve and want to keep adding more granular groupings, the list of subforums grows. They take up a lot of space at the top of the the parent forum that you have to scroll past every time you come into that forum. We could use the Forum Ignore feature for them (which is nice) and there are other tools like Forum Subscriptions that some members might find useful. One downside is that there is a one to one relationship with threads to forums. If we have a thread that could fit in more then one forum (as we get more granular this could be a more common occurrence) there is no way to associate it to more then one forum.
Tags - Tags are a new option we have and I think they could be an excellent solution for us. I think "out-of-the-box" it's hard to see how useful they can be but if we think of the theory of them, it allows us to associate threads to multiple topics which gives us added flexibility. An example could be a thread on Estate Planning that also deals with Estate Taxes. This thread could be associated to both tags which is an example of the one to many relationship that tags give offer. The ignore system allows members to ignore tags. That means if there is a very specific topic they do not like they can ignore on a more granular area.
I have put a "Popular Topics:" section that links to various tags in the Off Topic forum as an example (see attachment). This shows a way were we can group threads without having to add subforums. In the example the links are live so you can click on them to see how it works. Please note we can put the popular topics links under the most appropriate forum but the discussions can be located anywhere in the site.
On a couple Social Knowledge sites we have lots of subforums. Please take a look at the forum listing on Airstream Forums. You will notice it has a lot of subforums and these sometimes confuse the members on whee to post. With tags we can make it a bit easier for a member to know where to post because the forums are organized at a more macro level and the tags can provide a more granular level of organization. Its easier to pick a macro level category to post to when deciding where to post then having to figure out which subforum.
So with the above we need to consider the amount of work it takes to maintain. If a member posts a thread in the wrong forum it will take a Mod to move it to the right forum. If a member posts a thread without the proper tags it will take someone to tag it. If we select the latter option of tagging we can create a new group of members who are allowed to edit/add tags to threads and then let more members participate in this effort (we still can't open up tagging to everyone because of abuse in the past). We could enable this for many of our active members and ask them to "chip in" if they see a discussion that needs to be tagged.
So what do you all think about having links to our most popular topics as a way to create more granular views to similar topics?
Sub-Forums: Subforums are a decent choice to help organize forums. The biggest drawback is as we evolve and want to keep adding more granular groupings, the list of subforums grows. They take up a lot of space at the top of the the parent forum that you have to scroll past every time you come into that forum. We could use the Forum Ignore feature for them (which is nice) and there are other tools like Forum Subscriptions that some members might find useful. One downside is that there is a one to one relationship with threads to forums. If we have a thread that could fit in more then one forum (as we get more granular this could be a more common occurrence) there is no way to associate it to more then one forum.
Tags - Tags are a new option we have and I think they could be an excellent solution for us. I think "out-of-the-box" it's hard to see how useful they can be but if we think of the theory of them, it allows us to associate threads to multiple topics which gives us added flexibility. An example could be a thread on Estate Planning that also deals with Estate Taxes. This thread could be associated to both tags which is an example of the one to many relationship that tags give offer. The ignore system allows members to ignore tags. That means if there is a very specific topic they do not like they can ignore on a more granular area.
I have put a "Popular Topics:" section that links to various tags in the Off Topic forum as an example (see attachment). This shows a way were we can group threads without having to add subforums. In the example the links are live so you can click on them to see how it works. Please note we can put the popular topics links under the most appropriate forum but the discussions can be located anywhere in the site.
On a couple Social Knowledge sites we have lots of subforums. Please take a look at the forum listing on Airstream Forums. You will notice it has a lot of subforums and these sometimes confuse the members on whee to post. With tags we can make it a bit easier for a member to know where to post because the forums are organized at a more macro level and the tags can provide a more granular level of organization. Its easier to pick a macro level category to post to when deciding where to post then having to figure out which subforum.
So with the above we need to consider the amount of work it takes to maintain. If a member posts a thread in the wrong forum it will take a Mod to move it to the right forum. If a member posts a thread without the proper tags it will take someone to tag it. If we select the latter option of tagging we can create a new group of members who are allowed to edit/add tags to threads and then let more members participate in this effort (we still can't open up tagging to everyone because of abuse in the past). We could enable this for many of our active members and ask them to "chip in" if they see a discussion that needs to be tagged.
So what do you all think about having links to our most popular topics as a way to create more granular views to similar topics?
