Thread Titles & Thread Locations

[leehack]

I'm going to be putting some emphasis on the titles of threads and the correct forum for them, in an attempt to improve how easy it is to find things via the search facility. There is so much treasure in this forum that just gets buried or hard to find, hopefully this can improve it a little (or a lot).

If you find a really useful post that answered your problem but was difficult to find via the search facility, please take 30 seconds of your day out to let me know, so others can also benefit from this great resource that we all collectively create.

You might find your thread gets moved or your spelling gets corrected, don't take it personally, it's just an attempt to put the right book on the right shelf with the right name on it.

Thanks.

[Rich Brady]

Good thinking Lee

[Paul Bulpit]

Now that you come to mention it...

I spent a whole evening searching for the answer to a problem, in the end I posted this thread. (No answers anyway).

Tonight, looking for spelling mistakes for you, I accidentally found another thread on the same subject. (Still no answer though!)

There are a number of errors in the second thread and I'm surprised that I didn't find it first time round. Anyway I'm glad that I'm not alone with the issue even if it can't be solved.

[animal dreams]

Is there any way of tagging threads with a category or keywords?
It would help the search enormously.

[leehack]

Not without doing it manually and that'd be a hell of an undertaking. For important threads, it could certainly be done though, so a good idea for sure. We need to educate so that good and correct titles are used more, that's the first step, although at the time i can see how people don't really think along these lines when they first write and they cannot go in and retrospectively change titles unfortunately, only mods can do that.

How do you get people to do it first off, i guess strictly dealing with it would be the only real way, but that's not really practical in this situation. I don't think it's too much to ask considering the incredible amount of free advice people receive though, so we must work on improving it, or at least try.

What i would like more than anything is for someone who finds a really useful post that was hard to find, to tell us what they were searching for, so we can realise what these threads need to be renamed to. That's not too much to ask i hope when considering what they are getting in return.

The common opening to a post nowadays about having searched for 2 hours and found nothing is getting a little monotonous, even more so when you saw that they signed in 4 mins ago, did a search for 90 seconds and then gave up. There's two key points i guess as i see it, getting thread titles and the information inside the forum improved and then encouraging the searching for these once they can be found. I'm up for any suggestions on how we can improve that.

It'd be great if you could search for a term and get presented with 5-10 threads instead of the 40-50 we do at the moment, even I as an experienced user find that a little overwhelming.

PLEASE, PLEASE start to use the thread rating system also, this gives a fighting chance of the top ranked at least being able to assist on which threads are best to start looking at first.

[Jan]

We could also do this

1) Moderators could correct threads titles that are poor, from now on and also email the person whose thread title has been corrected to encourage them to use better titles in the future.

2) People searching that find their answer in a poorly titled thread could email the moderators to ask for the thread title to be improved (I think that Lee has already asked for this one).

Regards,