Hi all,

 

After looking through our forum layout today, it seems there is a good chance to clean up a few things.  Could you guys help me out with your opinions and ideas?  I'll post a few questions, but, look forward to any of your ideas for the forums.

 

I've been looking at other websites (not just Z related) and noticed there are a lot more simplistic layouts when it comes to forum management.  For instance, I am also a LandCruiser guy and follow a pretty large forum called IH8Mud.  Their forum layout is very simplistic, you can see it here: http://forum.ih8mud.com/    There is no categorization of threads and most of their information is based on a very refined search engine (which we also have). 

 

Yet, when I head over to various sportbike forums, they usually have a complex layout.  However, I don't see many of these sites that break down information by category like we do.  http://www.twowheelforum.com/index.php

 

Anyway, I'm just trying to get an idea of how we can make things a little more simple around our site layout.  If you have some opinions on this topic, I sure will take it into consideration when we look at the layout again.

 

FYI, you can see our layout by clicking on the "Forums" menu item, or clicking on the quick navigation button at the top next to "View New Content"..

 

Mike

I like it the way it is, but I'm a daily reader/poster.  Maybe some of the newer folks could help better?

 

I think the individual categories help those who don't want to participate in a discussion, they're just looking for answers. 

Thanks, I also forgot to mention if you think we should open it up for more cars... submit a few ideas.  

 

Here are my ideas:

 

- 300ZX Z31 Series

- Concept Z Car

- Roadster ??

Answering SU questions is easy when I can jump on, spot Categorized threads, answer when appropriate and go backto what I was doing.....

I agree with Bruce that the categories are nice, but i think it conflicts with the needs of the forum as a whole.  I did some looking through the member list and found that while we have about 1400 members only about 160 of them have posted in the last 90 days and have over 100 posts total, this is what I considered "Active Members".  Considering the relatively small amount of new content being created I feel like it should be consolidated into a few very active areas instead many areas with minimal activity.  Perhaps the search tool could be preloaded with queries to find posts tagged with certain content such as SU questions to make it easy for use cases such as Bruce but I have no idea how the forum functions in that regard.  This site looks about as spread out as twowheelforum.com, but they have 29,000 members to support being spread that thin.  I love the site and community anyway but that's my opinion

Answering SU questions is easy when I can jump on, spot Categorized threads, answer when appropriate and go backto what I was doing.....

 

Thanks Bruce, how do you like the combination of the forums?  I think we had about 2-3 different carb forums and I combined all of them into "Carburetor Central" to make it easier.  There is also a dedicated vendor forum for Ztherapy for announcements and such.

 

Mike

Mike.

I had my settings on the old system set to show 30 posts on a page.  I don't see a setting like that now (topic display settings.)

 

Is 20 posts per page the new standard?

 

I think you did a good job.  Things look 'lighter' but take up more screen space, so you scroll the screen more now on a notebook or laptop PC.  That's not bad if I use my other computer with the 30 inch screen...