Opinions requested regarding Tech Support forum

[ixl]

Hi everyone,
Not going to provide a full update today. Just wanted to tell you that I have a few things in progress that I should finish tomorrow. I had to pause today to deal with making my pickles since they are calling for a potential frost here tonight! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif
It seems to me that the Technical Support forum is the most popular here. This is great; after all, many people come to this site because they are having technical problems. However, as the forums become more used, the volume in that forum is going to grow to the point of unmanageability for all concerned.
Therefore, I am considering splitting that forum into a category of Tech Sup forums. Do people think this is a good idea? Will it make it easier if we have the questions split roughly into subgroups? What sort of categories would you suggest?
I was thinking about a Tech Sup forum for say, overall system problems, problems after just building, and a few by component type (say, core components, storage devices, I/O, etc.)
Or maybe people prefer having everything in one forum? I'm just afraid posts will "fall through the cracks".
Please let me know what you think...

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Charles M. Kozierok ( ixlubb@PCGuide.com )
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...

[Son of Zeus]

Master Yoda (a.k.a. Charles),

"potentially frosted pickles"??? Thought u were based in the States, not Siberia. Not much technical support needed with those (I hope) but a huge potential for export I imagine.

OK got to cut down on the caffeine. Where were we? Ah yes, splitting the Technical Support Forums into bit sized chunks (sorry about the food analogies but I can't seem to get those frozen pickles out of my mind). Sounds logical.

Can we have one for designing & putting together new systems? I would most definitely be interested in that. How about: "General"; "Mobos, Chipsets & CPUs"; "Everything Storage Related"; "Monitors"; "Video Cards"; "Sound Cards"; "Modems"; "Peripherals" etc, etc.

Bye for Now.......Son of Zeus.

[DANQU]

Hi Charles
Cataloging is a great idea, with topic indexing, itemizing in conjunction with your web-site; to be able to cross reference and search questions with answers.
For example
Hard drive problems:
Troubleshooting
Hard Disk
Drives

Great site
Dan




[This message has been edited by DANQU (edited 09-05-2000).]

[Wolfe]

Hey, Charles.

I agree with the other posters. A CPU/Mobo section seems a logical choice. I think Video/Multimedia could be a catch-all group for monitors, video cards, DVDs, and maybe even sound cards/speakers? I suppose storage needs its own group. And peripherals would take all the rest of hardware. Not sure about software, though. One big ole group or more sub-categories? *shrug*

- Chris

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PC Hardware Links (http://users.erols.com/chare/)

[ixl]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. Though I am surprised I have not heard from more of the others.. perhaps people don't care that much about how the forums are organized. More my style to worry about such things. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

I will be shuffling the forums today. If anyone has any more input on how to do it, please speak up now! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

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Charles M. Kozierok ( ixlubb@PCGuide.com )
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...

[der King Mongo]

Hi Charles,

I agree with your assessment--it's already somewhat unmanageable, IMHO. I was thinking more along the lines of
Install Help
Troubleshooting
and then within those, the different types of hardware, say
Cards (video, sound)
Storage (HDDs, CDs, DVDs)
Chips (memory, CPU)

Or something like that. My only concern is that, as I've seen on other great forums, you get some newbie posting "how do you install a hard drive?" in the Video Card Troubleshooting forum and everyone curses them out for not reading the Forum FAQ...but, I trust you to maintain good discipline amongst the troops.



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***He who eats when he is full, digs his grave with his teeth***

[ixl]

Your Highness,
Yes, it is getting quite active is it not? I must say that this is a good problem to have. We have some great folks on that forum and people are getting their problems solved, which makes everyone happy.
Still, it is obvious that it needs to be split, and that will happen tomorrow. Since the TS forum accounts for the bulk of the messages on the forums right now, it will get split up. The others will be reorganized.
Your suggestions are good. The problem is that a lot of problems don't fall into neat component cateogries. Take a look at the current TS topics, and consider: which forum would you put them in of the ones you suggested? It's not easy, I tried doing it myself and couldn't come up with a good solution. It may be that a couple of tries will be needed.
Of course, in the end all that matters is that people get help. It doesn't matter what the forum is called. Splitting is something I want to do so that if some answerers are too busy to scan everything, and they are more skilled in certain areas, they can concentrate there.
As for razzing newcomers, I don't think it will be a problem. We are all adults here and everyone's been well behaved. In time I will also appoint moderators for the various forums, who will have the authority to move threads from one forum to another if they are off-topic.
Thanks for your thoughts!

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Charles M. Kozierok ( ixlubb@PCGuide.com )
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...

[Samantha]

Wow, you've been doing at alot of work, Chief. Looks great!

Having participated on too many internet forums of various kinds over the years, I can tell you that there is one school of thought that believes that no matter how logical your organization or how well done your explanations, people will always post whereever they want. These people usually resist all efforts to break up groups into anything but the broadest categories. They are also the people who haunt the places hourly and, therefore, prefer to have fewer groups to deal with. They have little sympathy for the user who actually has a life and may visit a forum only weekly maybe to be confronted with 100's of messages in each of the few, large groups. I tend to favor categorization myself, but you need to merciless in your moderation. One advantage web forums has over news groups is the tools to move threads that are in the wrong forum. Some folks don't like to move threads, but you really have to if you don't want many of your forums to merge into one big jumble of undifferentiated topics.


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S~~

[ReddDogg]

I like the way you have been trying to organize, I like coming in and finding topics that I know something about and offering my input, and I like to hear responses to problems i don't have answers too. The best thing to me that you have is taht it shows on the main forum page what the most recent topic is in each forum, so I can tell if anything has changed without entering the forum. If you do subcategories, it will just enhance that for me. However, a good point was made in that people who post problems eitehr dont' pay attention to where they are posting, or they might not know what the problem is and their guess is totally off. It is honest mistake, i make it myself sometimes.

Thanks for all the hard work charles.

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Joe Redd
MCP

[ixl]

Originally posted by Samantha:
Wow, you've been doing at alot of work, Chief. Looks great!

Thanks! I'm getting really into this, pretty neat considering I had never seen Perl code beyond a bunch of print statements two weeks ago. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

...They have little sympathy for the user who actually has a life and may visit a forum only weekly maybe to be confronted with 100's of messages in each of the few, large groups. I tend to favor categorization myself, but you need to merciless in your moderation. One advantage web forums has over news groups is the tools to move threads that are in the wrong forum. Some folks don't like to move threads, but you really have to if you don't want many of your forums to merge into one big jumble of undifferentiated topics.

I agree wholeheartedly, and have already moved some threads. I plan to continue doing so.
I let a few fall through the cracks because I don't like the way the default code moves threads without linking to them. It seemed rude to take someone's topic, move it, and provide no easy way for them to find it. I just wrote a new hack that does this: when a thread moves, a hyperlink appears at the top of the thread in its old location pointing to the new forum where the thread is. I figured this was only fair to the people posting questions.

If (when?) volume ever picks up sufficiently that I can't keep up with all the new postings, I will designate moderators for different forums to keep charge of them and they will also be able to move threads.

c

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Charles M. Kozierok ( ixlubb@PCGuide.com )
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...

[ixl]

Originally posted by ReddDogg:
I like the way you have been trying to organize, I like coming in and finding topics that I know something about and offering my input, and I like to hear responses to problems i don't have answers too. The best thing to me that you have is taht it shows on the main forum page what the most recent topic is in each forum, so I can tell if anything has changed without entering the forum.

Thank you! I like this hack very much myself, and for the exact same reason. And you can also jump directly to the newest topic without going through the topic list. I consider this feature to be something important now that we have a lot of forums. I don't like jumping between all the topic lists any more than anyone else does.
If you do subcategories, it will just enhance that for me.

No, this is it for categories, at least until this forum grows much larger. As it is, it should be sufficient to last us for quite a while.
However, a good point was made in that people who post problems eitehr dont' pay attention to where they are posting, or they might not know what the problem is and their guess is totally off. It is honest mistake, i make it myself sometimes.

It's not a problem. Posts can be moved.

Thanks for all the hard work charles.

My pleasure; and thanks for all the hard work you great regulars are doing answering questions that I either can't because I am too buy with coding, or don't have the experience to address.

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Charles M. Kozierok ( ixlubb@PCGuide.com )
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...

[Paleo Pete]

I just posted in the suggestions box, and didn't realize this thread existed. I saw the managability issue coming, and if you'll check the suggestion box you'll see this again.

I think a good idea would be to separate the Operating System section into DOS, Win3.x, Win95 etc. I won't extrapolate here, see the other thread.

Some of the other suggestions here sound good too. We have some good folks here, and have drawn some very knowledgable ones who seem to be doing very well.

You'll always have the few who post questions wherever hey happen to land, but that's a pretty common thing, you just have to grin and bear it. As someone said elsewhere in this thread, you have to stick to your guns with the moderation. Another given is the few who will be abusive or insulting from time to time. Can't give an inch in that department, or they'll take a mile.

All in all, it looks very good to me so far, I've been trying to help in another forum for a while, and have been hanging out here mostly since I spotted this forum, since I seem to be able to be of more assistance. the people in the other one were, for the most part, way out of my league, and seemed to opt for the most technical fixes they could think up. I try to go the opposite direction, and keep it simple as possible, since we're dealing with people who, for the most part, don't know squat about what they're doing. No insult is intended, simply a statement of fact. Most of the people asking questions do so because thay have no idea what to do, and so far, the people here seem to be doing quite well at helping them.

One thing for all the techs, you might have noticed me pointing out my site a few times, and you'll see me suggest books often too. My goal is to not only help people, but to urge them to help themselves as well, without outright telling them to go learn something. That might be a good idea for us all to think about.

http://www.zing.com/picture/pf6b0795b25a6c3b3085c5cc19f8532af/ff87923f.gif.orig.gif


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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[ixl]

Originally posted by Paleo Pete:
I just posted in the suggestions box, and didn't realize this thread existed. I saw the managability issue coming, and if you'll check the suggestion box you'll see this again.

I'll respond there too. Thanks.

Some of the other suggestions here sound good too. We have some good folks here, and have drawn some very knowledgable ones who seem to be doing very well.

I'm pleased with folks like yourself, King Mongo, Joe, Dale (where is he lately? http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif ) and others who have jumped in and contributed. It's great to have such smart folks around. I don't know the answers to a lot of things, and don't have time to respond to them all even if I did.
One thing I hope will happen over time is more general discussion. We spend a lot of time helping people with problems, and that's cool. But it will also be nice to build a community of folks who can discuss PC issues in more general fashion.

You'll always have the few who post questions wherever hey happen to land, but that's a pretty common thing, you just have to grin and bear it. As someone said elsewhere in this thread, you have to stick to your guns with the moderation. Another given is the few who will be abusive or insulting from time to time. Can't give an inch in that department, or they'll take a mile.

I agree wholeheartedly. We had one minor issue so far and I think it was resolved satisfactorily. In the end, the person who needed help got it.

All in all, it looks very good to me so far, I've been trying to help in another forum for a while, and have been hanging out here mostly since I spotted this forum, since I seem to be able to be of more assistance. the people in the other one were, for the most part, way out of my league, and seemed to opt for the most technical fixes they could think up. I try to go the opposite direction, and keep it simple as possible, since we're dealing with people who, for the most part, don't know squat about what they're doing. No insult is intended, simply a statement of fact. Most of the people asking questions do so because thay have no idea what to do, and so far, the people here seem to be doing quite well at helping them.

I agree. And I like your attitude. People come to this site to get explanations they can use, and "KISS" is the way to go. At the same time, we are always respectful towards anyone who comes here. After all, we were all newbies once, something that some people on some web sites seem to have forgotten.

One thing for all the techs, you might have noticed me pointing out my site a few times, and you'll see me suggest books often too. My goal is to not only help people, but to urge them to help themselves as well, without outright telling them to go learn something. That might be a good idea for us all to think about.

I agree again. And again, this is consonant with the goals of the site overall.

Thanks Pete!

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.