"Koryu: History & Tradition" forum

[Nathan Scott]

Hi all,

For some unknown reason I just spent the last day and a half cleaning up the koryu forum. It has a great deal of useful information in there that is now easier to find.

I trimmed off about 7 pages of threads by moving them to the appropriate places, or merging them with existing threads on the same subject. The dojo finder is more beefed up, the ryu-ha listing sub-forum is more beefed up, and there are a lot more archived threads on recurring subjects of discussion. I also renamed threads as necessary to identify the actual subject of each thread.

If you haven't been there for a while, you might take another look. It should be much easier to search through now.

Suggestions or questions welcome.

Regards,

[Ken-Hawaii]

Many thanks, Nathan. We need others to do similar "pruning" to make e-Budo more attractive to new members.

Ken

[Tripitaka of AA]

If people bookmarked their favourite threads, will they still be found after the renaming/clarification/cleaning up? Sounds like you did a magnificent job and I'm sure it will be much appreciated, I'm just wondering what message comes back if you try to follow an old link to such a thread. Hopefully, any confusion will be cleared up when people read THIS thread.

[Nathan Scott]

Thank you sir.

Bookmarking old threads? Hmmm. Well, I didn't consider that, but here is how it will pan out:

1) Threads that were renamed will still come up under the same URL as was previously bookmarked. There will just be a different title.

2) Threads that were merged, were merged into a single existing thread (usually the main one) for the subject. The main thread has the same URL as before, but now contains additional postings from other thread(s). If you bookmarked a thread that was subsumed within the main thread, then the bookmarked link will be dead now. The other benefit of merging threads is, when someone responds to a subject that is now in a single thread, everyone who posted in other related threads will not get "new post" notifications. If the threads are left separate, then a discussion might flare up in a related thread that the others wouldn't know about.

3) Threads that were moved into one of the Koryu sub-forums will have the same URL, just a different physical location in the forum.

So for the most part, the bookmarks won't be messed up too much. For those that are, I apologize. But allow me to offer my philosophy on the house cleaning:

When threads are new, people involved benefit from the discussion. Afterwards, the threads become buried deep in the forum, or others don't notice them because the title does not match the subject. So you end up with a forum full of duplicate discussions over the same subject matter, and good information being lost. Many aren't willing to take the time to surf through every thread trying to figure out which one contains gold, and which one is just some kid looking to get some attention on the internet.

So, in my experience, house cleaning after a subject has died off and combining like subjects into single threads that have accurate thread titles greatly enhances the attention span of new visitors to the forum in the future. It cuts down on time surfing through all the various threads looking for an answer, and accurate thread titles enhance "search" function results when performing a search (including Google searches). The sub-forums are also important, and allow readers to cut down on search time by consolidating specific information into sub-forums.

We've all noticed the massive amount of contributions we used to get on discussion forums has largely died off. I believe a big factor to this is because most everything has already been discussed. So, since we have always had some high quality contributors at e-budo, I figure if we keep the forums organized it will help it continue to serve an important purpose as an information archive.

But yeah, the house cleaning may cause a few minor inconveniences for those bookmarking or memorizing thread names/locations, and I apologize for that.

Regards,

[Nathan Scott]

BTW, just to be clear, I didn't mess with ALL the threads, but I did clean up quite a few.

[Anders Pettersson]

Just to add some details concerning David's question.
If the bookmark has the thread number, like for this thread: http://www.e-budo.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52604 then the bookmark will always point on that thread, no matter what the title has changed to.

If the bookmark contains a reference for a post like this:
http://www.e-budo.com/forum/showthread.php?p=497294
("p" here is the reference to the post id) it will always show the thread with that post in. No matter what thread it currently is located in.

/Anders

[Tripitaka of AA]

Brilliant responses and well put. I agree with Nathan's philosophy and just got to wondering what would happen... Anders, as ever, is a practically minded chap who is as thorough as he is knowledgable. All is good, I will find my favourite posts/threads, and now other people have a better chance of finding what they are looking for. We all win. Thank you.