|
|
The forum they relate to (football, baseball, etc.)
A new "News Forum"
No opinion - I don't read the Bot's posts
Yesterday when the News_bot posted several stories at 2:00pm, I had trouble viewing them. (home computer, different issue) After reading one of them and hitting 'next thread' it would skip all those threads that had the same time and go to the top of the list. I had to manually open all those threads in a new window to be able to view them. Does this make sense??
If anyone else had this problem, please speak up.
Just how freakin' lazy can one man be?
Quite lazy. :icon_wink:
My suggestion would be to create a separate news forum for all articles picked up by the News_Bot. In busy times regular posts get pushed off the front page of some forums (mainly football of course) in less than two days without news article posts...often it's less than one day when you add in the news articles.
Anyone who doesn't want the news articles mixed into a forum wouldn't have to bother with them if they were in their own forum. Also the admins wouldn't have to move misplaced news articles if they went to their own forum to begin with.
Or when you have articles that all have the same subject, place those all in one thread. During the softball tournament, you could open 6 or 7 links from the News_bot and it would all be the same WAC page.
Chris how much work is this on you?? Is there anything that some of us can do to help you out??
All valid comments and suggestions which I and others have given thought to at some point in the past.
As this is YOUR forum, we will take any suggestion under consideration.
First, the easy one.
Doc - That would be a lot of work on our part. As I've mentioned before, all of the Bot's posts go into a holding pen before the admins move it into the forum. The way we do it is to select all the posts at one time that are going to a particular forum and then "move" them to that place. We often times do not read the posts, but rather look at the topic and know where they go. To do what you are suggesting would require that we make sure the articles are on the same subject and then "merge" the posts before the move. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it will take more steps and time to do it.
Reality Check - While I can appreciate this, a couple of comments. First, you can always go to your User CP and go into the Edit Option screen. A little ways down you will see an option for "Number of Posts to show per Page". This is probably set to "Use Forum Default" Just change this to whatever you want and posts will stay on the page for longer. And if 40/page is not enough for you, just let me know and I'll add a larger option. Second, if you go to many other larger and more active forums, you will see that posts stay on the page a much shorter period of time than even ours!
While we can always set up a separate "Tech Athletic News" forum, we feel that this would actually reduce the interaction and attention to the different sports. MOST of the Bot's posts get numerous replies from our users and we feel that putting them into the forum they relate to lets people look at the ones they want and ignore the sports they aren't interested in. They also stimulate discussion on the forum.
Like I said, we are open to suggestions and help in managing the forum. If enough people want the Bot handled differently, we'll change it.
Chris
Thanks Chris for your reply. Considering that I've never messed with RSS feeds or bots, I wasn't sure what it would take to do what I was suggesting. If at some time there is an easier way to do this, then maybe we can revisit it.
I appreciate your response and all the work you put into the board.
I have always set my posts per page option to the maximum. An option greater than 40 per page would be welcomed.
Most casual users don't go beyond the first page of a board. In a time when we need to be attracting new members, having a large number of posts with 0 replies does not do anything to attract members.
I disgreed with your comment about "most" Bot posts getting numerous replies, but I was actually shocked to discover how few get any replies. Of the 400 Bot posts in just over the last two months, 325 of the 400 got 0 replies. Only 12 of the 400 got more than 10 replies. There have been only 514 total replies to those 400 posts, and 114 of them came on the latechreport.com post regarding nlulm.
I agree that if a majority of Bot posts generate board activity, then they should stay right where they are. But I don't believe even close to half generate any activity even in busy times. And if they don't, then are those posts really doing what you want by placing them in the sports forums?
No way. To do that, hey would have to make others admins and they aren't going to do that because then they can't talk about all of us.Originally Posted by DocMarvin362
To it's credit, I believe that some of the things that the bot posts on are things that we've already talked about, have another thread on, or is a story AFTER a game in which we talked about it at length when it was going on.
BTW, you now have more options for threads per page. I put in a 50, 75, and 100 threads per page option.
I've added a poll to this thread so we can see what the opinion of the rest of the board is.
I would really appreciate you running the news bot on latechreport.com so that we can support each site and build traffic for each other.
Please advise.
I love News_Bot. Great way for everybody to keep up with what has just happened, whether you were out of town, on vacation, or whatever. I realize a news forum would be a bunch of extra work, but it would be nice to have all the articles in one area.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
