The Glade 4.0

I was thinking about how we have a Health and Fitness section and a Food section, why not have a Home Improvement and Gardening section in the Board Index.
I'm sure we all have little projects or even big ones that we could get advice on from each other.
Foamy and I are thinking about moving and I have some questions about home improvement before we leave and some gardening questions too.

Just a thought. I already posed this to Dash and Mookhow. Mookhow said Poll all of you.

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ultimate guardians of their own liberty."- Thomas Jefferson

"Yeah, I'm rehearsing my poker face. I don't handle stupid well. *sigh*" - Farsky

I am totally onboard.

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Health and Fitness and Food got sections because there was a lot of posts to go there. I haven't seen a rash of Home and Gardening posts to justify a section, so it doesn't really make sense to me.

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If it was possible to hide it, I'd say yes. Can we do something from a technical standpoint to let users hide subforums that are just taking up screen real estate? Maybe an installable mod, or something?

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Subforums is basically the way to "hide" forums...

We could condense Food/Fitness as subforums under a "Lifestyle" forum of sorts.

I agree with Kaffis, though- we usually only make new forums/subforums when there are enough posts to justify it, and I haven't seen but a handful of posts that would go here.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Or perhaps there haven't been posts because there isn't a forum for it?

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That's kinda silly.

It's not like we had no food/cooking posts until there was a section for that.

I'm not against it, I just don't think there is a real need for one.

I should think that if you're interested in making such posts, start making them- and then once it reaches a critical mass, it's easy to go through and roll them all into a new subforum.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

This is possible by using usergroups. See (or don't see) the PbP forums. It's possible to set up a forum whitelist, but not a forum blacklist.

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There haven't been enough threads per this, so I don't think it's a good idea.

I'd use it.

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So quick question to those that say you'd use it:

Why would you post more in that vein if there was a subforum for it than you do now?

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Sure, ya, if there was enough discussion there.

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I think you missed the "why" in my question, Vlad.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Same reason I post more tech articles than I used to, I imagine.

Right now there isn't the place to post them so I only post when I've exhausted all other avenues (see my recent posting about shower valves). I am sure gardeners and home improvement people would like to share projects they are working on just like cooks share recipes.

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If it seeded discussions on those topics, there would be reasons to reply, maybe those would start more discussions. By creating a place to discuss something you can encourage people to post on that topic? You'd be fostering discussions. Does that make sense? I mean, we're not paying by the forum, right? If it doesn't work out and no one posts there, just delete it

If I have a question about technical stuff, or if I just want to read about technical stuff, I'm inclined to go over to the Tech forum. If I want to see wierd quirky news of the day type stuff, I go to General. If I want to talk about breeding tomatoes to select out the blight resistant ones, or I have a toilet with a wierd fitting that needs to be replaced... the Glade isn't the place I go, because there's no place to talk about it.

The one thread I did on gardening a while back in the Food forum brought in a couple pages of discussion, so that seems to be at least an indicator.

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Yeah, this thread was a good example of that too. If one day I'm in a mood to read about working on stuff on showers, I'd be able to easily find those threads. Maybe I won't need the information *right now*, but at least now I know what the valve thingy is called if I need to replace ours. OK, I don't remember what it's called... but now I know where to find it!

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I guess I'm just used to assuming that all of this stuff would still be discussed in General, like it has for quite some time.

To me, just because there isn't a subforum for it, doesn't mean we don't discuss it... It just means it goes in general, because there hasn't been such a significant desire to discuss it that we've made a subforum.

I guess what I'm saying is that just because we don't have a place specifically called "home repairs" doesn't mean we don't have a place to post it- I mean, heck, this site started when we only had a single forum that got everything posted to it.

I'm not opposed to a forum (or subforum) for specific topics, it just seems like that tends to fragment discussion, as well as making people think (as this thread shows) that if there isn't a specific subforum for it, there's no place to post about it.

I mean, we don't have a subforum for "Pets and Petcare", but I that doesn't mean we don't have a place (General) to post topics on on our pets, or asking questions about their care and training.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Sure... But we made a Food subforum because the cooks were already sharing recipes, not because we thought they might start sharing recipes if we made a subforum.

It seems like the way this has worked in the past is once discussion on an area reaches some critical mass, we split it off and make a sub forum to encourage it... But making a subforum to attract posts on issues people aren't already talking about is definitely a different way to go about it. Not wrong or bad, per se, but different.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Yeah, we had 8 EQ forums and 1 RL forum for quite some time and we got by. Not the end of the world if we don't have a home and garden forum I guess.

I know that I'd post in there though. What's the big objection to having another forum? Don't want to clutter the place up?

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The board was also twice as active 4 or 5 years ago in terms of posts/day.

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So... by you guys's logic, if I start up a bunch of gardening threads, we can have a forum?

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As I've said, I have no defined objections- I just know there has been strenuous objection to "cluttering" every time we've added a forum in the past- and those were for things you would see 2 or 3 topics per week on.

For this, I just mainly am unsure about the whole "make a forum to create discussion" as opposed to our current MO of "make a forum for discussion that's already happening". I did a handful of keyword searches (and looked through the results) and was able to find maybe 10 posts I could use to "seed" a new forum like this- that's 10 posts since 2009. And at least some of those I think are better suited to Tech or Food.

Again, I'm not voting either way- clutter doesn't bother me, so I'm pretty ambivalent. I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here.

If there was an easy way to make forums "not display", or have posts show up in "collections" as well as in one of a few general forums- but I mostly browse by the "Display New Posts" anyway, so what forum something is in has little effect on me. That and searches finds me new posts as well as the old ones I'm looking for.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I guess my point is that at least for the time being- if you want to talk about gardening, go ahead and start up the threads- we have several places they fit well.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.