exxxviii wrote:
First, thanks a ton for reading and responding. I was worried that this thread would get a lot of attention and you might not be able to see everything right away. I did not intend for it to be BS or whiney, so I hope that did not lead you to discount all I said. Here is where I was coming from...
Slowman wrote:
i'm sorry. at some point i just have to call bullshit on bullshit. i routinely find what some of you consider unsearchable in 30sec using our search utility.
30 seconds is an eternity in search land. By 15-20 seconds, I will have exhausted about every search permutation I can think of on a topic and give up. "Some of you consider unsearachable" should be evidence enough of an issue. This really is the only forum I know that ignores numbers. I will grant you that it is a little better, but if I am having trouble finding something, I go to Google and add the site:slowtwitch.com tag to search. I know to do this because I am a digital and computer expert; most folks do not know how to search a site from Google.
Slowman wrote:
The problem is not the storage. it's the processor load. we're constantly upgrading the server hardware, RAM, processors to keep up.
I agree, since you you are still hosting on your own hardware. I had assumed that you were hosting in Azure, AWS, or something similar. Trying to scale a private, physical hosting environment for this site would be a beast.
Slowman wrote:
you're whining. this forum has the best user-generated content of any forum you've ever been to, including those you moderate.
Whining is not my intent. And, I did not mean to suggest that control or censorship is the solution, though my statement looks like that when I read it again. My intent is to figure out some way to help the seekers of information cut through the noise to find what they are looking for. This ties to better searching and that magic AI to help bucket great content.
It is the passion that derails threads. The passion is what builds the online relationships that help generate new threads with new information. The problem is that good threads get a lot of noise posts (some fine and some unhealthy) because of passion. The challenge is that in a good thread, we still have to wade through a lot of noise to find the salient points. Examples are the debates on aerodynamics and rolling resistance. Those have immensely valuable needles hidden in haystacks of arguments and healthy debate.
Slowman wrote:
now you're talking. i've been thinking the same thing. for example, we didn't used to have "indoor" on that navbar. we do because of precisely what you just said. i'm getting rid of "photos" and replacing it with "gravel". so, yes, thanks for that. thanks for the kick in the pants on that. i'll see if i can get that done this weekend.
This is why my earlier points are leading to. This site has a crapton of invaluable information. On the BMW forum I mentioned, we created an accompanying wiki that grew with the knowledge from the forum. That was manual 15 years ago, but there has to be some magic tools today that can help automate this.[/quote]
let me be clear: you and i struggle with the same thing. we have 7,500 articles and 6 million posts. and 90,000 forum users and by mid next year 100,000. right now, my biggest problem is getting people to use the navigational tools we're building to wrangle the data. we built a utility called HOT FORUM TOPICS. you'll see it here. nobody knows what it is, how to use it, it doesn't matter how many times i explain it and in how many places. the goal is for this to be a joint project between moderators and users, to corral and present not just searchable post and threads, but the best among them, in a living archive.
so, i need to find a way to rebrand it. make what it is more obvious. and that is just one of a number of changes i want to make to improve navigation. our biggest challenge, and all our work product, is invested in: how to arrange and present content; and how to manage navigation. i spent a boatload of money on that in 2016 and 2017, and it's like painting the golden gate bridge: as soon as it was finished i needed to start again.
i hear you, brother. this thread was not designed to be what do you need mostly
from this site. it was designed as
what do you need mostly? in your endurance life? with the goal toward figuring out what we ought to offer a slowtwitch club member, if we decide to have a club. however, as you know, as a moderator, threads take on lives of their own, and i'm taking notes. i have a bunch of notes, on how to make some changes to the site based on the input on this thread.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman