FAQ Area

Bill,

Nice idea. But if we do it the way you suggest we will need moderators - we are still gathering the team. Are you volunteering? :)

Alan

Thanks Bill. I am sure you will be hearing from someone soon.

Alan

At the moment, you can only mark an individual thread as read. Open the thread and at the top right is a button 'mark thread read'. Click on that and wait. It takes about 5 seconds per 100 posts to process (can be slower at busy times).

We are investigating marking whole forums as read - but not with the current algorithm.

Alan

John, you may need to clear your cache. For me (with Firefox) it was Ctrl-F5.

Alan

I agree - see what's happened with the beginners forums. Not good.

So, if we have a "FAQ" or "Tutorials" section, we need:

1) Someone to write a tutorial - this could be any member.and post it to somewhere that a panel can review it.
2) a panel of respected people to privately discuss whether the tutorial is valid
3) a forum which is read-only for members but writeable by the authors (or someone who has permission to post there).

I am sure we have people who can write tutorials. We just need to ask.
I can create an area where it is written to but not available to the public. I would suggest that the author emails me or Bob with a summary of their tutorial and we grant them access to that area.
We need a panel of people to review. This could be other authors plus selected members of the public who we trust to give an honest and polite review.
I can create the read only forum for members. When the tutorial is ready, one of us can move it in there.

So, how does that stand up at first glance?

Alan

I think in this case a better term is 'editor' or 'curator'.

I'm not very keen on that approach. I think that there should be just one go-to area for beginners. There they should go to find answers to their questions, whether those answers are ready made or need composing. I think that the solution that we have at the moment, a place for beginners to go, and a place where what the beginners should be told should work, and if Bill wants to curate, I'm very happy to for him to do it. We've got too many forums already, and providing two places for beginners to go is just providing a headache for them. Maybe we should rename 'beginners questions' to 'beginners area'.
As for editorial control, that's for when we get editorial content - I think having that sort of a control in a forum is not what forums are about, really. What I'd suggest is to continue with the present approach, which is to let people contribute to answering beginners questions, move debates into the 'discussion' forum and put good responses into the pinned list at the top.

That's fine by me. I was responding to the request for an FAQ/Tutorial area.

I think the beginners area (I like that title) does need tidying up.

Alan

I agree. It was a mess on DPReview, and we've inherited the mess. Made worse by a few people getting their retaliation in first.

Let's have a quiet discussion sometime in the next few days - no hurry.

Alan