We have quite a few threads that are more of a tutorial (educational) nature than just adressing one problem. I am thinking of jd's write up on UAC, ScottW's on codecs or my own on ghosting/imaging or on compatibility mode. Maybe we should group those together in a "Tutorial Forum" so that they can be easily found rather than having to leaf back 113 pages on the general forum. I know the argument is going to be : put it into the Wiki. But that is a much more involved job and we often don't have the time or courage to do that. There is also a lot of formal rules for the Wiki that not everybody wants to study. The "tutorial" route would be something in between and once it exists it may encourage more people to contribute their specialized knowledge. And often a thread does not start as such, but develops into it. I would leave it at the discretion of the Mods and the Geek to move the threads that qualify. --- Any comments?
How-To Geek Forums / Site Suggestions
New Forum for tutorials
(27 posts)
Stickies can be labeled 'Tutorial'. Forum's often close the stickies and questions unanswered are posted under an appropriate forum thread. That would solve the 113 page issue and let members post queries that are unique to their issue.
We've encouraged more than one member to write tutorials and can easily add a sub-section of stickies for just that purpose. Thank you whs for doing what you've done already.
No need to thank me. I just do what comes to mind. The stickies is fine, but you don't want to have too many of those. And after a while they change anyhow. But any mechanism (sub-stickies or a dedicated Forum) could serve the purpose, provided enough people think it is worth the change.
I would not spread them all over the place. My idea was, if someone wanted to read up on a specific subject, he could first check in 1 place whether there is a useful tutorial. Because if you use the Forum search, you get every dog and pony post that contains the search argument words and it is tedious to find the one that is really helpful. It was just an idea to make it easier to study a subject in a more comprhensive fashion. Over time it would become a complementary resource to the Geeks How To's (which would be even more useful if there were a search function just for those).
Btw: It would be nice if there were a search facility that searched only in "that folder" - like in Explorer (unless I am missing something).
We could definitely "sticky" the threads, but I think we'd end up potentially having too many stickies all over the place.
I'll give some thought to this, there might be another way to accomplish this by re-enabling the tags feature in a limited fashion. That way threads could be "tagged" as a tutorial, and there's a built-in page for each tag, effectively making a "Tutorial" page.
I've been flirting with the idea of creating a "wiki" type of forum post, where posts could be tagged as tutorials or "articles". The only real difference would be that the first post could be edited without a time limit, with the edit history viewable for everybody.
It's not a new idea, it's similar to Jeff Atwood's Stack Overflow site ( http://stackoverflow.com )
I have seen other forums where there are tutorial threads in which the first post is the tutorial. While that is a fine idea, I'm not crazy about doing it here at HTG forums because there is so very many limitations in the posting software which would severely limit the usability of the tutorial. No formatting, bold, italics and such; no tables or nested lists, ordered or unordered; and no *true* block quote that preserves whitespace.
I don't have a solution for this, but anything that adds a burden to The Geek or the MODs is a non-starter to me.
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