Meta > Suggestions and Questions
Suggestion for Regional Boards
webny99:
--- Quote from: hbelkins on March 04, 2022, 01:35:05 PM ---This gets mentioned occasionally, and the consensus is generally to just leave things the way they are.
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I'm basically boiling this down to just removing the partial states from the board descriptions and pinning all the state threads. That seems like a pretty easy, minor change that would bring a lot more clarity to the regional boards.
--- Quote from: hbelkins on March 04, 2022, 01:35:05 PM ---]
The thing that bugs me about the Ohio Valley board is how so much stuff from Ohio and Indiana gets posted in the wrong region.
Everything about Columbus and Indianapolis belongs in the Ohio Valley section, not the Great Lakes section. I'm not wrong. Simple water drainage factors are the proof.
--- End quote ---
Regardless of the technical definition of Ohio Valley, content from one state in two different boards is the problem, so I think everything from those states should go in a single board. I don't really care which one, just as long as they're not split.
Scott5114:
--- Quote from: ran4sh on March 04, 2022, 02:19:32 PM ---I think that when originally implementing the regional boards, the states should have been grouped by US Census designation (South Atlantic is FL-GA-SC-NC-VA-WV-DC-MD-DE, West South Central is TX-LA-AR-OK, etc) although some regions could have been given different names.
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The problem is that those are stupid. The only state in West South Central that Oklahoma has much in common with is Texas; Lousiana is practically an entirely different planet. We have far more in common with Kansas and Missouri than we do Louisiana. South Atlantic is far too large; any categorization that puts Delaware in the same category as Florida and Georgia is suspect.
--- Quote from: webny99 on March 03, 2022, 10:35:20 PM ---And secondly, would it be possible to pin the general thread for each state within its respective board, as is done in the Northwest, Pacific Southwest and Mountain West boards? (This is especially pertinent for the Southeast board, where only Georgia has been pinned.)
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I'm still adamant that the general threads shouldn't even exist. Breaking them into smaller threads is much tidier since you don't have multiple conversations interleaved and cross-pollinating and periodically getting revived when someone reads 5 pages back. It also means that old discussions can peacefully sink onto page 2 and further back. I would much rather have a thread where a question is posted, then an answer, then it goes away, than having that exchange tucked into a 1,078-page thread where four disparate conversations are going on at any given time.
But I'm apparently the only one who feels that way.
webny99:
--- Quote from: Scott5114 on March 04, 2022, 06:14:59 PM ---
--- Quote from: ran4sh on March 04, 2022, 02:19:32 PM ---I think that when originally implementing the regional boards, the states should have been grouped by US Census designation (South Atlantic is FL-GA-SC-NC-VA-WV-DC-MD-DE, West South Central is TX-LA-AR-OK, etc) although some regions could have been given different names.
--- End quote ---
The problem is that those are stupid. The only state in West South Central that Oklahoma has much in common with is Texas; Lousiana is practically an entirely different planet. We have far more in common with Kansas and Missouri than we do Louisiana. South Atlantic is far too large; any categorization that puts Delaware in the same category as Florida and Georgia is suspect.
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I agree those aren't the greatest definitions. I don't have an issue with the regional boards we have other than the split states, so I guess the question would be, looking at the states that are split (IN, LA, MS, MN, NY, OH, PA, TN), can all of those be realistically assigned to just one board? If the answer is yes, there doesn't seem to be any drawback to doing so. It's certainly yes for New York, but I can't speak as well on the other states.
--- Quote from: Scott5114 on March 04, 2022, 06:14:59 PM ---
--- Quote from: webny99 on March 03, 2022, 10:35:20 PM ---And secondly, would it be possible to pin the general thread for each state within its respective board, as is done in the Northwest, Pacific Southwest and Mountain West boards? (This is especially pertinent for the Southeast board, where only Georgia has been pinned.)
--- End quote ---
I'm still adamant that the general threads shouldn't even exist. Breaking them into smaller threads is much tidier since you don't have multiple conversations interleaved and cross-pollinating and periodically getting revived when someone reads 5 pages back. It also means that old discussions can peacefully sink onto page 2 and further back. I would much rather have a thread where a question is posted, then an answer, then it goes away, than having that exchange tucked into a 1,078-page thread where four disparate conversations are going on at any given time.
But I'm apparently the only one who feels that way.
--- End quote ---
Interesting. I can totally see your point, as sometimes the general threads can have a lot going on. I guess the other side of it is that we already do have separate threads for a lot of general questions, major projects etc., so a good portion of the discussion in the general threads might simply not occur if the thread didn't exist. I know there's been questions I've had that I put in the general thread that I didn't feel warranted their own thread.
What about more frequent splitting from those threads, for example, if a question generates 10+ replies, splitting it into its own thread?
TheHighwayMan394:
Mods aren't nitpicking about this anyway. Because 95%+ of Minnesota discussion falls into the Great Lakes subsection since 80% of the state's population lives in the eastern half of the state, there's really no reason to farm out the oddball interesting Moorhead project to the other board.
However, if it interests you you can see how painstakingly vtk divided Ohio with justifications about why she chose the lines she did.
Scott5114:
--- Quote from: webny99 on March 04, 2022, 06:38:59 PM ---
--- Quote from: Scott5114 on March 04, 2022, 06:14:59 PM ---
--- Quote from: webny99 on March 03, 2022, 10:35:20 PM ---And secondly, would it be possible to pin the general thread for each state within its respective board, as is done in the Northwest, Pacific Southwest and Mountain West boards? (This is especially pertinent for the Southeast board, where only Georgia has been pinned.)
--- End quote ---
I'm still adamant that the general threads shouldn't even exist. Breaking them into smaller threads is much tidier since you don't have multiple conversations interleaved and cross-pollinating and periodically getting revived when someone reads 5 pages back. It also means that old discussions can peacefully sink onto page 2 and further back. I would much rather have a thread where a question is posted, then an answer, then it goes away, than having that exchange tucked into a 1,078-page thread where four disparate conversations are going on at any given time.
But I'm apparently the only one who feels that way.
--- End quote ---
Interesting. I can totally see your point, as sometimes the general threads can have a lot going on. I guess the other side of it is that we already do have separate threads for a lot of general questions, major projects etc., so a good portion of the discussion in the general threads might simply not occur if the thread didn't exist. I know there's been questions I've had that I put in the general thread that I didn't feel warranted their own thread.
--- End quote ---
My philosophy is that if the topic is distinct enough you can write an unambiguous title for it, it doesn't duplicate another thread, and it's something someone might actually be able to have a discussion about (i.e. it's not something that only the person posting it will care about), it warrants its own thread. Not every thread will reach multiple pages and that's perfectly fine.
From an admin standpoint, merging threads is far easier than splitting them (merging is "select merge target, choose which title the new thread will use and which board it will be in, execute", while splitting a thread can devolve into basically going over the thread and selecting posts one-by-one to split out). If for no other reason than that, I'd prefer erring on the side of smaller threads.
--- Quote ---What about more frequent splitting from those threads, for example, if a question generates 10+ replies, splitting it into its own thread?
--- End quote ---
The problem is that, as mentioned above, thread splitting can get pretty tedious, especially if it's not a clean "split off everything after this point". If there are two or three lines of conversation going on in one thread, it gets messy. This is especially true if a user makes a single post responding to two different users on two different lines of conversation, as happens sometimes. There is no software mechanism for splitting an individual post in half or duplicating a post and keeping the correct authorship information on it, so the mod can only choose whether that post belongs in thread A or B, and hope that nobody replies to the off-topic half of the post in the wrong thread.
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