Reduce number of stickies?

Apogee

I notice that one of the stickies has recently been removed, but that still leaves 13 remaining.

The 'DTT commerical multiplexes' is now of only historical interest, and the 'BCI and Launch issues' hasn't had a post since January - can these two be unstickied?

While we're at it, surely the 'IRC Chatroom' could be moved into the FAQ or even Charter?

lucernarian

+ 1 to that.

watty

These forums http://boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=40 orignally a spin off from ICDG
http://iolfree.ie/~icdg/
(Except for Broadcasting History which is spin off of http://www.irish-tv.com/ and Foriegn satellite which was created later).

Originally moved to Boards as "hosted" about 8 years ago.

Because of the difficulty of Static information and Mr ICDG was too busy to update http://iolfree.ie/~icdg/ Byte and I (when moderators here probably) with the help of others especially Zaphod and Northern Correspondent (aka lawhec) decided to set up a wiki for all the regular posters here on the "ICDG" forums to contribute called
ICDG Irish Cable and Digital Guide
http://bytelive.com/wiki/tiki-custom_home.php

There was huge problems with security, spam and the syntax a little awkward. Also Backup & Restore didn't work.

So Bond-007, DMC and Byte persuaded me to setup www.techtir.ie in September 2009 (We each have a 1/4 share). We decided to use "Article plugin" on vBulletin. We imported most of the content in the icdg.bytelive.com wiki to the Article section. This in retrospect was not the best idea as vBulletin is expensive and really only good when just used for forums and customised as boards.ie is.

When hosting expires or it's terminally broken http://bytelive.com/wiki/tiki-custom_home.php will be gone. Everything important has been copied off.

Since the ICDG Forums are still here and now subsumed into boards.ie, we decided in April 2010 to change www.techtir from vBulletin to Drupal as it's much better for articles, blogs etc.

Conclusion
There really should be very little that isn't specific to boards.ie and the rules of these forums in the Stickies that isn't either out of date or in www.techtir.ie

boards.ie is good for discussion, but not so great for reference material.

If there is some important reference material in stickies missing on www.techtir.ie let me or Byte know. (If Broadcasting history let rlogue know). Anyone posting here is welcome to have a tech blog at techtir with their own user name and add books and articles as well. Though the WYSIWYG editor doesn't display wysiwyg BBcode, most boards BBcode is accepted.

The moderator board used have an enormous number of stickies and they came up with a perfect solution.
They created one thread entitled index of important threads and stickied that.

You could unstick all bar the rules thread and put links into the one reference thread and sticky that and lock it.

Only 2 sticky threads left then,yet easy access to important or historically interesting threads.

Simple

cgarvey

Agreed with OP. Countless times, I've had a glance at he page, and have seen no new posts (there were, just below the fold).

Suggest Charter and FAQ as the only 2 stickies. The FAQ can have sections (like Aerials, DTT Equipment, DTT Coverage, SaorView/Sat) with links to threads (or valuable posts).

Until someone can volunteer the time to do that, surely a lot of the stickies can go.

John mac

I think this should be stickied

Apogee

Deleted User wrote: »

The moderator board used have an enormous number of stickies and they came up with a perfect solution.
They created one thread entitled index of important threads and stickied that.

You could unstick all bar the rules thread and put links into the one reference thread and sticky that and lock it.

Only 2 sticky threads left then,yet easy access to important or historically interesting threads.

That's a nice approach, certainly one that should be looked at for the FAQ which is a huge, rambling, unwieldy thing. Like this where only a mod can post on the FAQ thread.

But I'm not so sure it would work with the other threads. Mods might be expected to have enough experience/cop on to read such a megasticky, but the amount of casual traffic through here would mean that quite a few wouldn't bother checking it out and result in (even more) duplicate threads.

lucernarian

Duplicate threads are hard to "regulate" in that a discussion forum should have relatively free flowing conversation and the same topic may be discussed from a different reliability. E.g. a particular mast/tower upgrade for a relay might possibly duplicate content in a "51 sites to be enabled for DTT" thread yet it's only dealing with a transient issue and deserves its own thread.

One sticky covering a "category" of conversation (like DTT rollout for example) is too inflexible to deal with this and as others have elaborated better than me this forum is not ideal at all as a reference site. I don't see any harm in more threads covering a specific topic, e.g. "outages on Kippure Aug 2010" rather than merging them all into one thread which may have info that is long out of date and may have useful/still relevant nuggets buried within 200 posts of "EPG gone as of 6.45pm".

Many people, particularly the lots of newbies who are trying to find out about the eventual Analogue switchover will not read through a 50-page thread to find out whether their box will work for Saorview or if they'll likely have coverage in Clonmel or whatnot.

And of course the search function doesn't cover such common terms like RTÉ, FTA, BAI, DTT or MoU. Smaller threads with good titles allow this info to be easily found by those who need it.

watty

vBulletin search needs TLAs* to be manually added, sadly. So you can't search TV3 DTT

Another reason we chose Drupal instead of vBulletin
e.g. TV3 DTT

Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.

The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search : TV3, DTT

versus http://www.techtir.ie/search/node/TV3%20DTT (log in required)
or
http://www.google.ie/search?q=TV3+%2BDTT

People seem to not read even short stickies. Or search with Google/Bing. Maybe mort than 3/4 of questions already easily have the answer...

Apogee

bump

OneWayBet

Apogee wrote: »

bump

I agree, too many stickies!

Bob_Harris

I can't see it happening.

Mods don't like being told what to do :pac:

You have to make it look like it was their idea in the first place.

marclt

Hahah!!

I've very good at being told what to do! I will take a look at all your suggestions, and make a list of important topics.

I did suggest recently that we produce a Frequently Asked Questions, so people could reference that with links elsewhere - but it would be useful if we produced that as a 'community'

I do agree that anything that hasn't been posted on in a long time should not longer be 'stickied' and I'll remove some of those now.

Let me know what else you think we can do...

Apogee

Thanks marc!