Node (Forum) Tweaks Help!!!

[StevenHXF]

Hello all, having had to sort out permissions for each of the nodes on the forum by hand we came to the conclusion that there are too many forums and sub forums on ICMag.

To encourage new posts and to try and get some of the people who stick to one area of the forum to come out of hiding we'd like to reduce the number of forums and sub Forums and maybe look at changing the order of forums and categories on the homepage. Something that stands out to me straight away is the fact that the Growing category is half way down the homepage, seeing as this is what most people use the forum for surely they should be at the top? I might be talking nonsense but it strikes me as odd that International Forums would be higher than some of the Growing forums. Again, this is just me thinking out loud and isn't gospel.

What we'd like to do is ask for suggestions on how we might start to clean up / merge some of these forums / sub forums and maybe even ideas on what the hierarchy of them should be when you first visit ICMag.

An example of something i'd like to do straight away is to move the individual states from USA Cannabis Scene: State By State and into the USA sub forum inside International Forums. This would remove an item on the current IC Magazine category and reduce the length of the overall homepage.

Any suggestions are welcome. Please only post relevant replies in this thread, there's plenty of other threads to talk about other things.

P.S This isn't taking time away from other work going on.

Proposed Changes

• Move individual states from USA Cannabis Scene: State By State into International Forums > USA, we'll look at trimming some of these down further if required.
• Merge all International Forums sub forums into their parents. Germany, Hungarian etc... After discussion, we will have to do this on a forum and sub by sub basis. One size will not fit all for this.
• Make Speakers Corner a members only forum and stop posts there appearing on listings [suggestion]
• Merge Scotland <> UK International forums (controversial I know)
• Merge Toker's Den sub forums into parent prior to move into Off Topic
• Merge General gardening, Women's Forum, Old Stoners Crash Pad, Hobbies and Interests and Toker's Den into Off Topic.
• Move Growing Forums to the top of the forum and change position of IC Magazine forums.

 

[Switcher56]

Start with the speaker's corner. Most place have a forum for such discourse, not several subs to said forum.

 

[StevenHXF]

Start with the speaker's corner. Most place have a forum for such discourse, not several subs to said forum.

Do you mean move all the posts from the Post Your Videos!, Speakers Corner and Found on the Net into the main Toker's Den forum?

 

[exploziv]

Some would like that corner gone for good, but maybe some kind of regrouping wouldn't be bad. I say your plan is great! I am a mod here and it doesn't make sense. Imagine how it looks to a new user.. Other than that you got those recomandations from me in private already, I will add if I find new ones.

 

[StevenHXF]

I'm going to create a list in the original post with suggestions to try and form some sort of list to work through. This is subject to change and will be informed by forum users. Something has to be done though because my OCD can't take it.

 

[tobedetermined]

Ideally . . .

In my mind the speakers corner would be clumped together in Toker’s Den. Posts from SC would not appear on the main What’s New feeds. In other words, if you want to see it and participate in it, you have to drill down into Speaker’s Corner. And only a logged in member can view it. I was a participant on another unrelated forum and this is how they dealt with all of the BS that an SC type forum creates.

 

[StevenHXF]

Have added those suggestions to the list in the original post, would welcome suggestions on how to streamline everything else.

 

[Three Berries]

Are certain section off limits to guest?

 

[Uludag]

We came to the conclusion that there are too many forums and sub forums on ICMag.

Hi , i was asking in the german subforum and people agreed also to this statement. Its just to much and alot of old stuff which didnt survive the software changes sometimes or people deleted the old pictures by themselves. So we need a cleaning here. Also if we think about german speaking people, Austria, big parts of switzerland can understand too. So maybe it would be a good change to get them all together.

I mean the activity in german subs:

general is kinda okayish i think, not the most active but fine. But if we look at the others for example the "Cannabis Helpcorner" :

2 Questions/ year.

Seedsman Corner:

Nothing against Seedsman, much love but i mean cmon this is useless. 2019.


Then further, if we look at the subs of Austria and Switzerland:

I think Austria and germany are maybe not a 100% fitting because Austria has cloneshops but still, i think its good idea to combine them. Also Switzerland:

Accept 1 Posting not used in 2 years. Maybe has 50 Threads.


Im not sure i have a point here but i think thats what you wanted to say also here:

To encourage new posts and to try and get some of the people who stick to one area of the forum to come out of hiding we'd like to reduce the number of forums and sub Forums and maybe look at changing the order of forums and categories on the homepage.

What we'd like to do is ask for suggestions on how we might start to clean up / merge some of these forums / sub forums

We have the same i think with Scotland and UK maybe? I guess they could have a sub together.

In general if we look at the frontpage also why we have to have so much different channels you could combine stuff like growing colloseum, growing in coco, growing in soil, growing diaris. Maybe just name it Indoorgrowing and people can open reports and stuff.

Growroom desingns, fertilizers and nutrients, harvesting and processing could be something like Grow-Equipment.

General gardening, Womens, old stoners crash pad, hobbies and interests,Tokers Den could be "offtopic". No offense against the girls or so but i guess they can use the other growing channels also like the boys.

I think the IC has alot of diamants to find but we need to clean alot to bring them back to shine again!

Sorry for my poor english buddies. just a few examples from my stoned 420 head. cheers

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

The forums definitely need some sort of change - to simplify them - and lose much old 'dead wood'' - that is not relevant today - I like some of the suggestions so far - keep them coming -

 

[Ganoderma]

I will be pondering on all of this... Steven, I will have questions to ask at some point which will help me in coming up with suggestions.

 

[StevenHXF]

I will be pondering on all of this... Steven, I will have questions to ask at some point which will help me in coming up with suggestions.

Look forward to hearing your suggestions.

 

[StevenHXF]

Bump.

Would really like some feedback on this. If we do our own thing and move the forums around people will moan and at the same time we'll get no suggestions on how people might like things. Sticking with things as they are is a valid suggestion but would love to hear why the current layout of the forum nodes is good.

Come on people.

 

[Chi13]

The forums definitely need some sort of change - to simplify them - and lose much old 'dead wood'' - that is not relevant today - I like some of the suggestions so far - keep them coming -

Some of the old stuff is the most interesting; it's history as well. Not trying to create more subforums but I'd love to be able to access the old stuff if needed. edit, just noticed an archive subforum.

Dump the speakers forum altogether. It has created more bad feeling than it's worth, or at least fence it off with warning signs.

 

[Entusia]

Proposed Changes

• Move individual states from USA Cannabis Scene: State By State into International Forums > USA, we'll look at trimming some of these down further if required.
• Merge all International Forums sub forums into their parents. Germany, Hungarian etc...
• Make Speakers Corner a members only forum and stop posts there appearing on listings [suggestion]
• Merge Scotland <> UK International forums (controversial I know)
• Merge Toker's Den sub forums into parent prior to move into Off Topic
• Merge General gardening, Women's Forum, Old Stoners Crash Pad, Hobbies and Interests and Toker's Den into Off Topic.
• maybe we should start with primary categories on the homepage first and see if we can fit merged forums into those categoried?!?
• maybe make small / step-by-step changes and see if we can get some sort of order rather than trying to do it all at once?!?!

Imho merging all the international sub forums into their parents is not needed. It would be cool, but you'd need to have some sort of advanced post flair/filter system before. Maybe on some of the more inactive ones would make sense even without such a system, but in Italian for example it would be a complete disaster. There'd be too many different types of grows that go straight into a single feed.

So the forum i would like to see definitely has less nodes and more node-specific post flairs (categories) to screen unwanted content, a la reddit. Also, would love to have the ability to hide nodes/forums permanently from my view.

I'd say start making small changes from the bottom (subforums) and finish with the top (forums).
Also the ordering and grouping is very weird. "Grows" should be first. Move Contests and Cup to an indipendent top level node, second. Move International forums to an indipendent top level node, third. "Talk about it" should be fourth. This is the content that I (and i think others too) come here for, in order of importance.

Then, "Vendor forums" should be fourth. "Magazine" (announcements, news, support, etc) should be last. This is the content that keeps the site alive, but not full of users. If users go, there's no site.

My

 

[Uludag]

Imho merging all the international sub forums into their parents is not needed. It would be cool, but you'd need to have some sort of advanced post flair/filter system before. Maybe on some of the more inactive ones would make sense even without such a system, but in Italian for example it would be a complete disaster. There'd be too many different types of grows that go straight into a single feed.

Maybe not all but a few ones make sense to me. And i guess you are right with the very well used ones. Im not italian so what do you think about cleanings? Maybe having a italian sub with 2 categories like Grow related for the reports and not related for the other stuff.

In my dreams you can click like for example on the german sub, there you have this offtopic part with threads like "what are you smokin right now" "what is your favorite Song" Stuff like this what people are like to use daily, just for a bit conversation.

And then one part where you have the Reports, but sorted out the dead ones without pictures, not ended very well.....etc. So if a new german/italian/spanish whatever user hits the ICmag, he can just go through finished reports in his native language.

Lets say kind of a Allstar Galerie. Very usefull Threads, with a lot of potential to learn things and see something very special. Because i have to agree here 100%

Some of the old stuff is the most interesting; it's history as well.

Lets finds this good stuff and delete the useless. Everyone can help Admins in his native language finding dead threads, doin a bit of preparatory work. Admins can give it a look and decide as a last instance if it really can go to the trash.

 

[StevenHXF]

Maybe not all but a few ones make sense to me. And i guess you are right with the very well used ones. Im not italian so what do you think about cleanings? Maybe having a italian sub with 2 categories like Grow related for the reports and not related for the other stuff.

In my dreams you can click like for example on the german sub, there you have this offtopic part with threads like "what are you smokin right now" "what is your favorite Song" Stuff like this what people are like to use daily, just for a bit conversation.

And then one part where you have the Reports, but sorted out the dead ones without pictures, not ended very well.....etc. So if a new german/italian/spanish whatever user hits the ICmag, he can just go through finished reports in his native language.

Lets say kind of a Allstar Galerie. Very usefull Threads, with a lot of potential to learn things and see something very special. Because i have to agree here 100%



Lets finds this good stuff and delete the useless. Everyone can help Admins in his native language finding dead threads, doin a bit of preparatory work. Admins can give it a look and decide as a last instance if it really can go to the trash.

Yeah, I think what happens in the International Forum subs , especially the non English language ones will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis by the people who use them. I thought we could do a vanilla merge on all of them but as @Entusia points out, the Italian forum will benefit from keeping its subs.

I think we'll work on the obvious wins of which there aren't many and will think some more and await more feedback.

Does anybody have any opinion on the main categories and the order in which they appear?

 

[VerdantGreen]

I would support hiding speakers' corner as much as possible.. some of the threads/views promoted there are offensive and revolting and it is moderated in a way that skews towards far right conspiracy (eg, the chosen stickies) .. or get rid all together..

Seedbay doesn't need any subforums, it makes my forum three clicks away from the front page when it only needs to be two... just a single forum and maybe a couple of stickies would be fine.

will keep thinking...

 

[StevenHXF]

Keep it coming.

 

[Phenome]

I’d just like to say that the dj short sub forum is a very important section to this site for me, I’ve spent too many hundreds of hours contributing to that sub forum that I would be devastated if it got grouped into another forum subsection. I think getting rid of the state by state stuff sounds like a good idea, i use to be active in the Oregon section but I can’t even remember the last time someone posted on there