Hi Clay
Thanks for your reply and suggestions.
I agree about a video, any video. That’s why I said it wasn’t a solution. I’ve been running Songstuff for 22 years, so you’re very much preaching to the converted regarding people’s behaviour, their interests, changeable desires, skills and commitments. It’s always worth exploring and discussing as members do come up with interesting and useful ideas.
I am thinking over what you are suggesting, trying to imagine it in practice. I guess one difference between our perspectives is that I am looking mostly to improve working within existing forum software. What you describe could be a significant redesign, possibly beyond the scope of what we can realistically do. Possibly not. I am aware of limitations of our software but also wary of menu proliferation which if done poorly can be one of the worst blights on a community. In many ways the issue is too many choices. Too many choices is simply difficult to navigate, period.
Until about 2012 the www part of Songstuff was bespoke coded so I’m not afraid of coding, but I am cautious because of the ongoing commitment over and above the initial development. Our forums are customised forum software, built on several hundred thousand lines of code maintained by a large team of 3rd party software developers and software testers. The more we depart from the core coding, the more we potentially have to maintain and ensure compatibility with, for every single release of the forum software.
Don’t get me wrong. Potentially very do-able but it raises a lot of questions. I would need to be convinced and work through a proper design. Seemingly simple suggestions can result in literally hundreds of hours of work behind the scenes. That means I have to explore options about the real need for features and the best way to deliver it. Several hundred hours spent here means several hundred hours not spent elsewhere. If it worked out at 10 hours that w outdoor be a very different consideration.
Out of interest, if you look at the +Create drop down, it is menu driven creation for all community content.
From what I remember, without coding, we can add menu items to the top menu only. I seem to remember that one issue was that it only goes 2 layers deep. If we could do it the way I am thinking, it is a manual process, but not coding. Still, that would be a compromise functionally.
It’s also a fact that we can’t have a system, going forward, because it caters for longer term members, purely on the basis that they have acclimatised to the problem. That may retain some members but it would leave in place something that puts new members off. Meanwhile longer term members may be used to issues, but most would like to see the boards busier. These things don’t all sit together.
It’s not an easy issue. Indeed it is several issues.
Less forums would certainly simplify navigation. It’s like peeling an onion!