Question:
*suggestion Box*
Hi all,
Have you got a great idea for the forum...is there something you would like to see? Why not give us your suggestions on how to make this great place even better.
a
:)
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
OK - I'll start ;)
change the settings in the search function so we can search by Asus model numbers - us new guys get a whack upside the head if we ask questions that have been answered before yet all the Ausu model numbers are 3 characters and the current settibg require a minimum of 4 for a search term ...
this can be changed in the vBulletin software easily I believe and would make search useful here in Asusville ....
:cool:
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
Yea, I've mentioned it to the Admins, but I think it wasn't picked up :p
But a very good point, such popular topics as IPS, and pretty much 70% of ASUS models have 3 letters. Actually, I'll ask the admins and see what happens.
Thanks for the reminder :D
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
How about a dedicated for sale by owner thread here?
How about a link to this forum from the what laptop should i buy thread? (u know the place where nobody from here really visits). Asus is the biggest section on this entire forum while it gets the least ammount of shout outs in the second biggest section. Thats weird!
How about a dedicated asus review forum and support forum you know kind of like the one you see on nbf?
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
Well, that's the thing, there was speculation about splitting the forums, but that would just complicate things, and it would be like the NBF forums, which is not what they want(I'm not saying that either is right, or wrong).
I'm not sure what the first suggestion is implying though...
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
Suggestion: Less stickies, IF at all possible! Or merging things that might go together.
Organizing the Asus forum is gonna be a toughy. By far the most popular section of the forums (other than the what to buy) and loaded with enthusiasts (more topics to cover).
Our 3 asus mods will sure get the job done WELL ;)
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
Q, get yours now, and join us! JOOOOOOIN US!!!!!!!
And regarding the search:
This is an often asked question via our site contact form actually. The answer is, we'd love to.
But. There's some major overhead involved in that we'd have to take down the forums while all 3 letter words are indexed, come up with a list of 3 letter words not to index and make sure that our server can handle the extra indexing and storage space needed. Right now we're a little busy with some behind the scenes stuff, but come April / May this could be a technical issue we look into more for the forums.
(aside: when you start thinking about the number of 3 letter words in the forums we'd need to block or would be completely useless as a search term it becomes a little staggering, "the", "and", "too", "now", "she", "dog", "cat", "are", "our"...and all those extremely common english words would end up getting indexed needlessly and thereby increase database storage space multiple times what we have now).
We're also looking into a Google search engine tool for the forums in which we'd buy a Google server and it would crawl our sites and index them, thereby making things easier to search.
So yeah, we're aware search could be much better, and will proactively be looking into it this Spring.
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
Thats good news on the search front...hopefully that will help fix many of the issues.
On another issue, I was thinkin about putting together a ASUS news from the Web thread...either fortnightly, or perhaps weekly depending on whats going on. This thread would basically be any ASUS related news with links to those news sites/full stories. Let us know if you think this idea blows or not.
Also on the point about the # of sticky's. Personally I think its fine at the moment, the only one I would like to remove is this one, which I will in a few days after everyones had a chance to see it, and make some suggestions. What I would like to see is some sort of graphical separation betw. stickys and other posts...much like the annoucement is separated...I think this would help draw new peoples attention to them esp the FAQ's (great job on those by the way)....at the moment I think newbies come to the forum get overwhelmed with all the posts and dont even see the needle in the laying on the top of the haystack.
a:)
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
I'm involved with another vBulletin forum with 70,000 threads, over a million posts and similar users online at any given time and we saw no real peformance difference with 3 letter searches - and we run the slightly slower previous version of forum software - it is a hassle, just time consuming, to reindex the database, but its not difficult or a big problem - just takes a while
another solution is for the forum admin to simply add specific search phrases to the "include" list which ignores the character limit - it should be easy enough to develop that list - maybe just post a thread that asks for all 3 character descriptions - model numbers, things like "IPS" etc - there are probably just a few dozen search terms that if added to the include list would address 85+% of the search problems
From vBulletin Admin pages:
Words to be Included Despite Character Limit
If there are special words that are important for your forum but are outside the word length limits you specified above, you may enter them here so that they will be included in the search index.
For example, a web-programming forum with a minimum word length of 4 characters might want to include 'PHP' in the search index, even though the word is only 3 characters long.
Separate each word with a space.
Answer:
Re: *suggestion Box*
I think ASG suggested a very good idea.
To add on,
How bout making a sticky, with a ready made list of three letter words to index (the most obvious ones) that we want to be search-enabled and everybody can just add to them. Of course, everyone must first check whether or not the 3 letter word they want to add is in the list already. they can just do a simple browser search command on the page to check. Umm. Might be extra work for the mods- erm. for a few days/week while the sticky is up to compile whatever everybody's suggested into the list. but if the list is already comprehensive to start out with, there shouldnt be much addition.