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As some of you have already noticed, the old "GTPlanet News" forum has been consolidated into "Site Feedback". I'm using the opportunity to introduce a new forum feature known as Thread Prefixes. Think of it as a form of "tagging" threads in a specific forum - as you can see, this thread and all the others which were moved from the old forum now bear the "Site News" tag to the left side of the thread title in small, green letters.
You may have seen thread prefixes in other forums running the vBulletin software, but I've taken it a step further, linking the prefix text to a view of all other threads with the same tag. This allows you to easily filter threads on specific topics in a specific forum, creating a type of pseudo-subforum that you can browse and search as normal.
As you can see, there is a lot of potential with this functionality. It encourages better organization while reducing the number of empty forums that nobody particularly wants to post in. For example, I recently added a YouTube subforum to The Rumble Strip. Although it encourages people to share interesting videos with the rest of us, the forum doesn't get quite enough attention for the topics to really become popular. As a result, we're missing good stuff other people are sharing, and their contribution to the community goes under-appreciated. By merging the YouTube forum into the Rumble Strip and adding a YouTube prefix, nobody misses anything, the forum maintains organization, and people are still encouraged and inspired to make new topics.
This "Site News" prefix was introduced first to help me and you guys get comfortable with the feature. Of course, it does have its limits and it will not be appropriate for many of the forums here (I can already see the concern on some of your faces, now
). A careful implementation, though, could significantly change the dynamics of the community in a positive way.
You may have seen thread prefixes in other forums running the vBulletin software, but I've taken it a step further, linking the prefix text to a view of all other threads with the same tag. This allows you to easily filter threads on specific topics in a specific forum, creating a type of pseudo-subforum that you can browse and search as normal.
As you can see, there is a lot of potential with this functionality. It encourages better organization while reducing the number of empty forums that nobody particularly wants to post in. For example, I recently added a YouTube subforum to The Rumble Strip. Although it encourages people to share interesting videos with the rest of us, the forum doesn't get quite enough attention for the topics to really become popular. As a result, we're missing good stuff other people are sharing, and their contribution to the community goes under-appreciated. By merging the YouTube forum into the Rumble Strip and adding a YouTube prefix, nobody misses anything, the forum maintains organization, and people are still encouraged and inspired to make new topics.
This "Site News" prefix was introduced first to help me and you guys get comfortable with the feature. Of course, it does have its limits and it will not be appropriate for many of the forums here (I can already see the concern on some of your faces, now