New Years resolution

[strap-on]

My two cents....

I think the nature of the forum and the nature of what you ( the TS community) are trying to create in the tech section are different.

I notice someone will ask a question and will get flamed by the oldies for being a question that has been asked many times before and is in the tech section "somewhere" if you bother to look.

The internet is a great place for information but unfortunatly people get sick of repeating it. And lets face it forums that have as high a post turn over as TS are impossible places to retain information.

So heres my idea....

To retain the REAL good tech articles why not set up a wiki? then the articles would be easy to find. The bad info would get replaced with the good info and it would be a really good resource. I know everything costs but where there is a will there is a way.

(and yes sideros even I would contribute money)

food for thought

[Pies]

omg dan. since when has your 2 cents ever counted

jk. good ideas man. we have a wiki set up on oldschool.co.nz and although its been a little slow to take off, its set to be a damn good resource!

[slighty_sykotic]

And ill said already, i have alot of access to free bandwidth and space, so if we need a place to put this wiki or whatever happens... thats no problem.

--Sykotic

[strap-on]

2 cents counted for some good times with your mum

The thing is you dont want WIKI after WIKI on the net (like how there is car forum after car forum poping up) its probabaly better if the content is slightly more generalisd in order to attract more people and thus better articles.
Maybe make it as broad as a toyota WIKI or even a Performance car in general WIKI

[strap-on]

And ill said already, i have alot of access to free bandwidth and space, so if we need a place to put this wiki or whatever happens... thats no problem.

--Sykotic

Sweet how much space have you got? how much to you reckon we would need? where do you get wiki software from?

[vvega]

i hae no issue with teh current setup i just remeber the days of such people as DR-X
ive never flamed anyone for askign the same question 50 times

[slighty_sykotic]

And ill said already, i have alot of access to free bandwidth and space, so if we need a place to put this wiki or whatever happens... thats no problem.

--Sykotic

Sweet how much space have you got? how much to you reckon we would need? where do you get wiki software from?

Gigs of it.

www.jetpack.co.nz

Servers are no where near full, and ive got a new one being added to the farm at the moment. So no problems there.


As for the software, can ethier buy it, or use one of the free ones.

http://www.projectforum.com/pf/wiki.htm ... lewiksea12


--Sykotic

[strap-on]

I need permission from mr. foster or someone similar to set up a toyspeed one and link it to the site what you reckon about a trial one mark?

[solitaire]

wiki sounds awesome

[Caveman]

wiki would be an awsome idea

good place for turbo 4age q and a

brad awsome stuff about the web space

[BlakJak]

Wearing my "Mr Foster" hat...

... As I said to strap-on privately, a Wiki is a neat idea but theres a few kinks in it...

Already, between the Tech Section and the FAQ Section we have the means to put some decent reference material in there.
What it'd take is someone to read the Questions (and Answers) and consolidate them into a series of articles (filtered by category) suitable for publication to the FAQ.

This is a similar process to that which would be required to make a Wiki work.
It has the advantage that it can be done with what we have now. It also is more resistant to spam than Wikis tend to be.

The hosting of a Wiki isn't a huge deal, i'm sure between a few of us around here it could be done. My personal POV is that we should start small; if we have some technical people who'd consider stepping up and taking on 'Editor' type roles and working on the text behind some decent knowledge-base type articles for the Tech and/or FAQ sections it'd be a healthy start.

I agree that some questions are just 'newbish' and that 'search' is the stock answer for probably too many questions - that has to stop or at least back off a bit. A better way would be to provide a hyperlink to the answer...
And frankly, if questions are being repeated - why the hell aren't they being FAQ'd?

I'm all for the TS community spirit, AND for having a tech resource available to our members. To run a wiki would require some significant committment from a number of people, all of whom would need to be relatively IT-Literate as well as Car-Literate... lets take this one step at a time. (Material can always be pasted into a Wiki later, should one be built.)

[solitaire]

Id be happy to spend a little time on it... cant take it on as a piece of work myself though (not that i am qualified anyway)

[RomanV]

My personal POV is that we should start small; if we have some technical people who'd consider stepping up and taking on 'Editor' type roles and working on the text behind some decent knowledge-base type articles for the Tech and/or FAQ sections it'd be a healthy start.

Good idea.

there are many different people here, with many different areas of knowledge. 4age, 3sgte, JZ engines, etc.

Perhaps we could have a 'contribute to the tech section' area, with threads in it labeled "3S", "4AGE", etc....

So if someone has some interesting information or trivia, they can post it there, from which point someone else can summarise all of the info at a later date, and put it all into a proper article, which could be put in the tech section library.

I'd happily contribute a few rants about my various areas of interest.

[Ae92typeX]

I support removing false info, spam and heresay comments in tech, but as suggested by Blackjack above there needs to be a tech' pannel of moderators for the tech section to do this. No offence to moderators and all they do, but how are they to know the answers to everything (since they also ask questions I assume they dont)
I think the nature of removing posts etc that are not correct is fine, but they have to be proven as not correct.
Additionally, comments are passed every now ad then about all the stuff behind the scenes some moderators already do. This will only increase with (good, but difficult to police) proposed changes.
The prolem imo with putting everything asked twice to faq is that the faq page gets to big and people dont bother to get off their lazy finger asses and look through it. Its already getting big, and reading week-to-week it is obvious that people dont look in it, esp with subjects regarding wof's etc.

[solitaire]

if the faq is organised properly it would not take much looking to find what you want... and then we could say "faq" instead of "search"

[vvega]

or perhaps you could just answer intead of CBF
i get so pissed seeing people get flamed because they didnt look or couldnt find it

and fact is most of the time the anwer is so sort than the rants you guys write

IMO the only thing teh FAQ is good for is giving people a reason to flame people for not looking at it

how many times have we seen posts where 8-10 p[eople all have a go at someone for not looking in the FAQ

i mean what you think hes not smart enough to look after the first round of abuse ??

toyspeed is well know for its tech section but not in a good way
thats why most of us..(i guess im a old timer) cbf posting anymore

if you wanna help people post in teh tech section
if you wanna trit o be cool telling people to look in the faq go post in off topic


just my thoughts

BTW im still waiting for fivebob to come have his say


wayne

[fivebob]

Hmmm like all New Years resolutions, I don't expect much follow through on this one.

It must be about the third year running that mods have stated the exact same thing, hasn't happened yet and I don't see that it's likely to happen this time either.

The problem is a cultural one and as far as I can see is endemic on Toyspeed. Sure there are people here with the knowledge to pick out the crap posts, but they soon get sick of pointing out what's crap, because either nothing gets done about it, or they cop flack for pointing out that the poster in question has the brains of a chocolate fish

But what else can you expect given the demographic of Toyspeed, and to a lesser extent that of the admin team. They don't know any better, and lack the maturity to learn from their mistakes. Without a firm guiding hand there's little hope that it will get any better.

[vvega]

oi i resemble a chocolate fish..take that back :d

[pc]

I think having tech moderators trim the rubbish out of threads in the FAQ section would be about the limit as there are too many posts in the tech section to sucessfully moderate.
I'm sure that maintaining a Wiki would achive the result better than a FAQ section though, as new info can be added in a more structured fashion.

It would be cool if people could submit articles, like 'how to rebuild front brake calipers' with pictures, or something like that, and if moderated correctly, by people that do that sort of thing for a living, then when people ask questions in the tech section that have already been covered, only a link has to be posted.
This should mean that the level of moderation required can be minimal.

I could write an article on how to rangi up a fibreglass bonnet on the cheap

[Adamal]

Ok, I don't know if I'm going on or off topic here, but anyway...

My new years resolution is to:

A) Stop smoking

B) Get the SW with the kit on and painted and actually start doing stuff to it.