More Categories for this forum

claudiaab

posted 2007/10/14 18:40 Visibility: World

Hey there,

After talking with Valerie and Andreas on the Volunteer Chat and also with Matthias, who is working on the design of the BW forum, I think it is about time to involve some more users in the brainstorming about how our forum should look like.

There was a consensus so far that the tag system has some great potential, but does not really make it easier for users to get into the forum system. For that we should have more of the fixed categories.

In the long run I personally would love to see Categories and Subcategories that users can but needn't expand (this is called Accordion-effect, I have been told, and mostly you will find this system when you organize your folders with main and sub-folders) So a sports category could be expanded and reveal Football, Hiking, Canoeing, Biking. The system should remember whether a user wants to have some categories expanded by default or not.

Also in the long run it would be great to have different possibilities of sorting the tags: alphabetical, most popular, most recent, my favourites, etc.

In the short run we should just have a longer list of categories.

Suggestions that have come up:

*Cultural Exchange
*Music (this would logically later be a subcategory of the first)
*Film (ditto)
*Politics
*Sports
*General

I also think that the list of recent posts should be shorter (5?)

Please give some feedback here and especially contribute to the list of categories - Matthias is actually waiting to implement it.

Cheers,

Claudia

thorgal67

posted 2007/10/17 14:47 Visibility: World

Here are some of my thoughts, feel free to give your opinion as well :

1. some other categories that we could include (fixed ones) :

- member introductions

- educational exchanges

2. yes, it would be nice to have a shorter list of recent posts, especially once the tag system is improved

3. great idea to have categories and subcategories. It makes sense (both on a geographical level as on more 'theme-based' level

fabzgy

posted 2007/10/18 17:40 Visibility: World

I would like to see sth. like "Ways of travel"

Subcategories:

- hitchhiking

- road trips

- cycling

- sailing

- walking

- trainrides (Interrailing, Transsib, etc.)

- Jetting everywhere (LowCost Airline Bigcity travelling)

claudiaab

posted 2007/10/21 22:52 Visibility: World

Yes, good ideas!

lemon-head

posted 2007/10/22 01:55 Visibility: World

We should hink of the typical questions that will be asked.

"What is the cheapest/fastest way to travel from A to B ?"
"Should I go by bus, or rather by train?"

How would you put that into one of the subcategories?
Maybe we should rather start with one single category "Transportation" or "Transportation / getting around". Regarding our current number of members, we shoudl not clutter things up too much. We can still add new categories later.. ideally, with some "card sorting" :) or maybe our system of tags does some automatic card sorting for us! (biggest tags could be an orientation for new category names)

Maybe we will find out that a good separation is "local transportation" vs "long-distance transportation".

That said, fabz' categories do make some sense!

pirane

posted 2007/10/22 10:45 Visibility: World

My 2 cents

- Trekking/Climbing (fore trekking related questions around the world)

- Recepies ( global recipies)

- Cultural questions ( questions or discussions related to festival, communities and cultures foreign to you)

I have another nice suggestion but not sure if it could be implemented through a forum or through some other application. It would be nice to post cultural events/shows happening in your city either on a forum or some sort of calendar. When people visit foreign countries they like to experience local cultural shows( music, dance and the like), so this feature would give travelers more visibility to such shows.

lemon-head

posted 2007/10/22 18:23 Visibility: World

I totally support your proposal!

One method that I imagine is using a special form of tags for time/date and location, and associate these tags with your starter post. (this will be tricky, but rewarding design work)

Then others could write a personal note on this post, which would automatically add the event in your calendar.

(a lot of work until we get there)

I think we should distinguish here between events and meetings. Events are something outside of this community, that you can go to yourself. A meeting is primarily for meeting other people in BeWelcome. So the first one (event) can easily be announced using a forum post. A meeting would better be served with some kind of group imo, with membership = join the meeting. Again, this group would get a timedate and location tag.

(again, we are quite far from implementing that stuff)

That said, please be patient - what I'm posting here is mainly my personal ideas, nothing I can promise (as most of what I am posting on this board).

lemon-head

posted 2007/10/23 20:14 Visibility: World

What about "HospEx news and rumors" - this would include all stuff that happens in other networks, and our own. This way we can keep these talks "in the house".
I hope it will not be just bashing of the other network, but information about where the different orgs are heading to in future. And maybe stories from some "famous" travelers.. stuff that you would otherwise tell when sitting with others in a bar..

lemon-head

posted 2007/10/23 20:16 Visibility: World

Sorry, this forum is broken :(
I meant
"This way we can keep these discussions in-house"

claudiaab

posted 2007/10/23 20:23 Visibility: World

"this forum is broken" --> Andreas, I guess you meant the layout i.e. wordwrap... I think I managed to change this. Can you edit your own posts? Adding some extra spaces should do the trick. Not ideal, I agree ;-)

lemon-head

posted 2007/10/23 21:26 Visibility: World

No I can't edit posts. No "edit" button. (i think this will be a new feature of the new version, not sure)

Yep, I think the problem was linewrap - part of my last post was invisible, and there was a linebreak in a position where they shouldn't be one.

I think the general problem is the wysiwyg textbox, which doesn't work reliably for me. I would much prefer a normal textbox with bbcode. Instead of direct wysiwyg ("what you see is what you get" - for other readers who are clueless) I could imagine something like instant preview - this is nice to have, but also no pain if it doesn't work.

It seems I am the only one complaining about this textbox :(

pietshah

posted 2007/10/24 02:23 Visibility: World

What about the geographical forums?

Their main use will consist in being accessed while surfing the geography of the site (country, region, city pages), but it makes sense that they can be accessed together with all the other forums also, since some events for example may interest people interested in "events", whatever geographical zone it applies. In such case the tag will help a lot. Or crossed category?

Also, we can't forget that the geo surf Country/Region/City will only be one part of the surfing, since direct searches and maps will tend to develop more and more.

Then, how are displayed the local forums so they really get well accessible?

lemon-head

posted 2007/10/24 02:48 Visibility: World

crossed categories, yeah, sounds good.
but - how will that be different from tags? Ok, one obvious difference is that categories will be predefined, while tags can be made up by the user.

In a chat with Navin, he talked about a tree of categories based mainly on geographic criteria - country / city / region. But, having that as the only criterion will not be practical I think

and, as you say, a strict geo tree might soon become obsolete, if we get better maps and geo tags...

really curious what we will invent!

claudiaab

posted 2007/10/24 15:32 Visibility: World

There might be a misunderstanding here, Pierre. The geographical tags and the tag system should definitely stay. That way a post can be tagged 'travel tips' + 'Venezuela' + 'hiking' and would thus be found in any of the three labels.

The idea is just to make the tag system easier to handle for users by adding some more prominent and fixed tags as 'categories'. So basically the categories are the same as tags...

As for the tree structure of geo categories, I'm not sure... From my experience other categories are used much more... But some more hierarchical structure would be good in the long term.

lemon-head

posted 2007/12/06 17:16 Visibility: World

I thought more about possible new forum categories, and found the following ones. It's still in a brainstorm state.

* Lifestyle ("shaping one's life" ? "Lebensgestaltung" in german). Could also be "global living", "alternative ways of life", or "traveling and life", or whatever.

* Future of BeWelcome -> this could be a brainstorming area, but not so much focused on technology.

* BeWelcome tech talk -> about new features, etc. with subcategories for different components, or by other criteria. it is necessary for tech people to have this stuff easily available and sorted!

* Meetings/Activities -> here people can invite each other for shared activities. Obviously, it is important to combine with geo tags or categories.

* Stories -> here people can tell about funny experiences

* collaborative creativity -> for instance, a comic where the participants take turn in painting one more picture...

* exchange of skills / experiences for common interests (like cooking, carracing, filmmaking, etc)

* Media/Arts/Movies/Music -> this would be similar to "cultural exchange", but maybe it is better to name the terms explicitly? "Culture" sounds so abstract. And "Media" goes a bit beyond just "culture" - can be news, ads, whatever.

* Philiosophy -> all that is digging deep and abstract, and yields endless discussions with no result.

* Politics, recent events -> here we can expect some heated debates :)

* Trash news -> what happened to britney spears, etc. mabye this category can help to get the stuff out of the way.

* Fun and Nonsense -> forum games and other stuff, that we want to get out of the way.

lemon-head

posted 2007/12/06 18:50 Visibility: World

aside of that, we could consider some alternative names, that will add some flavor to the forum.
For instance: kitchen, teahouse, tavern, circle, workshop, pit, cave, fireside, council, corner, board.
Such names can be combined with content or activity names. Like, "Writers' workshop", or "Philosophers' corner"

Also note that the above proposed list (previous post) contains both classifications of activities and classification of content. I think, it makes the most sense to have both!

lemon-head

posted 2007/12/06 18:50 Visibility: World

one more: for creative projects, it would be cool to have a place to publish the result of your work. maybe this would better fit in a blog, but our categories could be used across tools.

lemon-head

posted 2007/12/06 18:56 Visibility: World

I think goodcategories should do more than just "classify content", like in an office archive. More important is to invite reading, and inspire creative contributions!

Hehe, one more.
If I have invented a new funny game - let's say a stupid drinking game, or a sports game - which category would invite me to publish this idea in BW?

lemon-head

posted 2007/12/06 19:05 Visibility: World

one more: the categories should help the reader to find the content he/she is interested in, and help the writer to target the audience he/she wants to reach.

nonesee

posted 2007/12/08 20:07 Visibility: World

salam selamat datang :)

i been busy dealing visa to have christmass time back in melbourne (my seccond home), just drop by and sees we have tonz of new great things here,,, Howdy everyone? (any Christmas venue we can meet up in me holiday mate' )

Nyways, heres some thought and thinks

1. The fact came from the previous Ex-HospEx, why come up with considering issues by opening topic/forum about it, tell me i'm too sensitive but i feel its more like letting old wound open and giving the new one a space chance to put the same mark (of 'sad expectation/disappointments,etc) postscripts which we had left some in the o'le one'. I prefer to keep carry on for any spirit of boosting our 'team work' to be 'a huge topic' in every (new/old) HospEX instead...

2. hence, the previous good lesson leads us here to be better, then...as ..here my request ;) "did anybody come up with cheap flight tracker?" I must say i tried to do it few times in other Hosp-Ex but i found the member involve in sort of topic are more to those who SEEKS for information then GIVING it. I think this is the same with all 'travel plan' kinda forum.

Just thinking if we cud organized the forum in certain rules

so people in look for information can be devided (not shown/separated in different category)

and those questions answered can be marked or something,

else seperate forum for (flight offer) information only. This idea comes since i registered in some flight email offered which sometimes i dont need but maybe useful for me to post it for others. However from my previous experienced i keep seeing my posted info untraceable by other because mixed with questions of other after my post order.

if not, do authorized someone to edit the forum sounds to extreme?

this way, our group can be an useful tools even just for traveler who haven't actively involved.

Hm,, i think dats it for now, i'll let know if sumtin else come, hope it usefull

Salam

nonesee

btw,who ever work for putting the message system below the profile page..."gimme your number, ill buy you beer ;) "

lupochen

posted 2007/12/11 01:38 Visibility: World

Hey, I'm nearly falling asleep. Just wanted to inform you all with a short notice that we did modify the categories of this forum, according to the entries in the wiki.

Hope you like it. We might add more in time, after introducing some kind of submenu-feature.

G'Night!

Micha

philipp

posted 2007/12/11 08:04 Visibility: World

the last poster is the one who deserves the beer

fabzgy

posted 2007/12/11 19:32 Visibility: World

Aarrggghhhh... No I ve got to scroll again before I can see the latest Forum post. I hate that...

What is the "General" Category for? Noone marks his thread with a "general" Tag or do you? The Envirnonmetalist category should be a group Forum which means not a category on the first site.

I see the need of new Categories but please make them fit in the design before commiting changes.

lemon-head

posted 2007/12/12 19:29 Visibility: World

@fabz: can it be that your screen is quite small?
Anyway, I see the problem - especially, since the number of categories might even grow more.

A solution could be to put them into a sidebar (left or right) - would that make sense for you?

> What is the "General" Category for? Noone marks his thread with a "general" Tag or do you?

As long as categories are optional, I agree, there is no need for "general".

> The Envirnonmetalist category should be a group Forum which means not a category on the first site.

Hmm yes. Or include it in "politics" ?

I would appreciate if you can help out more to find really useful categories! As you can see, we are still in brainstorming state.

claudiaab

posted 2007/12/12 22:16 Visibility: World

Fabian, please keep in mind that the current structure of the forum is still temporary only. We would actually like to get categories and subcategories. Then of course a 'General Category' does make sense.

As for the Groups Forums, this is also something that needs to be set up first. So far the work done on the forum was more a redesign, but what is needed now includes more programming, so I guess we have to be patient for some more time... Anyone who is interested in helping out programming this, please contact us ;) (or rather Philipp ;-) )

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