first suggestion to be part of our forum primer

[Herman Trivilino]

I'm not talking about a thread "sticky".  I'm talking about a forum category or board, (sorry, I have not researched it enough to know which term to use), like you see here:
http://forum.tormek.com/index.php#c1

Those are also called forums.  An unfortunate vocabulary, but that's what we have.  A forum is usually a collection of sub-forums that are also referred to as forums.

You could however have a locked category or board that is used for exclusively for viewing articles. 

That's the usual practice.

Good ideas, grepper.

[grepper]

Yea Herman, it's just a matter of terminology.   In order to be consistent and not confusing, I attempt to use terminology as defined by the software vendor.  Like all agreeing to call the different parts of a knife by the same name, edge, heel, return, etc.

Categories and boards are terminologically specific to this SMF (Simple Machines Forum) software.

As defined in the SMF manual:
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Board
Boards are a fundamental part of forums, where topics are posted. Boards are displayed on the Board Index and should be organized into categories to make it easier for viewers.
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Category
Categories are displayed on the Board Index and are used to organize boards and make it easier for viewers to find their way around. In essence categories are groups of boards that span a subject.
-------

[grepper]

A summary:

All of this conversation in regards to providing helpful information for new Tormek users, and improving the readability and increasing the ease of knowledge discovery of the forum content, seems to distill down to basically two very workable items:

1.  A getting started guide.  Folks are willing, able, and motivated to do this.  But if simply posted in a topic without being "sticky", it would quickly drop into the great heap of all posts of all time, accessible only by deep browsing or the search box.

2 .  Make much greater use of the organizational functionality of the forum software, i.e., organize subject matter with increased use of boards and categories.  With relatively little upfront effort and ongoing administrative maintenance, this would produce very beneficial, long term results.  Very little initial investment considering it's huge, long term upside potential.  A lot of bang for the buck.

Both require administrative assistance.  The latter a little more than the former, but adding boards and categories is a very simple task.  Basically give it a name and press the Create Board button type of thing.   Additionally, organization would have to be defined, and names for board/categories decided upon, which should not be too difficult.

At least it's been an interesting conversation.

[Rob]

So the question to Jeff is........do you want to do this Jeff?

[Jeff Farris]

You guys start the threads and start populating them. I'll make them stickies.