Knowledge Base functionality

After considering the options for replacing the spammer damaged Weather-Watch Wiki I’ve decided to use the ‘Docs’ functionality that’s provided by a forum plugin. I’ve renamed this as ‘Knowledge Base’ (KB) and you will find a link to it in the sidebar.

The intention of the KB is to provide a source of information that will be of general or more specific interest. The posts will be informational and replies are disabled which will help to keep the KB concise. Discussion about KB topics can be carried out elsewhere in the forum if required. The posts can be edited to correct wrong information, or to add updates if required. All the posts exist in KB sub-categories in the forum, making them discoverable in multiple ways. The KB (and link) is really intended to bring together the posts into a fixed location in the forum that’s easily accessible.

At the moment there’s only one sub-category, but I’ll add others as I add more content. Some sub-categories, e.g. Weather Software will be descriptive, e.g. to allow users to see what software is available and it’s functionality. Other sub-categories will be ‘How To’ type, e.g. giving people advice on how to set up software or weather stations.

The KB is currently curated by me, although if any ‘subject matter experts’ want to volunteer to help out I probably won’t say no! Alternatively, if you’d like to write a post about something that you’re knowledgeable about, you can send it to me as a DM for me to add into the KB.

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You may notice some older posts reappearing at the top of the lists. This is because I’m moving a few things around. For example, the ‘Useful URLs’ and ‘Software Downloads’ sub-categories have been moved under the Knowledge Base, because that’s really where the belong. There were a few URLs that weren’t KB content so they got moved to more correct sub-categories. Editing them makes them look new so they move to the top of the ‘Latest’ lists.

There’s also a degree of duplication in the KB, e.g. WxSim is mentioned as weather software, as a software download and as a Useful URL. I’ll probably merge these and use tags to allow them to be found multiple ways, but I’m still considering the best way to do this.