Or - Oh no, what’s the Admin done now?
As you’ve probably noticed the forum is looking very different. After many years with growing numbers of categories and sub-categories, I’ve simplified the structure dramatically.
Instead of thinking which of around 100 sub-categories you should post in, there are now just two categories to choose from for most posts. The choices are:
- Ask a Question - if you’re wanting to know why something isn’t working, or how something works, or looking for advice on your next weather station purpose, ask your questions here.
- Let’s Chat - for pretty much everything else, post here.
There are a few more categories too:
- Announcements - this is where Weather-Watch.com announcements will be posted. Only admins/mods can post here.
- Knowledge - this is where useful information like the responses to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) will be posted.
- Projects - small development projects will be discussed in topic thread in here.
Some users might also have one or more specialist categories available.
If you’d like to see some of the rationale for the change, you can follow my thought processes here
Of course, having just two categories means there are a lot of posts in each one, so how can you separate out what’s of interest and what isn’t? The new keyword is “tags”. Unlike topics in the past where you posted in one category, a topic can have multiple tags. So, if you previously wanted to ask a question about Your Davis VP2, using Weather Display to upload your data to PWS Dashboard you had to figure out the best place for your question. Now, there’s just one place to ask, but you can add three tags - Davis, WD and PWS-Dashboard (actually davis, wd and pws-dashboard - tags are all lower case). So now your post will be found by anyone looking specifically at any of those three tags. Posting in the new categories will force you to pick at least one tag, but you can add more - up to five. The maximum number of tags can be increased but lets see how things go with five.
I’ve written a few posts in Knowledge (see links below), about how you can use tags to enrich your forum experience, from searching using them, to changing your side-bar to include your favourite tags, to notifying or muting posts based on tags.
This is clearly a huge change but hopefully you’ll see the benefits soon. All existing topics have been moved but I’m still tweaking the tags list. It will take a little while to finish that work, but the new categories are open for you to use right now.
Here are the Knowledge posts with extra information on how to use tags on the forum…