Documentation, Tips & Tricks forum organisation proposal

[lisa]

In the course of 2 years we have accumulated 30 pages worth of docs, tips and tricks in the forums. It has gotten to the point where to find what you're looking for takes a mastery of the search function. What I'm proposing is a method for organising that part of the forum to make it easier to find topics.

The Method
Steps:
1. Create a sub-forum of Docs, Tips & Tricks for all incoming threads, lock Docs, Tips & Tricks forum.

2. Move all relevant stickies to the aforementioned new sub-forum

3. Create a sticky or announcement in the Docs, Tips & Tricks forum to serve as an Index of Topics. In this announcement note that all new documents should be created in the newly created sub-forum (step 1) for consideration and that for easier processing a category should be suggested in the user-created threads.

4. Populate the Index with broad topics (such as Servers, Desktops, Portage, Installation, Outdated, etc) with links to (non sticky) threads that will serve as a sub-index for Docs that fit under the categories created.

5. Systematically go through each post in the forum to categorise them. After a post is categorised and linked into the appropriate "sub-index" (in step 4), edit the thread's subject to reflect the category, such as "[NETWORKING] - Optimising your NIC". Optionally: set a poll: "Did you find this document helpful?"

6. When all of the current posts in Docs, Tips & Tricks become indexed keep the forum permissions set so that users may only reply to threads and not create new threads.

7. All new docs to be considered should be posted in the sub-forum (step 1). Once the document has been approved it shall be moved into the proper Docs, Tips & Tricks forum and indexed by a moderator.
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[rac]

Subforums are not technically possible with the current phpBB version, although they are rumoured to be on the feature list for the next major revision. What could be done is to separate the Documentation and Discussion group into two, and populate Documentation with your proposed forums, if that would be OK. The downside here would be that we would be expanding the main index page substantially. Let's see what people think about that.

The existing FAQ forum should probably be folded into whatever gets decided.
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[pjp]

I think DT&T and the FAQ Forum are examples of documentation not working well in phpbb.

There is no easy way to maintain an index, or documentation. As the index grows, it becomes more difficult to 'browse' for stuff. Search capabilities are less than ideal to begin with.

I'm all for fixing DT&T, or improving documentation, but I'm not convinced phpbb is the place for it.

If it is done, I think we'd need "Documentation" moderators.
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[gralves]

Why not transform DT&T in a wiki?

[kallamej]

There are already a couple of unofficial wiki projects started. See for instance discussions here and here.
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[pjp]

[Deathwing00]