Recently, some of the moderators have been delegating threads posted in the General forum (such as this one) to forums they deem more appropriate for the thread given it’s content. I, for one, am 100% in favor of this, and am glad to see some better organization of threads.
However, a downside of this is that some of these threads are being moved to forums that aren’t on the Recent Activity side panel by default, and as a result, some users can no longer find them without manually searching through the subforum itself. This PSA is to help unknowing users figure out how to add these subforums to their recent activity side bars so that they can easily access the posts they want to see again.
The key is the little config button on the top right of the recent activity side bar, as seen here:
Once you click on that, you will be given a list of all of the different forums and subforums on this site. Personally, I just selected all of them so that everything appears from my side bar, as that’s how I typically browse CD. You can select and deselect things as you please. I have found that the “disappearing” threads are most commonly being placed in Chit-Chat, so it may be helpful to add that.
I hope this is helpful to users, and I look forward to adjusting into the correct usage of each subforum as we adapt into this change.
EDIT: Mods, I posted this in General to maximize the amount of people who will see this by default - if there is a better place to put it that will achieve the same goal, feel free to move it, since we’re all still learning the ins and outs of what goes where. Thanks!
Thanks for posting this, I was considering moving something like this to User Announcements, but I’m not sure what is supposed to fall into that category.
We really should consolidate the number of subforums we have. With the activity levels we are at, it doesn’t help people find anything to spread it out so much. But consolidating forums would be quite a project to undertake, dealing with the thousands of old threads and where to put them, so it would be awhile before anything like that could come to fruition.
People keep saying things we should do, but I don’t think this site is a priority at all for the owners (and I don’t think it should be, they’re busy with actual jobs).
Has anyone reached out to Brandon yet asking if he (or people he chooses) would have time in Fall to make any of the changes being suggested?
While I think that is definitely fair, I think it is also fair to say that CD is very important resource for the FRC community and needs to be maintained for the good of all teams. From white papers to important event discussions this forum is a hub for all things FRC and should be maintained as such, IMHO. I would love to see some of suggestions to be consolidated and voted upon by members of the community. (And I get that this is a lot of work, but I think it is something long overdue)
And to comment on this. I have been using CD for many years (lurking for a few before that) and while it is great once you understand all of its little intricacies, I think something really needs to be done to simplify the UX of the site. For example, I did not know that all of the sub-forums were not shown in the portal by default. I’m not sure how many discussion I completely missed during my time as a FIRST student.
Nobody thinks CD isn’t an important or valuable resource, or that the work shouldn’t be done. We’re just asking that you recognize that everyone who can help are all volunteers, with day jobs and lives, and that we need to be patient with the people with the ability to do the work we all agree on. It’s not an issue of not knowing what improvements CD should make - it’s just hard, thankless work that takes a lot of time for what amounts to a side project.
