Questions showing up under "New Questions" will now be 7 or fewer days old. The old setting was 14 days. After 7 days, they become listed only under their categories.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@alaska.net), July 25, 2001

Answers

As the site grows, the need for this is obvious. I see a lot of new threads started on topics for which old threads already exist, so that we are starting to repeat ourselves. Is there a way that new seekers after truth can search the data base conveniently? A local search engine, so to speak?

-- Bob Fleischman (RFXMAIL@prodigy.net), July 25, 2001.

No, unfortunately there isn't a search function within the LUSENET software, and I'm not sure if there will ever be one. So there really isn't a good way to search for existing content other than just browsing the archived threads.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), July 25, 2001.

Google.com can help with the search. You can do an advanced search that restricts the search field to data on greenspun.com. You might get results from the more general part of the site but most of them will be from right here.

-- Fergus Hammond (fhammond@adobe.com), July 25, 2001.

The lack of a search function causes endless repetition, repetion, same questions being asked, answered, asked again, again, again. That is a very serious problem with LUSENET. LUG, photo.net, usenet all have good search function.

-- martin tai (martin.tai@capcanada.com), July 25, 2001.

Would Philip Greenspun consider moving this forum into photo.net? After all, the activity and quality here are both rather high. Tony might continue as moderator. We'd all have access to the search engine and other photo.net features.

-- Dan Brown (brpatent@swbell.net), July 25, 2001.

Might?! :-)

I'm sure not because we're a brand forum. If Philip did that, then he'd likely have to have one for the other brands.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), July 25, 2001.

I've wondered why the photo.net classifieds aren't brand specific. Perhaps that's the answer.

-- Phil Stiles (Stiles@s-way.com), July 25, 2001.

Will this also apply to "New Answers"?

Regards,

-- Ray Moth (ray_moth@yahoo.com), July 26, 2001.

As re "... Tony might continue as moderator..." (five postings above):
I sure hope he continues as moderator. He's my first choice! :-))

Mike

-- Michael Kastner (kastner@zedat.fu-berlin.de), July 26, 2001.

Would a revamping of categories help?

What are the most oft repeated questions? Maybe we could put these in a prominent place. What are topics that have been gone over, that don't really need refreshing?

I might guess:

1. About to buy: which camera body
2. About to buy: which lens
3. About to buy: which next lens
4. Just bought. Trouble-shooting: camera body
5. Just bought. Trouble-shooting: XXmm lens
6. Which accessories?
7. Good dealers.
8. Famous photogs.
9. Book recommendations.
10. etc....

There are many ways to come up with categories. If we could get all the messages, we could try to put them into say 10 piles. Then consolidate them into a smaller, more manageable number of piles.

Another thought is that people might feel compelled to post an old question anew b/c they want 'fresh' info. If I were new, did my homework and found the appropriate thread in which to post my question, I might feel less inclined if the most recent post prior to mine is a year old. I'd worry that people weren't looking at an old thread since it'd be buried deep.

In this case, an up-to-date FAQ is good. People will know that the info. is current.

There is the problem of reorganizing the existing threads. How hard is it to do that?... if there are 9000 messages (= how many threads?), that would take a while. 'Twould be great if we could all do it collaboratively; i.e., split the work of re-tagging all the existing posts among a bunch of us. I wonder if Dr. Greenspun has worked that one out yet...?

If the 'core' folks here would each do 20, 50, 100? over some patch of time, we could get a goodly number put away.

We could perhaps file only threads back to a certain date, leaving the others filed as is, for deep storage, archival, for the day that we get a good search engine here.

My $0.02.

-- Tse-Sung Wu (tsesung@yahoo.com), July 26, 2001.

re: Google

Is it possible to embed a Google link here, with pre-set parameters as suggested by Fegus?

-- TSW (tsesung@yahoo.com), July 26, 2001.

Living FAQ

Here's another thought: Why don't we figure out what is the topic that gets most repeated here? Say it's "What camera body should I buy?" And maybe a handful of others ("What next lens?" "28mm or 24mm?", or whatever they may be.)

If we were to place these prominently, then it would be like a "living FAQ". Newbies would come by, have questions to ask about getting into Leica. They'd see the thread, read it, and, if they wanted, they could add to it with their own little twist of the question (hopefully this would become rarer and rarer as the thread grew and became richer and more comprehensive). Newbies would feel confident that the thread would be fresh still, b/c it's up there on the first page of this forum, not buried deep somewhere, several clicks away.

So this will do three things:

1. Bring newbies' attention to a FAQ, which hopefully would answer 90% of their questions.
2. Make the FAQ fresher- because rather than being static info., it's a thread like everything else, and, as such, is likely to be updated by regulars, if needed.
3. Give an opportunity for regulars or not-so-newbies to give back to the pot with their own experiences. This is, after all, the other half of the reason that there are so many repeated posts here- there are folks willing to participate in the same thread over and over again. Which is a great thing about this space, to be sure.

which, hopefully, will keep repetitive posts down, but still be open and useful to newbies, and interesting and fun for regulars too.

-- On a roll (tsesung@yahoo.com), July 26, 2001.

"...with pre-set parameters as suggested by Fergus?"

Pardon me!

-- TSW (tsesung@yahoo.com), July 26, 2001.

Tony, another possibility is try to use the email alert feature to send all posting to Listquest search

-- martin tai (martin.tai@capcanada.com), July 26, 2001.

Photo.net faced a similar situation w. too many repeat questions 1-2 years ago, and the solution became the unmoderated and unachieved forum. The success of the divided photo.net fora can be, and has been, discussed in great length - I personally do not think the result has been entirely successful -but I’ll leave that for now.

The lack of search functionality is a serious shortcoming of LUSENET, but understandable since the service is free, hosts lots of QA's - and a database search is very "expensive".
I do not think LUSENET was designed with a relatively high volume site (like this one) in mind, a minor shortcoming considering that we don't have to deal w. slow loading banner plastered pages, complex member registration, and mandatory spam offered by other “free” hosts.

If this site continues to grow (moderately) in popularity, a solution could be a slightly more strict moderation: E.g. repeat questions are discouraged from the “q-and-a-post-reply-form.tcl” but accepted and deleted after say 7 days. This requires more work from the moderator, and Tony could choose a couple of regular contributors to help in this process. A FAQ is a fine suggestion, but I actually already think of this site as a dynamic FAQ.

If the activity on this site become overwhelming, Porting Leica Photography to Photo.net with its more advance administrative and user options, may be a good idea, but should also be considered with some caution. There seem to be quite a few discussions on photo.net regarding subscription fees to support the complex maintenance of that site. I am not entirely happy with everything suggested and would suggest that this forum wait a little to see what happens before photo.net is approached.
Philip Greenspun/photo.net may not be exited about a brand specific forum; an alternative -if necessary- could be a "Rangefinder Photography" forum, which would basically translate into Voigtlander, Konica and Leica M/LTM –more or less what is already being discussed here (R users will probably hate me now ;-)).

-- Niels H. S. Nielsen (nhsn@ruc.dk), July 26, 2001.

With 492 threads in the M category, and far fewer than 100 in most of the others, it's clear that the M category needs to be broken down more logically. This may help to reduce the duplication.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), July 26, 2001.