Recommended Posts (July 13-19, 2008)
This thread lists some particularly good posts in the forums from the week of Sunday, July 13, 2008, to Saturday, July 19, 2008. We hope you'll read the others, too, but if you're in a rush, here's how to catch up!
Start Here
If you're new to the forums, welcome! We'd love for you to participate in any discussion you like. Here are some good places for you to dive right in:
Introduce Yourself
It's always fun to hear from new JoCo fans (or old ones who've just gotten around to joining the forums). If you're curious, feel free to read through the old posts in the thread and see what other people have said about themselves, but we're happy for you just to, well, introduce yourself!
Favorite Songs List
Tell us your five favorite JoCo songs and why you like them!
How did you discover JoCo?
The thread title says it all, doesn't it?
The Forum Code of Conduct / FAQ
You'll probably want to read our policy, written by, of, and for the members of the JoCo forums. We're really loose around here, but it'll give you a good idea of how people behave in these parts. (You don't have to read the whole FAQ, but if you have questions, look there first.)
New this week
New threads:
Community Skills, started by LilMarauder to "gather a list of the skills and talents of the various community members so we have a place to look when we make various JoCo-related projects".
A Talk with JoCo, part 6 (Video Footage), started by Encubed. To quote myself, gauche as it is:
ETA: In the interest of full disclosure, this thread originally had a poll on it, reading as follows:
Why didn't you do anything to help with last week's Recommended Posts?
Start Here
If you're new to the forums, welcome! We'd love for you to participate in any discussion you like. Here are some good places for you to dive right in:
Introduce Yourself
It's always fun to hear from new JoCo fans (or old ones who've just gotten around to joining the forums). If you're curious, feel free to read through the old posts in the thread and see what other people have said about themselves, but we're happy for you just to, well, introduce yourself!
Favorite Songs List
Tell us your five favorite JoCo songs and why you like them!
How did you discover JoCo?
The thread title says it all, doesn't it?
The Forum Code of Conduct / FAQ
You'll probably want to read our policy, written by, of, and for the members of the JoCo forums. We're really loose around here, but it'll give you a good idea of how people behave in these parts. (You don't have to read the whole FAQ, but if you have questions, look there first.)
New this week
New threads:
Community Skills, started by LilMarauder to "gather a list of the skills and talents of the various community members so we have a place to look when we make various JoCo-related projects".
A Talk with JoCo, part 6 (Video Footage), started by Encubed. To quote myself, gauche as it is:
A thread with lots of twists and turns, but all interesting: Encubed started it to show off part 6 of "A Talk with JoCo," Jinx's and my five-part interview with Jonathan Coulton. Jinx took the opportunity to post her really perceptive thoughts on the interview. Then Spiff, building on one of Kerrin's posts, came up with the idea of a web app to help people suggest and sponsor song ideas. A great microcosm of what I like to see in the forums -- funny, insightful, and innovative.To nominate threads to appear in next week's edition, go here (thanks, Mitch).
ETA: In the interest of full disclosure, this thread originally had a poll on it, reading as follows:
Why didn't you do anything to help with last week's Recommended Posts?
- Actually, I did -- I am Colleenky, Percephene, three08, Jinx, Bry, or MitchO. Or -- nope, I'm one of those six.
- The "Recommended Posts" idea is kinda (lame / useless / boring / adjectival).
- Face it, last week's posts weren't all that good.
- Sure, I helped out two weeks ago! Wait, what, you mean we had another one?
- I don't care about newbies or the forum community. (Sorry).
Comments
Agree the wiki isn't the easiest to use (compared to commenting as Rob suggests, for instance), but it definitely saved me time compiling. I'm open to suggestions -- perhaps a less "pretty" but easier to navigate wiki setup?
And I've never actually ventured over to the wiki because I'm semi-terrified of it.
Also, will someone investigate this forum add-on?
The down side is someone will need to write the summary, and they won't know why people voted.
If you want people to validate why they didn't help, I guess I will...
Lack of time, I only read very specific threads as it is, due to very limited time. I only read about third of threads, and some of those I only skim for interesting posts.
However, a sticky pointing to timeless/classic threads that newbies should check out, maybe even divided into categories like the JoCo primer does for songs (and which the current system does include) but updated every now and then when something significant comes up would be sufficient.
If someone wants to actively participate in the community they will go out and read the majority of threads, and become part of it.
If someone is not interested in actively participating in the community or does not have the time to, a weekly recommended posts thread will not make much of a difference. It takes effort to become part of a community and unfortunately, as a result for some people this may not be possible.
If it were possible to vote or to nominate within the forums, I think it would be an easier thing. I share Rob's feeling that it's a drag to go over to another place, where there's a lot of detail to tend to, most of which requires you either to remember things verbatim [how does Cali capitalize her name? what was the name of that thread? What's the JoCo blog comment I want to quote? - and so on] or to keep going back and forth, back and forth.
My fear about using the vote-up, vote-down thing is that even though people might get a good feeling knowing that others liked something they posted, newer folks in particular might get really discouraged or disgusted having their first posts voted down. I mean, I like candor, but some days candid constructive criticism from a bunch of people can be kind of depressing.
On the other hand, it's also true that I don't feel really good about doing things in the wiki mainly because I'm such a clueless newbie about how to do things there. It's not logical, but I'm afraid I'll break things. So that's something I could learn more about, if I knew an easy way (or at least an accessible way) to do that.
Does anybody have any suggestions as to how as individuals (or even as a group) we could get better at using the wiki?
I'll cop to at least knowing some basic HTML, which helped me understand (somewhat) when I was copying and pasting code pieces to make my version (which I'm proud to say we now use) of the front page. But that's not what we're expecting of the average user.
On the wikifear topic, I agree, it can be scary at first, I still remember my first edit on a wiki ever, and that was only because an admin of that wiki encouraged me on irc to do whatever I liked, even editing his own user page. And that admin became a good friend! Wikiskills are going to become increasingly important in this world, workplaces are starting to use them for (among other things) in-house knowledge bases, and also in education (at least one of my papers required us on day two of the course to publish our findings/thoughts on a wiki) so while its scary, its a good thing to learn! Especially for the parents among us, our kids are going to need to learn these kinds of things!
If anyone has wiki questions or wants their hand-held, feel free to leave messages for me on my talk page, don't worry about mucking anything up, its as easy as an undo button for people to fix it up, and there are sandbox type areas for you to play around in! I'm sure any of the frequent wiki contributors would be happy to help!
I also have a short wiki presentation and sandbox area set up on another wiki (Uncyclopedia) which is here if you want a bit of a Wikis 101. (Disclaimer: It was a presentation for a paper at tech, it was designed to fit onto a projector screen for a class presentation, so its a bit dumb, but hopefully someone might find it useful.
Remember, be bold in your edits! Don't worry about stuffing things up! It can always be fixed.
I appreciated Encubed's post a lot, and it's exactly the kind of honest reaction that I was hoping to, well, incite when I put the poll up. Look, I'm okay with you guys acting as though my ideas aren't stupid most of the time, but for something forum-wide like this I really need to know what people really think. I don't know if "Recommended Posts" is a bad idea, but if it is, it's certainly not the first one I've shared on the forums and tried to promote, and it certainly won't be the last. So criticize away.
That said, I don't think that Encubed accurately characterizes the intent of the recommended-post effort when he limits it to attracting prospective active participants in the community. Certainly that's a nice goal, and if "Recommended Posts" continues, which, y'know, is mostly up to you guys, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that it'd help -- though for that narrow a purpose it probably isn't the single best or most efficient option.
But there are definitely members of the community who are getting or have gotten crowded out by the tremendous volume of posts, much as I love it. And I know there are people who are forum regulars but don't read every thread, and so they miss things too because they just can't manage to keep up with them. "Recommended Posts" is also an attempt to cater to those groups.
And, of course, there are, presumably, non-members who don't follow the forums because there's so much stuff they don't know where to start. For these, perhaps the "timeless/classic threads" idea that Encubed suggests would indeed be a better option. (Although more relevant than that might be the "start here" threads.) But even for these, "what's cool in the present, featuring the people that you'll still see around today" might be more useful, in its way, than "this was a fascinating discussion held eight months ago featuring a lot of interesting points made by people whom you'll never see again."
In short, I don't think that everyone needs to be a forum diehard in order to be a part of the community, and I'd like to make the forum accessible to those who aren't going to be forum diehards, or who might be later on but aren't yet.
But I'm not terribly interested in shoving the idea down the forum's collective throat, and if people really don't like it (I don't mean "dislike", I mean "don't like) I'll gladly back down. What say you?
I think the perfect solution would be a positive vote system that allows for adding of comments, that integrates with the forum posts.
There, I've now unforgivably spammed a Bry thread again. Sorry.
three08: I think that's fair, and I agree that there were more threads I really, really liked that first week than this past week. Actually, I agree with three08's entire comment. I wouldn't mind a briefer Recommended Posts, not at all, if that's what the forum would go for.
Jmonkee: That's what the "Ongoing Threads" part is for, was the intent. (That is, there's a section for new threads, and there's "Ongoing Threads" for old threads where interesting things have happened over the last week.) Would a different name for that section be clearer?