Forum Upgrades

[painterdale]

Maybe I'm doing this wrong or something. When I'm not logged in, I can hit a "Today's Posts" tab. When I am logged in, that isn't there, just a "New Topics" tab. I personally like to look through the posts for the day.

Dale

[droptopford]

Maybe I'm doing this wrong or something. When I'm not logged in, I can hit a "Today's Posts" tab. When I am logged in, that isn't there, just a "New Topics" tab. I personally like to look through the posts for the day.

Dale

It does the same for me Dale. Looks like pretty much the same posts come up either way. The difference I see is that the 'New Topics' tab begins with today's posts and continues showing posts in reverse chronological order. Might be something I'm missing though.

Clark

[PaulCDF]

With the "Upgrade" is there a way to narrow search?
Example I was searching for subject word "Magneto" under Indian Scout Forum:
Search result is SAME if a do search under Indian Scout Forum or enter search word in overall Forum page.

[ihrescue]

With the "Upgrade" is there a way to narrow search?
Example I was searching for subject word "Magneto" under Indian Scout Forum:
Search result is SAME if a do search under Indian Scout Forum or enter search word in overall Forum page.

I am still learning about how to effectively work with forums. One thing I understand about searches in a forum is if people described things well with good keywords in their posts then you can have a good bread crumb trail back to important info. We all need to think about helping people find what you are writing about in the future. The other thing is how to search. There is such a thing as a Boolean Search which uses five different characters to join with your keywords to make the search engine work better. The five characters are AND, OR, NOT, "" ( ) . The point is you can put one two or several keywords into your search and narrow down what you are looking for. I did a brief search and found some words. Obviously you will ant to include magneto and Scout, but I also found brand name I thing Splitdorf, Aero and the word dynamo associated with posts about magnetos. Are there other keywords that go with a magneto, like points, coil, etc? So one search might be magneto AND Scout, another magneto OR Scout, magneto AND Splitdorf AND Aero AND Dynamo AND Scout, "Magneto" (Magneto) AND Splitdorf AND Scout OR Aero. So how you configure the search character matters to the search output. If you have a bunch of key words the parenthesis around magneto makes that the first and most important word to return in the results. Quotes around a keyword means it has to match that exactly, OR says that it can be magneto OR Scout but results don't have to be both, etc. The search character is always all caps.

It takes some practice but it will help you get some more narrow results. I also went out on YouTube and read some articles about Boolean Searches and it help get ideas.

Mike Love

[PaulCDF]

Mister Wizard!!!
Yes Thank you. Familiar w concept Boolean searches. Before upgrade could search individual forums: Chief; Scout; Electrics; Flathead. Now will need to ask more precisely as query “asks” entire database, maybe not a bad thing. Time and use will tell. Thanks Once Again.

[rustynutz]

Paul346, you can search the individual forms by clicking the search drop down arrow, then clicking on the advanced search function

[PaulCDF]

THANKS Rusty!!! That will help.

[BoschZEV]

Some tweaks seem to be needed to make the forum work better. With relatively few people posting to the forum what is most useful to me is to see the new posts, not the new topics, and the only way I've found to get to them is:

open the forum
click on 'latest activity'
click on the 'filter' drop down menu
turn the 'new topics' off
close the drop down

At that point I think I'm seeing the latest posts, although I'm still not 100% sure. Unfortunately, the site doesn't remember my choices so I have to go through the above process every time I open the forum. Also, this is how I get to the new posts on my PC. I haven't yet figured out how to do the same thing on my iPhone.

Another thing to fix is the 'Welcome to vBulletin!' box at the top says to click on 'edit site' above. There is no edit site link above.

Even if there were a large number of posts every day on this site, which there's not, the 'trending' box seems like a waste of space on a forum like this, as opposed to if it were a social media site. As I write this a thread on '1927 Model J Intake Manifolds' is at the top of the trending box. The fact this topic is "trending" can only be of interest to very few people, and having it featured in a box on the home pages seems unlikely to make anyone else more likely to want to read it than if it weren't "trending."

The above comments aren't meant to be criticism of the site or its creators, but hopefully count as constructive criticism to make it even better.

[knucklehead 61]

is there a way to see the latest posts (like on the old forum) without having to scroll through multiple pages? ex: vintage pic of the day.
seems like you have to start over at page one each time, which makes it no fun to try to keep up, especially when the page count gets high.

[droptopford]

Not sure why that happens but it sometimes does. When it happens I go to the bottom of the page and click on the last page of that thread. That option is not available on top.