I’ve been wondering about how the posts could be better organized on this site. As a newbie, I’m pretty much lost in all the tasting notes and mostly browse to look for posts on a specific topic such as cellar organization, a single winery, variety or region. With so many tasting note posts, I feel like I never get beyond pages 1-3 but don’t always know of something I want to specifically search for in advance so I give up. Has anyone made recommendations to improve the organization? Maybe do the following?
Move all tasting notes on specific wines to a separate forum outside “Wine Talk”.
Create “sticky” posts where you can discuss a single winery, for example “Rhys”. Sure there would be a lot of pages on these posts but it would be nice to go to one post for most of the commentary on a single winery.
For the people who were on this forum when it started, and on others before this one, yes, it’s been brought up. Basically, the more subforums, the worse the user experience. I think Squires had the same issue. The search function could be improved, but it’s the best way to find what you want.
You can probably effectively create your own pseudo sub forum using the search as follows: Search Wine Talk only, for the characters “TN:” in the topic title only.
Edit: Sorry, I just tried that and it says TN: is too common of a word.
Hi Bryan
Whilst the search function can do a job, it can be a bit of a challenge to find a thread, even if you’ve seen it before and are going back to try and find it.
I agree on the subforums bit (but see below).
I post on a wine forum and a travel forum that both use Xenforo forum/site software. I have to say it’s very good and allows a few more options for this challenge:
‘view new posts’ feature. Rather than opening each forum in turn, clicking on this brings back every thread with a post you’ve not read, or marked as read. Thus it doesn’t matter how many forums there are if most people use this feature. Once you’ve read everything that interests you, click on ‘mark forums read’ and it treats everything else posted as read without you having to open it, thus next time you come along you just see the new stuff. The beauty of this, is in never needing to open each forum in turn on a day to day basis, and once people become aware of this feature, most seem to use it by default. This allows the site owner to add many more sub-forums.
Tags. I suppose similar to hashtags, these are preset by the forum owner and can vary by site, so the travel forum might have tags for each continent, wine talk could have tags for cellaring, for tasting notes, for vintage commentary, etc. etc. These can then be searched on, whilst also using a key word search as well.
here’s one of those forums - the travel one (not fair to Todd to link to the wine one)