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> OK. It seems to work. There will be some ease of use upgrades for
> everyone, for example you can now set your preferences to show different
> ranges of dates or just NEW messages. More importantly for me is this new
> script is more efficient, thus faster and it can deal with more messages.
> I may get rid of the archive and bring all the archived messages back into
> the main index. Searching should also be improved. There is now a search
> index so the script does not need to open all messages to do perform a
> search.
> : Over the next couple days I will be converting over to version 4.0 of
> the
> : WebBBS script. I tried on Sunday and it failed miserably, so I'm first
> : going to try to get the Design forum going first and then I'll try again
> : on the other boards. Please be patient. If you can't get on and you get
> : weird error messages, it means I have messed up. Hopefully everything
> will
> : be back on line one way or another shortly. If you get persistant
> : problems, please let me know.
It looks good. Interesting addition can be seen above. Instead of just keeping the text of the original message in a response (lines indicated by a colon now, instead of a greater than sign) the original message AND the message that spawned it are included ( lines indicated by > : ). How many generations does this go on?
Do you plan to retain the viewer counters on the main building list? They were gone for a while.
If you can get the archives -- and old archives -- back into the main arena it will be easier to find old stuff.
More than that, though, with all the messages together a few searches could serve to organize this into some areas that could be converted to digests on a single topic. Then point to these digests from a FAQ list. For example, there are a lot of repeated questions about varnish. A search for Varnish would turn up all these things and provide a list that could easily occupy an afternoon of reading.
Or, these responses could be boiled down to create a more powerful FAQ list. Perhaps if you decided on the topics you could get volunteers to do the actual editing, condensing and rewriting -- each person doing a single topic -- and turn that FAQ list into practically an instruction manual for beginners.
Given any thought to having this board available in multiple languages? Given the diversity of the audience the list of such possibilites is very large.
Paul G. Jacobson
This is an archived message from The Kayak Building Bulletin Board.
Guillemot Kayak - High
Performance Wooden Sea Kayak Designs
