silverdooty wrote:the content matter of this website draws a lot of young people. young people asks questions,older more knowledgeable people answer them. that is how it has worked for centuries. it doesn't matter how much information or access to it there is. some people get it, some don't. some require more than is offered or than they could find. it's human nature. i would be surprised if any one person on this site has all the knowledge.
Yes, we have already established that, we are just trying to make the process of going from no0b to knowledgeable member a lot quicker and easier for us and them.
silverdooty wrote:if you limit the amount a new person can post, he/she won't post. they might have something helpful, insightful, ingenious, but you will never find it on this forum.
We're not limiting them from posting, they could post all they want if they had their own section, it could even go un-moderated. They will have acess to the rest of the forum, they just can't post in it.
silverdooty wrote:the wiki contains a lot of information. unfortunately after the first couple of pages it is not the most organized. you can't expect someone to fully understand everything in the wiki if you have 23 dead-end pages and 13 orphaned pages, or titled like 'Howto1' or 'Best'. 2 pages of 'pneumatic cannon' or 'pneumatic cannons'. same with the hybrid cannon and hybrid cannons.
We have also already established that, hence some people volunteering to do it up a bit.
silverdooty wrote:the search feature of this board, plain and simple, sucks. this is a free forum script. it can be improved upon, many sites use this board and modify to their liking. without knowing the way to get results from the search engine it is almost impossible to find any real useful info.
Are you using the 'quick search' if so that's your problem. This search function on spudfiles is just as good as any other I have used.
If you know what to type in and have some common sense you can find any information on the site, it just may take up 5 minutes of your life. Think logically don't type in 'piston valve' if you are looking for a how-to on making them. Limit the search to the how-to section then try it but type ' piston AND valve' or something similar.
silverdooty wrote:organizing the front page and fixing the wiki should be the main concern. bring more focus to the wiki and how-to section on the front page. fix the quick search to 'search for all terms'.
Again we have been over this, did you read this whole thread?
silverdooty wrote:a lot of the information found on this site can be found elsewhere on the internet. spudfiles is one of the top results, but not the only result. all this information in one place would lead people to believe it is a good place to ask questions. is it or isn't it?
Spudfiles is the biggest spud gun web site after SGTC shut down, it has probably 95% of all spud gun information on it, only a few 'rogue' people with crappy free web sites aren't on spudfiles or don't have their stuff on it. Because SF is the biggest spud gun resource web site, it does take time to look for things because of the over-whelming information.
silverdooty wrote:when you over-mod a forum, the forum dies. new forums sprout and eventually the same thing happens, people want more modding. this is a forum about building spudguns. there are many different scenarios for assembling PVC and making it go boom, but they are not limitless. if you modded every post to useful info there would be very little left.
We're defiantly not over-modding this forum, there is a lot of stuff we let slide, and no not all forums die from over-modding. The only reason SGTC went down was because of hackers and Joels occupation, not because of their wonderful modding team. We don't mod every post, only crap ones made by no0bs, that's what we are trying to limit, I only mod a small percentage of the new topics, the rest are perfectly fine.
silverdooty wrote:have you ever wondered how many members are more spudgun knowledgeable than you, but just don't post? i would guess more than those who post.
No, if they are more knowledgeable chances are they are on this web site, I don't see someone just thinking of how to build some extreme valve better then a piston valve without coming across a site like this, that's if it is spud gun related. I'm sure there are loads of homemade firearms web sites out their with great info, they're just not interested in spud guns.