Organizing Forums

[wbuchanan]

I was just wondering if it might be beneficial/helpful to organize the forums in categories based on the reference manuals? It seems that it could get pretty difficult to stay on top of things with everything in a single place and might help people get answers to their questions a bit more efficiently (e.g., having [SEM], [XT], etc... categories within the general forum).

[Stephen Jenkins]

Could you please clarify what you mean by "organize"? If you mean different forums for different manuals, I'd vote against that at the moment. Indeed, my current proposal would be to integrate the Mata forum with the Stata form. That is, to me, one of the benefits of the "old" Statalist was being exposed to lots of different topics and learning about stuff I mightn't otherwise come across. Moreover, some questions are cross-topic. So, at present, the idea raised the other day of using devices like tags to distinguish material (in addition to subject lines) sounds more promising to me. [I happily concede that my mind may change as use of the new Forums develop! I discover that that I am liking the new format/software more than I'd originally thought.]

[Nick Cox]

I tend to agree with Stephen.

Precisely what William suggests was one possibility suggested during initial discussions about the forum, but clearly not adopted. In fact I suggested it, but I don't support it now.

1. In practice that would lead to many more forums than can even be scanned simultaneously by title on many monitors.

2. Forum users vary from one-off visitors who might never revisit with very specific problems to long-term users with a serious interest in most if not all of Stata. Neither kind of user would be well served by having many forums: the one-off visitor might easily get confused about which forum to post in; the long-term user would need to monitor several forums.

3. Some subdivisions seem clear-cut: if you have a problem that is [SVY] or [MV] you tend to know that. But many problems are not so obvious: more experienced Stata programmers tend to have a much higher bar for what programming is than many people new to Stata. Many problems mix data management, statistics and programming wide sense.

There are scenarios in which some such subdivision is exactly right, specifically for somebody with very precisely defined interests who will be matched by other people who all post in exactly the same forum, but in total, as said, I don't support this now.

Broadly similar aims can be sought by careful use of tags and title wording.

[wbuchanan]

All good points. Maybe adding tags to the filter tool could be useful/helpful and not to difficult to implement?

[Roberto Ferrer]

I agree strongly with the use of tags but I think not everybody should have the power to create them. Many people use slightly different wording (and sometimes very different) to refer to the same thing and at a certain point we'll end up with a myriad of tags that are all supposed to refer to the same issue. Tag creation should ultimately be handled by site administrators and "super-users". This raises the question: how to define a "super-user" ? (If we really want them.)

One idea is to let any user create any tag in the short run, and after some period, forum administrators/super-users could purge the list to maintain those that are the most relevant/popular. From then on, only administrator/super-users can create them.

One problem noticed somewhere else is that common words that turn out to be Stata commands, for the moment, are not allowed as tags (don't really know how big an issue this is).

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

Unfortunately it isn't easy right now to add searching by tag to the Filter menu, but we do hope this is added in the future.

In response to Roberto Ferrer's comments, it is possible for administrators/moderators to merge/delete tags, so as long as this was done periodically, any issues with tags defined by the community at large can be dealt with.

Also, if a particular word is filtered by the forum software, let us know about it, and we can modify it to allow it.

[wbuchanan]

The future plans sound interesting for sure.