Hi guys,
I was just thinking about this forum. What do you say? Is there a way to make a better use out of these tousands of posts around here in the forum?
Yes of course there is the search engine, but wouldn't it be better to link the best post relating to a certain topic within it's explanation in the wiki? Maybe there are even other ways to get a better overview of all the knowledge placed in here. can't there be a kind of drill-down, where you can choose a topic like "loading models in jme" and see related topics with a relevance-score und possibly meta-data like, which version of jme is addressed.
Using such a tool would make it learning jme much more efficient.
Any opinions?
[Maybe someone could move this topic in the right forum. Sorry I forgot that there is a "project&site-forum"]
We already have a tags system ;) It's not the most heavily used, but the more posts a thread gets, the more people tend to add tags.
The functionality you're asking for will rely greatly on one out of two things:
1 - Heavy manual moderation and organization of knowledge and contents.
2 - Targeted, task-aware systems (app-extensions most likely, e.g. to Joomla! or SMF).
The 'manual labor' is time consuming and requires several individuals to be well co-ordinated. It is dependable in the way that the information gathered with be human-filtered instead of automatic, but on the other hand there's nothing stopping the influx of updates from stagnating if the contributing individuals suddenly lack time.
The automated system is largely self-sufficient and persistent. Being automated it runs the risk of being 'discriminate', but a well written program can account for this; by allowing additional user-input for instance.
Personally I opt for an automated system. I see our forum being the most logical choice to extend into a dynamic knowledge-hub at this point (the wiki is meant for static information and the software itself is not extensible enough), as it is by far the most trafficked part of our website in terms of both read-count and content interaction.
The major issue right now is that our forum software of choice, Simple Machines, is going through major shifts in management and community. When this cools down and the software has either had a change of management or started a fork, we can consider making paid requests for quality extensions to our forum.