Could we make a 'sticky' thread for Tomorrowland 2013 and kindly direct people to look at that before posting any new threads? There are 12 threads relating to the festival on the first page of Europe alone! I think this topic may have arisen last year leading up to the 2012 festival but I'm not sure what the outcome was.
Yeah it was like that last year, and I mentioned the amount of threads then. I tried directing quite a few to the largest thread last year but more new threads popped up, often with the same queries - so I gave up on that. To be honest, the amount of Tomorrowland threads is probably my only annoyance with being a mod for the Europe forum (not that all of them end up in the Europe thread, several go to Travel Companions too).
I think I may have mentioned it in the forum view thread I started a year ago, and how it's much easier for this to happen with the "all threads" as the default view rather than having each forum showing - and also how a sticky loses meaning with the "all thread" view as you don't see them.
FWIW, I popped into the travellerspoint office the other day, and they're well aware of the annoyance the overdose of these threads causes for people not at all interested in the topic (and being the ranking hit in Google for "tomorrowland forum", I don't think we'll stop getting them anytime soon). We talked through quite some interesting ideas on how to make things better in the future, though I obviously don't know the relative priority or complexity of those ideas.
For now, what might help things a bit, would maybe be to do a big edit to co-opt the first post in (last year's thread), to point newcomers who have that as their entry point to travellerspoint to this year's main thread, and to ask them to please post in there rather than starting their own topic. Should be a whole lot more visible to these new members than any sticky thread would be. (Obviously it needs to be very clear with such an edit which text was added by the moderator, and what was the original post by the guy who's gotten us such a large number of new visitors.)
(We're also in third place for "tomorrowland 2013 forum", with , so a similar edit might be useful there.)
Ah Tomorrowland.. my favourite music festival now
I like Sander's suggestion. Editing those threads that rank well for Tomorrowland related terms in Google will hopefully have the effect of stopping new threads from starting.
We could also do a manual merging of these threads? There's currently no simple mechanism for this, but maybe it's worth doing it manually.
Sander and I were also talking about the concept of groups in Travellerspoint, in large part to help people who are here for a niche topic be able to have an area to connect. The result would be a "Tomorrowland 2013" group which has its own subforum of sorts. But the threads from those group forums wouldn't be in the main forum views. Other groups would be for different languages, for things like Sydney New Years, exchange students, and so on. The idea's just being tossed around still, but fairly seriously. So happy for feedback / reactions to that concept.
I like Sander's suggestion too, and this would be good to use for subsequent festivals in coming years.
The groups idea sounds really good too - I'd be really keen to see that one implemented. It would work well for Sydney New year and also the 'anyone going to be in Oz at the same time as me' kind of threads.
I mentioned it last year. People just start new threads instead of looking at the many current and old ones, so it does need a sticky on the subject.
People just start new threads instead of looking at the many current and old ones, so it does need a sticky on the subject.
Something seen quite often on forums is that people will just start a new thread, or maybe make a brief search - and then start their own thread anyway. Stickies are also often not looked at, or if they are then in the current default view they're not seen anyway.
Is it possible for when people hit either the preview or submit when starting a new thread, that certain keywords can be caught by the system and a handful of relevant threads come up - asking the user if they want to make their post in an existing thread instead of a new one? (so a submit in such a case would result in a preview, but with a few likely threads as suggestions). It could be useful for topics that come up a lot - Tomorrowland being one of those of course.
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