[jetkins]

Originally Posted by bmcclure937

Having a link to the FAQ's related forum thread (from within the FAQ page) would be ideal because some of the topics are not necessarily worthy to be stickied... they are just common questions.

Good point.

[mechdrew]

Originally Posted by bmcclure937

If you take into consideration the potential for the FAQ page, then you could easily see that there are many many things that could be answered... once these add up it would be inefficient to have them all stickied (I personally hate it when forums have a huge block of stickies at the top and you have to scroll and scroll until you get to the other topics).

Absolutely! I was just viewing hackint0sh.org the other day and there were nearly all stickies on one of the forums, even worse was the fact that stickies appeared on every page, so you only got about five new posts per page.

One of the things I liked about the FAQ's section before the switch to vBulletin was that no one could just start a thread there like they can now. It simply had some important threads, most of which were locked, and the one's that weren't locked were productive.

[CyG]

Originally Posted by mechdrew

One of the things I liked about the FAQ's section before the switch to vBulletin was that no one could just start a thread there like they can now. It simply had some important threads, most of which were locked, and the one's that weren't locked were productive.

Drew is right; the FAQ section was considerably more useful when it was locked. Having a moderated FAQ section also alleviated pressure to add new stickies to the main forum.

My only other concern is the general Mac section. It's clearly necessary but we may need guidelines to keep discussions somewhat related to the Minis.

It looks like everyone has ironed out a good structure for this sub-forum. It looks like it's time to round a couple of deputies and start cleaning things up.

[bmcclure937]

Originally Posted by CyG

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My only other concern is the general Mac section. It's clearly necessary but we may need guidelines to keep discussions somewhat related to the Minis.

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I do not mean to be rude, but that is the point of the "General" section... for general discussion. This section would be used for a variety of different discussions, and they do not necessarily have to relate to the Minis... as long as they relate to OSX. I see so many "general" questions mixed in the forum about "How do I do this in OSX?", "What is a good app for 'x,y and z'??", "What is your favorite app?"... etc etc.

The point of the "General Discussion" subforum would be for questions that pertain to OSX, but do not necessarily pertain to a specific Dell Mini model running OSX (that is what the Dell Mini 9 and Dell Mini 10v subforums of the OSX forum would be used for)

I agree that there should be guidelines, but the "General Discussion" subforum in the Mac OSX forum should allow and encourage discussions about OSX

Just my $0.02...

The categories I came up with are obviously not official, but I felt that they covered all of the bases and would make everything more logically organized and clutter-free.

[mrboult]

+1 to organizing the site more.
+1 to bmcclure937's suggested format (the basic layout seems sound)

Love this site, thanks to those that do the real work for the rest of us!

[CyG]

I should have been more specific. I enjoy and participate in many of the general OS X discussions. Actual use of OS X is the most important part of putting OS X on Minis.

Certain general questions contribute unnecessary noise to the forum. The two that come to mind are non-Mini hackintosh questions and troubleshooting Apple products.

As to your categories, I think they're exhaustive and clear, which is why I jumped to a discussion of ground rules within a specific category. Like I said, I think your proposed structure is ready to use.

[brncmp]

I think that a wiki should be used, at lest for guides (Arch Linux have a great wiki that users use). This would help keep things more organized and up to date.

This way the forums could be left for questions and notices and put links to the wiki for the answers.

Thanks for listening.

[mechdrew]

Originally Posted by brncmp

I think that a wiki should be used, at lest for guides (Arch Linux have a great wiki that users use). This would help keep things more organized and up to date.

Well, there is actually a forum/wiki hybrid in use here for the guides, it's just not as well known. Either a forum topic gets moved to the Guides section (as mine did) or someone submits an article (basically a long post) and it then gets approved. Since the whole site just moved to vBulletin not that long ago, I would say injecting a wiki would be somewhat confusing. Not a bad idea, just not sure that is what we need.

Okay, back on topic! One thing we need to keep in mind here is that regardless of whatever rules or forums get created, there will always be people who post in the wrong forum. I look at the Mini 9 and Mini 10 subforums all the time and see people arbitrarily posting questions about OS X, when scrolling down could have actually provided useful answers. That's why the second part of organizing the Mac OS X forum is the moderators. Moderators keep track of the illegitimate posts and deal with them accordingly (move/lock/rename/etc.) So maybe now that we *generally* agree on a set of subforums we should shift focus to moderators.

[Richdmoore]

Great idea on the organization. A general Mac OS Help would be good too, as many people are doing this to test drive OS X after using Windows for years. (I wonder how many people have bought their first official Apple computers after using a Dell 9?)

I love the system specific forums, as each install has little tweaks and what is good for one model can cause severe problems on other models.

[bmcclure937]

Originally Posted by mechdrew

<cut>

Okay, back on topic! One thing we need to keep in mind here is that regardless of whatever rules or forums get created, there will always be people who post in the wrong forum. I look at the Mini 9 and Mini 10 subforums all the time and see people arbitrarily posting questions about OS X, when scrolling down could have actually provided useful answers. That's why the second part of organizing the Mac OS X forum is the moderators. Moderators keep track of the illegitimate posts and deal with them accordingly (move/lock/rename/etc.) So maybe now that we *generally* agree on a set of subforums we should shift focus to moderators.

I agree. Now that we have a foundation set for the organization of the forums, we will need a set of moderators to step up and volunteer time to keep the forums in line and organized. As you stated, most of the time this simply consists of moving topics to the correct section of the forum, renaming, locking, merging, etc etc.

Once we have a moderator team for the Mac OSX forums things can start moving to ensure there is less clutter.