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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Sub forums within the Id forum (1 Viewer)

Er, can you image the chaos that this would cause in the UK (being as the Prime Meridian runs through Greenwich, London)?

I'm in favour of a continental-based split.

I was thinking more on the line in "General" ... using the Atlantic ridge as the split... and then the International date line on the other side...

Fraser
 
I was thinking more on the line in "General" ... using the Atlantic ridge as the split... and then the International date line on the other side...

Fraser

I would have no idea if I was to go away what timezone/ridge or whatever I'd be in!
 
I resisted posting in this thread, but am happy to hear that so many people think the same way that I do.

First off, splitting the forum would make for lots of mis-categorized postings -- remember that a lot of posts in the Q&A threads are by beginners who are posting for the first time. Admins would have to spend a lot of time moving threads, and then people might have trouble re-locating their questions. Yuk. "First, do no harm." We should keep it simple and welcoming for these people.

Second, I like occasionally reading about locations that I may never visit. I also like it when there is global input into a local thread, it often comes with a useful perspective, and sometimes with amusing errors. I am very unlikely to spend much time in other regional forums, though. So we would be building barriers between the regional populations of BirdForum -- almost the exact opposite of what I would want in BirdForum!

My suggestion would be to give users the option of filtering the one big Q&A forum by region if they want, by, say, a continental pulldown menu. The big difference is that the big forum is unchanged. It's a little bit like having your cake and eating it too; a similar idea is for threads to be cross-posted in a big forum and regional forums. For this to work people would have to correctly tag their threads by region at submission, which would invite plenty of mistakes; but we have to do that in the gallery now, and it works after a fashion.
 
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I would love to have split forums. Living in Australia and having time zone differences that vary greatly from the U.S I find that if I do a post of a night, when I have a look at it the next morning it is nearly always on page 2 with few replies and unless I add another comment to get it back onto the 1st page in morning the thread dies. Because of the traffic on the forum now and the time differences I would love to see split forums possibly by continents.

I appreciate this concern -- as a West Coast North American, I tend to miss other American viewers if I post too late in the day. But I suggest that timezone-challenged posters simply resort to a well-timed crossing-the-time-zones bump if they didn't get hoped-for input on their thread during the first pass.
 
I would have no idea if I was to go away what timezone/ridge or whatever I'd be in!

I'm not trying to be complicated here... and I'm not sure that I'm in favor of a split...

I just say that if you are going to split the forum... don't make it too difficult. Seven continents would be difficult.

If a split... make it North and South America for one... the second, the rest of the world. That way you don't have to worry about Panama and Colombia for one and don't have to worry about Turkey and whether it is in Asia or Europe... and Russia... Europe or Asia. Time zones are really not important.

Fraser
 
I was thinking more on the line in "General" ... using the Atlantic ridge as the split... and then the International date line on the other side...

Fraser

I think our Icelandic members might have problems if the split was made along the Atlantic ridge.

I'm in the status quo camp.
 
I like photgog's idea of not making it too difficult the idea of
"If a split... make it North and South America for one... the second, the rest of the world." would eliminate most of the time difference issues I have in posting from Australia when my post get bumped off the first page whilst sleeping.
 
servo incommutabilis insquequo nex, no change. I like it the way it is. Really it does make it a kind of unique thing, maybe no one person can answer every Id querry. It seems that collectivly we can. So we all make up one super birder who treats the entire world as one patch.
 
I appreciate this concern -- as a West Coast North American, I tend to miss other American viewers if I post too late in the day. But I suggest that timezone-challenged posters simply resort to a well-timed crossing-the-time-zones bump if they didn't get hoped-for input on their thread during the first pass.

Do remember the option of "thread tools, subscribe to this thread" so that you can easily get back to *your* thread. A bump has been necessary for a lot of us, and nothing wrong with that (unless you think the answers have to come within 30 minutes ;) ).

Niels
 
I think a better idea would be to include more posts on a page. I generally prefer as many items as possible on a page because I would much rather scroll than cause a postback for the next page and have to wait for it to load. I counted only 25 entries on a page so there is a lot of room for more. Make it 40 or 50 then almost all recent posts would be on the first page.

Sorry if someone else has already mentioned this as I confess to not having read the thread very closely |=)|.
 
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I think our Icelandic members might have problems if the split was made along the Atlantic ridge.

I'm in the status quo camp.

Touche' StuartReeves... No matter where you put a line on the globe... someone is going to be on the line.

I did like Iceland when I was there... I'd hate to see it split by a mere forum...

Volcanic activity does have a head start on that however...

Fraser
 
After reading the arguments, I am against. I don't think the benefits would outweigh the advantages.

Is it possible to force a rule - location in title ?

Someone said the change would be forced in the future - well there might be other ways such as filters or using the same search every visit if the location is in the title.

Mike.
 
After reading the arguments, I am against. I don't think the benefits would outweigh the advantages.

Is it possible to force a rule - location in title ?

Someone said the change would be forced in the future - well there might be other ways such as filters or using the same search every visit if the location is in the title.

Mike.

I know it's not true in every case, but a quick glance at the Poster's country of origin flag usually gives a pretty good idea of what geographical location the querie is likely to concern.
 
I think a better idea would be to include more posts on a page. I generally prefer as many items as possible on a page because I would much rather scroll than cause a postback for the next page and have to wait for it to load. I counted only 25 entries on a page so there is a lot of room for more. Make it 40 or 50 then almost all recent posts would be on the first page.

Sorry if someone else has already mentioned this as I confess to not having read the thread very closely |=)|.

In Control Panel it is possible to set the number of posts per page to 40.

For those of you who have Firefox there's a little add-on called Auto Scroller; you just keep scrolling down - the next page is automatically loaded.

D
 
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