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Sub forums within the Id forum (2 Viewers)

James Thomas said:
How many sub forums would that make? :eek!:

.
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Perhaps only for a few main groups of particularly difficult to ID species. Gulls and waders would be obvious candidates and occur across different continents and regions anyway. A wader may breed in Alaska/Siberia, pass through SE Asia and winter in Australia. It may also occur as a vagrant in Europe.

Anyway like you say something will have to be done and regional division is a good a solution as any.
 
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I posters stuck to the request for location in the thread header it would be a start.

Twite.

ps. What about a sub-forum for manky mallards.
 
Where Am I

I do like the Idea but where am I, Sharm is Africa,middle East and most of the birds are from Europe...
I do agree posts vanish fast but at the same time responsescan be bought back up with a ?....
I think what ever you do will please some and not others but that is life..
Good luck with it.
 
I see no problem in the current set-up. Every time I open up Birdforum the first thing I do is scan the current bird ID page. If things have been moving quickly, and I recognise no postings on the current page I look at the second page. And that is that. I can keep up to date with all the postings.

I like the international aspect - I have visited North America, Australia, Caribbean, Indonesia, most of Africa, Europe and UK, central Asia........and will happily try to ID queries from any of these regions. Living as I do in South Africa, I am constantly amazed at the erudite contributions from all parts of the world on queries posed in Southern Africa. By subdividing the ID forum, you run the risk of losing all that valuable input.

Leave the forum alone - all you have to do is scan the first two pages daily, and remember that, if you respond to a post, that posting is elevated once again to the front of the queue.

Best wishes,
Dave
 
James Thomas said:
And for traffic reasons alone, the UK should have its own sub forum and not be grouped in with Europe.
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I disagree. The bird species are pretty much the same. There's no need to force people to look in two branches for the same species of birds.

wolfbirder said:
how about reducing the ability to post to one per week, posters should put all their i/d issues onto a single post, as they are all usually from same or near locations.
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I assume you mean reduce the ability to start a thread, not actually make a post. If so, I completely disagree. People would have to look in the same threads by the same posters every single time they access this branch to see if there is a new identification question in it, as opposed to new commentary. Many posters know they have a gull or a duck or a bird of prey. When that information is in the name of the thread (i.e. southern Italy, warbler with black throat?) it allows people to immediately scroll by or dive in. One thread with multiple questions means longer threads, lots of jumping back and forth between page 1 and page 2 or 3 or 4, and more potential for confusion as to what birds are being referred to.

I like the way this branch is set up right now. I look at the front page or maybe two, read what posts I like, and log in if I feel like commenting. Sometimes several days go by between my log-ins.
 
Another vote not to split from me. I want to view all threads in one list and not have to visit multiple subforums, on top of the reasons given above.

Splitting serves no purpose which could not equally be served with better thread titles. Is it not possible to force people to include location (and family) in the title by making them complete mandatory input fields when starting a thread?

Graham
 
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Steven Astley said:
This was discussed before and think I was opposed the idea, but the ID forum is very busy these days threads slip of pages within a day and as a result I think the forum is losing some of its effectiveness in resolving ID queries as not enough people are seeing the thread.

Maybe splitting into regions.

What do others think? Especially people who agree with me ;)
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Unfortunately, a number of people seem to have missed your last sentence. ;)
 
Another vote against splitting.
I can't believe I just wrote that, must be my old age and lack of twitching that's made me into a lumper:-O
 
Helenelizabeth2 said:
Unfortunately, a number of people seem to have missed your last sentence. ;)
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Yes, think I was being to diplomatic Helen should have said only people who agree with me can post ;)

IMO wouldn't be surprised if there is the odd rarity or 2 that has slipped through the net.

Not a big problem for me, I can just bump up ones that interest me.

Thanks for everybody's current and subsequent input (apart from the ones that disagree with me;))
 
I prefer that there is not a split. I really enjoy the mix of ID's and whether I know the bird or the area - or not- is not an issue. I feel that I get to learn so much more and it not an inconvenience to scroll through the pages to see what has come up. The ID questions are so quickly responded to (that in and of itself is amazing!) that probably few get overlooked. The international mix is really appealing and makes scrolling through the various pages a pleasure, where I don't feel inclined to do that with the Local Patch forum.
 
We have no split now... if you are going to split... Hemisphere... Western and Eastern... You don't get into continent problems that way... If you need more splits... do it later.

Fraser
 
Having read through this thread and considered what everyone says, I'm another one against splitting the ID forum (Sorry Steven;)) for the reasons already expressed. Birds move around too much. Surely as Microtis says, titles like 'duck in Italy' or 'raptor in California' etc can narrow down criteria to what different people are interested in so one doesn't have to wade through everything. I really like the international aspect of BF and wouldn't like to see it separated by regions. If it's going to be split better to do it by families but even then I think it's better not to.
 
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.
 
How about a split into:

"I've scoured every id book I own, searched the net and still don't know what it is" forum

and a

"I spent thousands on a camera but didn't bother to buy a book" forum!
 
Photgog said:
... if you are going to split... Hemisphere... Western and Eastern... You don't get into continent problems that way... If you need more splits... do it later.

Fraser
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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.
 
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