Split of bird identification forum? (1 Viewer)

[GMS]

I know this has been discussed before but I think it's time to revisit. I personally feel it would be beneficial to split the ID forum according to geographical regions (e.g. for Western paleartic etc) and with the increase of audio id requests have a separate thread for these also. It would make it much easier to navigate and find the topics of interest and not have to scroll through all the other posts that might be less relevant for each the member. What do others think?

 

[THE_FERN]

I'm not in favour. We have experts who are mavens for particular parts of the world of course, but also a load of keen amateurs like me of reasonably wide geographical experience. I'm not keen on having to check multiple fora. Probably I'll just not bother contributing. Maybe that's not important..?

 

[foresttwitcher]

Change for the sake of change is not always a good thing ... in my opinion it is fine as it is, after all you can choose which threads you wish to open and which you don't.

 

[Butty]

I'm not in favour. We have experts who are mavens for particular parts of the world of course, but also a load of keen amateurs like me of reasonably wide geographical experience. I'm not keen on having to check multiple fora.

I agree - in part , furthermore, because a geographical split leaves a wide species-overlap, and thus many of us would still finish up having to look at several fora even if one's chief interest was focused on a single region. Hiving off sound IDs would be a more-natural/workable split, but most of us have some sub-sonagram-level interest in bird-sounds so would still be disadvantaged by having to check an extra forum (and I suspect that, anyway, the current high-level of over-exuberant sound-ID discussions will wane in time).

 

[THE_FERN]

I'd also add it's been rare that the number of ID requests has been very high per day. The number of unanswered ones is even lower. Meanwhile, I've been lobbying @Green Fields to set up tagging. If it were possible to tag with geographical area this would help...

[I want tags so we can tag threads which have useful ID tips for transfer to Opus. And another tag to show when this is done]

 

[CARERY]

Not a really lively discussion, ey? I'm also in favour NOT to split the ID forum. However, I do like the idea to tag a thread. I could imagine it can't be such a big thing to implement the obligation to tag Continent and Audio/Visual ID request before a poster can launch a thread? What do the Admins say?

In my opinion a split would most probably lead to less traffic in each subforum which means it's less likely to get an answer. For instance it's not too rare that a thread is moved from the gulls section to here simply because more people will look at it...

 

[GMS]

Not a really lively discussion, ey?

I thought that Suggests that most folks don't care about it and the few that have commented are happy with the status quo. That's ok, no issue with that, it was a suggestion that for me would have made the experience less clunky and more enjoyable but fair enough if that doesn't work for others.

 

[delia todd]

the obligation to tag Continent and Audio/Visual ID request before a poster can launch a thread? What do the Admins say?

I can't really answer for Admin, but generally the feeling there is that they don't want to enforce too many requirements on new people to do this that and the other before their post is accepted.

Mods try to look out for obvious things and deal with them on an individual basis, such as moving ID requests from Say Hello to the ID or Camera forum for instance if we think they'll get a better response.

Some new people seem to have accepted the use of Tags much better than established members here as we never seemed to use the on the old platform(?) - was it even possible? It was months before I realised it was even possible to tag a thread.

Tags are really important in the Gallery BTW