Basejumper.com - archive

I notice a certain lopsidedness in the way threads are distributed among the various categories in the forums. Some categories have a handful of threads, and then there is this one called "General BASE" which has 5936 threads.

Now, we all know why this is the case -- the vast majority of threads in this category are the archival material which was migrated over from the other site. However, there will be new people signing up to the site in future who will not know why this is the case, and it is confusing.

This is all the more true in that many of the threads there would in fact be posted in other categories ("technical", for example) if they were being posted today. They don't belong, in other words, under "General BASE".

Has any thought been given to re-labelling that category to reflect what it actually is ("Archives", for example), closing it to new threads, and then starting up a new "General" category which really would contain only threads which don't belong elsewhere?

Just a thought.

My plan is to slowly (it will take a lot of time) move the threads out into the appropriate forums, so that the content of the old DZ.com BASE forum will eventually be split out into whichever of the new forums is appropriate to each thread.

Remember that doing this will require that each thread be looked over individually, starting from the beginning, and then moved to the appropriate new forum. In some cases this may require that threads be split into multiple forums. Basically, it'll take a while, so don't expect it to happen overnight.

okay tom, you have two.

Okay, I actually wondered about that. Wow, lots of work!

I'm guessing that in the course of doing that, you'll discover more categories that you want to add, as well. (Which will make for even more work as you go back and reclassify already-classified things into the new forums.)

Are you looking for help?

I don't like the idea of old threads being split apart from their original context. It's one thing to split an active conversation when it's reasonably easy for the reader to remember that two threads were once one and related, but in archives when the temporal relationship between threads is lost, it's going to get pretty confusing.

This seems like an awful lot of work for not a huge amount of gain. I like Istvan's suggestion of keeping the dz-migrated threads in a separate, locked "Archives" section, and let the new sections evolve on their own, from the beginning.

The two types of threads that I am particularly interested in moving out into their own "homes" are incidents and purely technical threads. The reason I want to do this is that I feel they will be much more useful to beginning jumpers if they are cleaned out into separate forums (because then you don't have to weed through the "chat" threads to get at them). Probably the most useful BASE primer I've ever seen was back when Mick had pulled out all the technical threads at BLiNC and created the technical archives. I was quite annoyed when he did away with it, and I'd like there to be something like that here.

Aside from beginners, it's very rare that anyone goes back and reads the old threads. I'd like to make it easier on the folks who are actually trying to learn from them, and making it easier to find the real technical information is a good starting point for that.

And I see you've already started. Big job!

Is it raining down there? Go play outside!