Philforum Focus Group

There is a general forum area here: http://able2know.org/forum/general/

One of the actions each of us can do to keep things organised is to make sure that you categorize your post when you start a new thread so it makes finding the discussion easier and more "philosophical."
EG: Philosophy, Epistemology, Kant, Transcendental Aesthetic or Philosophy, Kant, First Critique.

While some posts are naturally very general, whenever possible and meaningful, providing clear and distinct "categories" seems to be helpful to everyone, and will do much to retain the useful structure at Philforum.

To those who wanted to add Philosophers or "sub-forums" now is your chance by using categories that make looking for discussions about your topic easy.

Hi Victor,
Thank you. I meant a sub-forum, just for us refugees - A quick link to who is here and who is where.
Mark... Ps... My eyes hurt in this light!

You can create your own sub-forum in the Philosophy category by making use of the tags to label your threads.

If you want to create a general thread for the Philosophy category, create some general topics and use the tagging system to label them Philosophy General. Be sure to also add just the Philosophy tag so your sub-forum can be found by anyone clicking on the Philosophy tag for navigating to the menu of sub-forums.

That's the neat thing about our tagging system. You can create your own customized navigation structure with the use of tags.

Think of it as a giant web. The general categories on the homepage navigation menu are the hubs of the web. Each hub has connecting spokes of sub-categories that sometimes also connect to other general category hubs. These are identified with tags (labels) and can be easily navigated using the navigation menu of tags. You can easily add on to the structure with the use of your own tags. You and others can apply a tag to topics enough times that it may create a new hub.

Welcome to the A2K universe. May your philosophical topics be galactic hubs as well as planetary tags of interest.

Live long and prosper.

By the way, here is a general discussion topic that your fellow philosophy forum folks have created. Join them there for the general discussion you seek:

http://able2know.org/topic/152716-13#post-4167946

We'll do what you are essentially asking for, read tracking, soon.

But there are some things to decide on, such as how to handle the usecases who don't want read topics disappearing. Let me figure some UI issues out and we'll add it.

I haven't read the whole thread, so forgive me if some of this has already been covered.

Social groups: it sounds as if a priority is being made to restore them. Is there an estimated time that is more hopeful than the period of months previously mentioned?

Layout and navigation: Will there be a change in the aesthetics and navigation scheme of the place? Because right now, the aesthetics alone make it hard to come here, speaking just for myself.

Can someone post a screen shot of what your old forum looked like so I can get a better idea of what you are comparing the A2K forum aesthetics to?

I am guessing that within 10-20 days a couple groups will be in testing but I don't know when it will be open to all. Priority for the testing will be given to the former groups.



Yes, but I don't yet know when and they might be treated separately (design vs information architecture and navigation).

Thanks. Do you know if the Creative Writers Group will be one of them?

Until it is, you might enjoy investigating our writer's forum to see if it is of interest to you:

http://able2know.org/forum/original_writing/

Sure, as soon as it's working at all I'll import the data and let you play with it a bit before opening it up to the group members.

Thank you.

I would really like to see threaded forums come back.

The most difficult thing I've found over the past couple of days is figuring out what the organisational structure is. There doesn't seem to be one.

The USP of philforum was the high quality content. I wasn't much of a poster but I did an awful lot of reading there. By having forums and sub-forums I was able to methodically read through threads without losing where I was. From the Home page we had
Secondary Branches of Phlosophy split into:

Philosophy of Politics
Philosophy of Religion
etc
etc

It was easy to navigate. I'm not too fussed about how long it takes for other features like chat and who's online but I really think how the forum itself is organised needs to be changed. Is it possible to re-organise it to match how it was before? Once you click on the Philosphy link, you're presented with a list of threads and a list to the right of seemingly unorganised sub-forums we had before. Clicking on one of these gives you another list of threads but not the associated sub-forums eg if you click on Pre-Socratic Philosphers you're supposed to get sub-forums such as Socrates, Plato etc but you don't.

I can see how the current format is good for discussions but it completely dessimates one of the core functions of philforum - being a high quality resource for philosophy related info. It trumped anything you could find on Wikipedia. For people like me, who posted less, it was an absolute dream. I learnt more from the posts of Aedes, Didymos, Bright Noon, Dave Allen, to name a few, than I would have in all my searches on the web. Having these discussions simply scattered around everywhere with no real system in place makes learning from this forum pretty much impossible. If you can't easily find these topics in a systematic fashion they might as well not be here.

So I'd like to know if navigation/organisation of the forum will be changed to the way it was before. If yes, when will this happen?

I'll second this. The navigational struture of the old forum was brilliant, and the visual aesthetics were wonderful.

In addition to a logical forum structure with associated subforums you had a list of the most recent 30 or so posts and on top of that, you had a tag cloud with big and small words; the bigger words, like Nietzsche for instance, indicated lots of discussion about that philosopher, and when you clicked on it, you got a list of all the Nietzsche threads. It was very well done.

Here, I too, feel navigationally lost.

Well, I can say, that one of the nice things about this place is that new subforums are easy to create. Tag items with the same relevant tags, and then you will have a forum based on the tag. This forum works much like the tag cloud that you mention. Enter a tag into the search and you have a forum based on all the threads with that particular tag. For example, type in Nietzsche, and you end up with nearly all of the same threads that you would have on the old site. With time it will all start to make more sense.

Robert is also quick to point out that he does not find this site to be the most aesthetically pleasing. It is a work in progress, and with time that will be remedied. And remember, that the group forums are around the corner.

"So I'd like to know if navigation/organisation of the forum will be changed to the way it was before. If yes, when will this happen?"

In a sense, yes the organization of the forum will come back. Type in "ethics" for example, and you will have all of the ethics threads listed. Type in "philosophy of religion" and you will have all of those threads listed. We have a lot of work to do though on the organizational aspect of the forum.

Now, what we need to do as a community is organize the forums by using descriptive tagging. Let's say you make a thread that raises an ethical concerns about factory farms. For tags, you would probably want to use "philosophy," "ethics," "animals," "factory farms," "agriculture," or other such related tags so that not only the correct audience can find the thread, but so that random searches will reveal related topics quickly and efficently.

I apologize for intruding here.

However, there is a thread where people are introducing other folk to the wider forum.

So far, distressingly to me, it is almost all "old" A2kers trying to introduce other "old" A2kers to you newer folk.

It would be truly wonderful, I think, if some of you newer members would feel comfortable to introduce each other to we oldsters.

Here is the thread:

http://able2know.org/topic/152809-1

Of course, no pressure.

I do hope you guys do not feel intruded upon.

Bows politely, and exits.

thanks-i was beginning to feel navigationally retarded. i couldnt even put my finger on what was wrong or explain why i am not able to follow anything, but ...

robert, it's yeah, what he said! that's it exactly! even alphabetical order would help, anything...