I really want these three excellent clinics written by Joe Fugate to always be at the top so we don’t need to ‘bump’ them all the time. What do you think about this idea?
Designing for satisfying operations:
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=1&TOPIC_ID=25535
Building realistic scenery:
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=1&TOPIC_ID=32122
Twelwe years experience using DCC:
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=1&TOPIC_ID=36389
they are indeed great reference materials, so many questions answered and so much great advice.
yeah , having sticky threads would be great . i have links to those three threads saved so i don’t have to go searching for them
Personally, I think they should have another forum category under Model Railroader dedicated to these types of threads that bergie would personally approve to be good enough to be on there. People would only be able to reply to topics, not create them, or perhaps just have them there as reading material. Regardless, Joe’s definitely should be somewhere special so its easy to access.
By the way, I’ve just bookmarked them in my favourites, but new people might not be able to find them. This place can be a little overwhelming coming in new, not knowing what to look for.
[#ditto][#ditto] Excellent reference pieces!
Will
Excellent idea, new members have no idea where to start, and the same questions are repeated over and over, which is only natural, we have all done it even Joe 13 years ago, right Joe?
I vote yes,
I’m a member of a much small forum, and they have a VERY orginazed systam when it comes to catagories. I was actually surprised to see a forum of this size, and sponsored by such a large publication be so haphazzard.
I bookmarked them at work - weren’t there four of them?
They should not clutter the first page with stickies, in my opinion. What they should do is archive the most popular threads in a new ‘forum’ archive, and perhaps rank order them on the basis of use over time…a simple program to achieve that.
It’s not going to happen.
As selector said, it will clutter the page.
Also, this is MR’s forum, and I’m sure they don’t want it to appear that any one person / poster has more significance than any other.
You could imagine over time things would really be a mess. Joe has 4, aggro adds one about weathering, another about trees, someone else on handlaying turnouts. They’d all be great, but there would soon be a total mess.
Then how does MR decide which ones are good enough to get the “sticky approval”.
For the record, Joe’s posts are great, and I enjoy all of them and look forward to them.
But from a simple marketing point of view, I highly, highly, highly doubt MR would “sticky” anyone’s threads.
Gee, you guys really know how to make a guy blush. [:I]
I agree that regular stickies will over time just clutter up the first page.
I think perhaps a new “Best of” forum that it locked so people can’t start new topics might be workable.
Also, for what it’s worth, I’m talking with MR on ways to make lots of this in-depth how-to information from the forum clinics (and more besides) readily available online going forward, with something to possibly materialize next year sometime. No promises, but we’re kicking around ideas.
The fact I do internet and web stuff for a living and like to do how-to’s on the hobby helps, so one way or another I’d like to see this kind of info become more accessible over the internet.
I had an email from Terry Thompson the other day, with a survey, had Joe’s ballast video on it. I replied honestly about the PDF’s etc being a bit to expensive, and the MR video’s cutting off half way though sometimes.
Ken.
Ken:
Regarding videos cutting off halfway through, don’t use MR’s current video offerings as any kind of guide. Any videos I do (through MR or otherwise) that you can access over the internet will use a streaming video server, and NOT a web server. The way MR does video on their site today through their web server is NOT adequate for a site that has tens of thousands of visitors like MR’s web site does.
As to the downloadable PDFs, it depends on who you are. Consider: you are new to the hobby and you don’t have many, if any, back issues of MR. In that case, downloading a collected package of MR articles all on a single topic (12-50 pages priced at $6-$15 all with no advertising) is very helpful and not a bad deal at all.
If you already have all the material in back issues and you don’t mind using the article index on here to find them, then the downloadable PDFs are not for you.
Should we have any problem with MR selling things that aren’t for everyone? Haven’t we been bemoaning the lack of newbies in the hobby in other threads on here? How convenient can you make it for a newbie if you offer what amounts to back issue content they don’t have, all arranged by topic and not paid for by advertising? Why does everything on the internet have to be free?
I’d rather see 3 or 4 Forum Clinic topics “stickied” to the first page than dozens of “re-run topics” asking questions that are already answered in the Forum Clinics. New (and old) members would then more easily find answers to their questions.
That is strange. Go to the Garden Railways forum’s General Discussion section and you’ll find a sticky there.
Weathering, trees, and handlaying track can all be part of the same basic Forum Clinics that already exist, so there would be no need to create dozens of them. Just add the message to one of the exisiting Clinics.
Perhaps, simply by abiding by the wishes of the forum members who could contact the Administrators to ask for a topic to be “stickied”, no ?
I’ll repeat : Go to the Garden Railways forum’s General Discussion section and you’ll find a sticky there.
If significant numbers of forum members wi***o see a topic “stickied”, then why not ?
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=36405
I’ve got this one that Aggro started book marked. Maybe we should add Joes to it and let the newbies know to try and keep things more organized. Just a thought?
I had sent an email to Bergie a while back requesting or suggesting that, maybe if others did also they may create a new section for us.