Reply to "restoration forum"

Sam, sorry for taking your post off-topic. I've deleted the off topic stuff and we'll get down to answering your question.

the place to find photo documentaries of work progressing on a Pantera is in the DeTomaso Automobile Photo Gallery. Every member is encouraged to start a gallery about their car, and to update it from time to time, thereby creating an on-line photo journal about their Pantera, as work is performed, changes are made, etc. This journal can span years of ownership.

A photo essay on how to perform a particular job will be found in the appropriate technical forum.

The forums as they exist today are the result of a lot of experience, experimentation, thought, trial and error. Mark and I truly want these forums to be as good as possible for the benefit of each and every member of the DTIC. We really appreciate your input, your suggestions are always welcome, and I think its bitchen that members from time to time want to make suggestions that help make the DTIC a more user friendly bulletin board.

There are several issues at hand regarding adding or deleting forums, changing the scope of existing forums.

One is the member who logs on regularly and just wants to find what's new. For this person, the more forums there are, the harder it is to find what they're looking for. Searching 20 forums takes twice as long as searching 10 forums.

Then there is the member looking back historically for old posts on a topic. This member must be able to find all of the posts on that subject in one forum, and the topic must not get lost amongst other topics in the same forum. This points to having the forums fairly narrow in their scope.

Hand in hand with that issue, is making the forums easy for members posting new topics to figure out which forum he/she should post in. This is where getting too narrow in scope makes problems.

Some examples:

A rusty interior floor pan, is that a body topic, or an interior topic?

A window that doesn't roll up or down, is that a body topic, an interior topic, or an electrical topic.

What is clearly the proper forum to you, may be just as clearly another forum to another member. This is why the general technical topics forum covers as broad a spectrum of issues as it does. If a certain topic is spread in several forums, then it will be impossible or very inconvenient for you to find & read all the posts on that topic. If it is unclear where to post a topic, it will also be just as unclear where to search for the old posts on that topic. So there is a balance needed between having the forums too broad in scope, and too narrow in scope.

In considering your request, I look first at the forum covering your subject as it exists at this time, the general technical topics forum. This forum covers the following topics:

(1) charging and electrical systems (including gauges, wipers, headlights and power windows)
(2) heating, ventillation and air conditioning
(3) paint and body
(4) interior
(5) car care
(6) restoration and production/historic topics

I assume what you would like to do is separate body work topics from everything else in that forum. The searcher's consideration, is it difficult to find bodywork posts in that forum as it is now configured? The truth of the matter is, there aren't that many posts regarding body work, this forum is mostly about electrical problems. The fact that the body work posts are so far & few between is probably what makes finding them so difficult. The poster's consideration, would that make it more difficult to figure out where to post new topics. I've already cited an example where separating bodywork from electrical would pose problems for members trying to determine where to post new topics.

I can't see how to break this forum down any further withour creating problems, but I'm open too any ideas that I might not be thinking of.

take care,

George