Hi MsMarieH,

Your points are valid, and I'll take them to our development team to mull on. I can say that multi-dimensional forums certainly go against the "norm" of your traditional bulletin board where a thread lives within a topic, and can only be in one topic. However, each take has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of our current implementation: There are many cases when a particular post will be applicable to more than one category, and with this style of forum/discussion, you don't have to choose or break the rules by posting your question or comment three times nor have to choose which is the most applicable. Discussions are created and tagged to the appropriate categories (obviously that implies the person creating the post tags it appropriately), making it easier to find and create discussions that interest you.

The obvious downside here is that when viewed from the forum index page (a traditional "bulletin board style" view for fourms) it looks a little bizarre if someone tags a thread to 5 categories. We don't do this to inflate thread/post counts... in fact, the forum index page didn't even exist when we took this approach to discussions (we only brought it back because people specifically asked for that view to return).

For the majority of our other websites, this system works quite well, particularly on the sites that have a large number of categories that can easily overlap each other. I will admit, given PrestoPlace's smaller number of categories, it certainly doesn't make quite as much sense. I still believe that multi-tagging discussions is a good thing, but we could probably set a more realistic limit than 5 (2 or 3 max would make more sense here).

Website development is always a work in progress, and I thank you for the valuable feedback. I'll present this discussion to the dev team and see if there's anything that could be done to tweak the system for our valued PrestoPlace members.

Thanks again,

Matt Whitlock
Community Network Manager - Capable Networks

Mind Over Matt'er - Technology musings, opinion, and more straight from TechLore's head geek.