TexasCHLforum.com

RoyGBiv wrote:Thanks, but I'm looking for "Ignore Topic"... as in.... When I pull up the active topics list, don't show me that thread at all..
It would be extra nice to have a feature for a blanket... "Don't show me any threads started by user ______ <name>"

Yeah, more like Facebook. As KC5AV pointed out, there is a user preferences setting to ignore specific users. I'm not sure how it will play with the Actlive and Recent blocks.

Is your concern similar to mine?
1st - When I land on the forum home page Recent Topics is dominated by the OT forum.
2nd - Because there are so many forums it is impractical to scroll down to see which have unread content and of those which have topics that interest me. So I rely on the Recent Topics block to show me what's going on. Repeat.

The problem isn't that there is too much cable news in OT. The problem is nobody else posts anything in that or any other forum. If they did, the Recent Topics would look much different.

There are members who really love this forum and clearly try to post something, anything that will spark dialog and keep the community alive. When the rest of the forum was more active the OT was diluted with other stuff. Now, not so much.

My suggestion, if anyone cares, take OT out of the Recent Topics and take everything but OT out of Active topics. It doesn't solve the traffic problem but it does make Recent Topics meaningful and useful again and the latest OT post will still appear too.

PS - if someone really went to work on meta data and SEO to get this forum aligned with "constitutional carry" and other search terms to try and capture some of those people it might generate some traffic... Please no new forums unless one goes away for every one added.

I feel like the downtime the forum experienced recently didn’t help the activity level.

DNS is still hosed somehow. About half the time when I land here I get a site not found error. Refreshing the browser almost always loads the site the second time unless it really is down.

As far as the domination of the front page by cable news topics... Easy fix. Someone with admin access can remove OT from the Recent Topics block. (I have no idea the purpose of the Active Topics block [same info as Recent Topics but you have to wait for it] but it is easy enough to ignore.)

Forums are dead and dying all over the place. This one is so segmented and over categorized that I don't even attempt to read below the Active Topics block. So nothing much to see here but stuff I already read on news sites.

So, Off Topic is not the problem IMHO. OT dominating the Recent Topics block is one problem with an easy solution. Perhaps remove OT from Recent Topics and leave it in Active Topics?