common question forum

I was thinking about this, you have managed to create so many forums about various things yet there is no way of keeping track of whether a question has been asked previously or not. The search feature on this site dosnt seem to be that good.

I wondered if there is a posibility of creating a new forum somewhere on Ozzu which would allow all the questions that are often asked many times could be placed. This should cut down on the amount of questions being repeated. I have noticed quite alot of times Moderators leaving messages saying something like "search for questions before you post them, it may have been answered previously" which is fine enough. If there was a seperate forum for questions like this then people could just have a look here and see the question as the topic title and then the answer as it was answered originally.

Just a thought.

A lot of people don't bother to look, so you'd still get a lot of the same posts.

I know its something i would look at. Just a thought.

indeed, and the search works very well actually. Both the google and the regular phpbb searches do well for finding posts within just a few keywords.

Wow, I never knew there was an Ozzu-specific Google search.

I am gonna have to disagree. I am not that big a fan of the Ozzu PHPBB search, it dosnt seem to search anything i put in. Maybe it is just certain things i try and put in.

Anyway, i thought i would see what everyone thought. Seems like a fine idea.

as moderators, we search and find threads every day. we don't seem to have a problem with it, maybe you just aren't using the proper keywords. To answer your question a little more directly, it's not going to happen for a lot of reasons. Most notably that the topic would be out of category, and wouldn't do anyone that bit of good. Besides, that's what we have moderators here for, to help curb the duplicate topics. We do a fine job, and have no intention of slacking. Doing a forum like that would also be a lot of extra admin for us; something we're not really open for at this time.

I'm going to agree with UNFLUX on this one, I think the search function is as good as it can be for a forum people run in their spare time. If people (and I'm not excluding myself here) were better at spelling and/or typing then it would work perfectly...

For example SB, just on this thread alone... gonna, dosnt (twice!), posibility, seperate?

Of course it is much more apparent when the actual subject or topic of the thread is not spelled correctly, e.g. here are some mis-spellings of search terms people might usually try...

HMTL - 4 matches!
seacrh - 1 match!
searhc - 2 matches!
tempalte - 1 match!
incldues - 1 match!
anlysis - 2 matches!
protytypes - 1 match!
indexig - 1 match!
hostign - 1 match!
proxi - 2 matches!
proxie - 6 matches!

Yeah, i can see where you are all coming from.

I am not a huge fan of the search feature as i dont think it finds what i want sometimes. Its not really important though.

I just thought i would suggest this and see what the feedback was.

Thanks for getting back to me everyone.

we really appreciate the suggestions, don't get it wrong. But we do talk about a lot of these things in our Moderator forum before anyone else even suggests it.