The problem I have with having message categories is the following:

1. A question or discussion can easily cover multiple categories so I don't think it's reasonable to have a message assigned only one category. They'd have to be allowed to select multiple categories.

2. In reality each message would have to be assigned categories because if a single question can touch on multiple categories, it's possible that subsequent replies could touch on one or the other--or touch a category that wasn't originally at issue. Forcing users to category every message sounds like a bit of a pain.

3. If someone categorizes a message wrong then it potentially makes it even harder to find it if someone restricts their search based on categories.

4. The only use for categories would be to make it easier to subsequently search the site by designing the search facility to allow the user to specify the categories to search. The problem with this is that it depends on messages being properly categorized. We also have the issue that we have about 10 years/140,000+ messages already in the system without any categorization. This severely would limit any potential benefit of the categorization system even if we implement it now. The only alternative would be to have teams of volunteers to go little by little through the old messages and give them categories. Sounds tedious and boring. If we have teams of people willing to do tedious work, I'd be much more interested in having them help enter data for an up-to-date device/part database.

What I can assure everyone is that the 8052.com search facility will be much more useful in the new system. It won't find partial word entries (i.e. searching for "for" will not return words that contain "forth"). There will also be an optional date range limitation. So while the categories would be even better if we had good categorization of all messages, I'm hopeful that even without it the search facility will be adequate to find things that people are looking for.

I'm also trying to come up with ideas to make the search find more relevant responses. I'm thinking (feedback welcome!) that when a user searches for terms, the search will provide a list of threads that have messages that contain those terms. When the thread list is provided, clicking on the thread will take the user to that thread; but there will also be an "expand" button for each thread that, when clicked, will expand to show a list of all the messages in that thread that contain the term--and maybe the sentence containing the search time. By displaying initially a list of threads we don't immediately produce 800 results for a simple search term. By allowing them to expand each thread returned and see a sentence of each relevant post within that thread, we allow users to drill down into the search results a little more easily.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster