I've noticed a lot of surveying-related posts lately getting posted in the "General Non-Surveying" category, which is the default category. To get maximum visibility, please post your posts in the appropriate categories.
Why is this so important?
Surveying-related posts that are categorized properly will:
- be seen by unregistered and non-logged-in users. This can encourage them to register and/or login so that they can help you and/or respond to your post.
- automatically feed to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, encouraging unregistered and non-logged-in users to register and/or login to help you or respond to your post.
- automatically be added to the site's RSS feed, so anyone following the feed will be notified of your new post.
- be indexed by Google and other search engines, increasing the visibility of your post and encouraging people to login and respond to it.
- cause posts that are placed in the Employment and Buy/Sell/Trade categories to allow more people to see your job announcement, item you are selling, etc.
- help those looking for posts in a specific category to also see your posts.
Of course, proper categorization helps us too, because we get more traffic and more registered users, which encourages advertising. Proper categorization helps us all.
🙂
Wendell, you sure the category-picker is working right with all browsers/ javascript on or off, etc.? I made my for-sale post yesterday and it apparently wound up in some other category and got moved... I distinctly picked the right category before posting so that was a surprise...
Good grief!!
Are you telling me things I say here are also appearing in other social media? I'll need to be very careful with what I say in my posts. :-O
The real fix for this is to NOT have ANY default pre-selected.
Make the user select one.
The default for the cat drop-down should be "--select a category--" with no value behind it.
I'm suprised you've never seen this before.
Just my 0.02 quid. 😀
I agree with Eric. That forces a choice. Sometimes I post in the generic category by accident because I forgot to change it to Surveying. Wouldn't take any more time for us end users.
What happens when we post in that generic category intentionally, because we only want it to appear here? Will it stay there?
jud
Yes Jud. "Generic" has a value behind it. If you purposely select that, it should stay. Having it be a default with a value is not right IMHO. Having the "select one" with no value, combined with a little check behind the scenes that requires a value be selected solves the problem.
Like Deral, I to have had posts go where I did not want them.
Typically with any website, particularly discussion forums, anything you post is open to the public and available for indexing by search engines. In our case, I have only surveying-related posts open to the public because we want to attract surveyors, which means higher quality traffic.
Let's say we opened up P&R to the public -- we would likely see a surge of traffic related to politics. But we don't want that. We want surveyors. Sure, traffic is great and certainly we could open all categories to everyone and get more traffic. But I would rather have quality traffic as opposed to quantity traffic. This is good for all of us, as we know that we are speaking to fellow professionals and those who might otherwise specifically seek out surveying.
> Typically with any website, particularly discussion forums, anything you post is open to the public and available for indexing by search engines. In our case, I have only surveying-related posts open to the public because we want to attract surveyors, which means higher quality traffic.
>
> Let's say we opened up P&R to the public -- we would likely see a surge of traffic related to politics. But we don't want that. We want surveyors. Sure, traffic is great and certainly we could open all categories to everyone and get more traffic. But I would rather have quality traffic as opposed to quantity traffic. This is good for all of us, as we know that we are speaking to fellow professionals and those who might otherwise specifically seek out surveying.
Wendell, you are correct. We have enough Bozos, including me, on this site. We don't need anymore posting here.:-)
Title Posts for Maximum Utility
And since we're making suggestions, put an accurate, brief and clear (ABC) phrase in the Subject box -- to help everyone know whether to click-and-read or not.
OK, I Am Dumb, What Is An ''ABC'' Phrase?
Perplexed Paul in PA
ABC = accurate, brief, clear
I just made it up -- nobody's dumb.
Title Posts for Maximum Utility
Nice suggestion.
"How to edit points Copan" is far better than "HELP!". 😉
Quite possible there could be an error or incompatibility.
I've often noticed in many web forms that if I just made a selection in a dropdown then try to scroll down with my mouse wheel, it will scroll the dropdown list instead of the page. Not sure if that's an issue here though.
No Wendell. It's no incompatability issue.
It works the same on the other 3 or 4 Microsoft-hating browsers I use for testing as well.
It's a simple matter of user interface.
If the focus is on the drop down, scrolling the wheel affects the drop down.
Just click somehwere on the page outside the drop down and it loses focus and thus the page scrolls - as expected.
EDIT: On further review, it appears you don't have that problem. I have seen it before however. So, nevermind. 😉
ABC = accurate, brief, clear
so a woman gets on a bus and sits down and says T G I F, thank goodness it's friday
the man next to her says S H _ T, sorry honey, it's thursday
