It may be off the wall or not belong here

[JoshinMO]

It may be off the wall or not belong here, but I took a look and read a little in Our Information center and it's Great! Some types even have 2 topics which might seem unnecessary or overboard but that still may not be enough. WE were dealing with changes here, what was an upgrade at the time also which has likely helped The site though some People had trouble with The switch but it would sure be nice if They would come back. I imagine there was more than one but that is beside The point. I probably goofed up more than Anyone else but with The change some Photo's got mixed from topic to topic but Roger probably fixed everything by now. I remember Chase was making Topics in The information center left and right but Greg and Ray was making quite a few also, Charlie likely made many too though it's a bit out of My area heh. Likely many more I haven't mentioned (probably about a dozen altogether) but those are just a few that come to mind.

I focused on The Typology of MY Area mostly but might have put a bit into The Lithic's area also. Though I can't take credit for it really as I was just pasting Description's from Overstreet mainly. They had most of what I needed for this site and with the close Relation of Overstreet and Arrowheads.com (if not actually one?) and other Typology Sites might have been helpful to use additional Information but it could have been too much Info also. One type might have two names or vice versa. So it wasn't My own Studies but finding a Point that fit The description was a little task, Some Mine and Some Other's which I usually showed Appreciation and Thanks. But Some Other Member's have some real nice Addition's, many Personal Find's! That's what it's about here, obviously a Great Thing but it is also nice to slow down,think and try to understand Who made these Artifact's,when and where they come from. Most of The Information WE have has been documented by Archaeologist's for The last Century.

There is more I'd like to do in the Information Center but MY Account has been a bit of a basketcase, but I guess that's fitting lol. I can't post or edit there anymore.
Thank You for letting Me be A part of it and Thank's for The Time and Effort You put into it or The Reading You have done there and if You haven't seen it yet, take a peek if You get a chance.

[2ndoldman]

I wonder if it has anything to do with the sticky in each area.

[JoshinMO]

It might, not sure.

[2ndoldman]

If no one is monitoring the new submissions there, your new posts will never show.

[gregszybala]

Josh, you did some good work in the info section.
It is locked down, we were getting too many random posts from others who weren't really submitting the right info or even posts that were pertinent. I know Roger and myself at the least monitor the section and if you do place something in the section ready for post and one of us miss it, let us know. And please all if you have info to share, do it! The better for all of us.

[2ndoldman]

Thank you for the update Greg.

[chase]

Josh I consider you as a friend. The time spent was just great. you are what makes this forum. we got on this forum together, well almost. you have been a person that keeps me coming back. THANKS!

[painshill]

Josh, thanks very much for bringing this up and for your kind words about the Information Centre. I have taken the liberty of moving the thread and left a "divert" where you originally posted, which expires in 10 days.

Just to clarify on the “Information Centre”; when I first set this up (on the old forum), permissions were allocated as follows:

• The “root directory” of each main section of the Centre allowed any member to make a post there. As Greg said, we treated these root directories as “waiting rooms” containing proposed additions to the Centre which Administrators, Moderators and (in some cases) Mentors could review, edit and move.
• This was intended to prevent a “free for all” whereby the individual sections and subsections of the Centre became full of posts that didn’t meet the aspirations for the quality of information we intended to provide, which duplicated information already provided, were unhelpfully titled, or posted in the wrong place.
• Only those “senior” members with the appropriate permissions could then take those proposed entries out of the waiting rooms, edit them if necessary, and build them into the indexed structure of the Centre (or judge them inappropriate and delete them or move them out to the forum discussion areas).
• At the time we were testing data migrated to the new forum, it became clear that the existing permissions were not going to be recognised by the new software. We would have to set them up again from scratch. The new software has a completely different way of setting up permissions and it proved to be very complicated to try and get back to what we had previously. When I tried to set up the permissions for the Centre, there were unexpected consequences popping up in other places. As a precaution, I therefore simply set the entire Centre to “read only” for everyone apart from Administrators and Moderators.
• I advised at the time that we would need to re-set the permissions after the dust had settled but – for various reasons – it still isn’t restored to how it was previously. It needs to be, but it’s also quite a lot of work. The main issue is that the old forum allowed us to easily set permissions by forum section, whereas the new software forces us to set it by member status within each and every section. Essentially, it’s difficult to customize. Sometimes, the permissions of an individual member become over-ridden by general permission elsewhere, and vice-versa.

I made a commitment to Matt a while ago that I would not make any further changes to the permissions structure because of this complexity… but it does need to be restored to something similar to what we had previously and it won’t be easy.


However, I have an alternative suggestion. It would be very easy for me to create a new section on the forum with a title such as “Information Center – Proposed Submissions by Members”. The advantages would be as follows:

1. As a new section I wouldn’t have to worry about the complexity of the permissions structure. I could simply create that new section to inherit all of its permissions from the main forum. It would take me about two minutes to set it up.
2. All members would then be able to post information in that section which they think might be valuable additions to the Information Centre (but we would still make a plea that contributions were mindful of the quality we aspire to… it’s not just a bunch of links to Wikipedia or a picture gallery of nice finds... and avoid duplication).
3. The senior members with permissions in the information Centre could cherry-pick from the proposed submissions as before and build quality information into the correct sections of the Centre itself by editing and moving. The Centre itself would remain protected.

The disadvantage would be that all suggestions would be going into one place and not conveniently grouped by topic as before (however, that has an advantage for Admins & Mods in that they would only need to look in one place to review proposed submissions).


I have created a poll in a separate post for you to vote on this (linked below):

http://forums.arrowheads.com/forum/got-problems-or-suggestions-gc129/have-suggestions-for-categories-gc14/231952-information-centre-poll-to-cast-your-votes

[JoshinMO]

Thanks for putting thought into my ramblings Roger. I am OK with the info center being on lock or whatever for now but sometime it could benefit from some updating or additional material. Really I was just pointing out that there is some good study material in there for Anyone to learn more about these things we find and talk about and wanted to mention how some of us put a lot of time into it but obviously I forgot to mention some People who also put lot's of good info and artifact photos in there. It's like a giant native american artifact and history encyclopedia and People that want to learn about these things can definitely here at this site! Can't Thank You enough for fixing all the topics and pictures You have here so Thanks again.

[chase]

Roger...Thank you for all you do. I have benefited from you over the years and still hope that I can

[painshill]

Thanks Josh (and Chase).

One of reasons I took my foot off the gas pedal in the Information Centre is that I was keen to correct the post-migration errors, missing threads and posts before adding more stuff and making improvements. It took a loooong time to get it back to where we were. I treated the Information Centre as the priority (it’s now fully corrected) and then extended the work to the discussion parts of the forum, initially focussing on specific members whose posts had suffered the most.

To give you some idea of the scale of that work, in total there were 19,161 threads containing 138,279 posts at the time of the migration to the new forum (not counting the private/admin areas). To date I have verified or corrected just over half of that content. In total, so far, I have corrected 5,342 picture errors… and I’m still working to correct the remaining errors. But I only have so much time to devote to this.

It might be argued that it’s time to call it a day on corrections, but it goes against the grain for me to ignore errors. In some cases they’re obvious… a picture of someone’s cat where there ought to be a picture of a point… but the forum is still full of errors that would not be obvious to a novice seeking to learn. Posts talking about features of a particular style of point where the wrong point is shown for example. I find that kind of misinformation difficult to live with.