markjenn said:
That's sorta my original point - the idea of make-specific forums should be mainly to share information specific to that make of motorcycle. Presumably, that is the reason people come here, not to discuss wines, scuba diving, or ham radio. Now certainly, trail riding is something that is somewhat in the S10's balliwick, but OTOH, it is even more in the balliwick of sites like advrider. The two sites are completely synergistic with folks going to advrider for information related to the general subject of adventure riding and this forum for things related to the Super Tenere and adventure riding with the Super Tenere. In the end, I don't think there is anything that distinguishes a S10 trail map from a GS trail map or a Tiger trail map.
As to the complaint that sites like advrider are "too big", I think this is something that goes away once you've learned your way around. Yes, it's big, but it also has a good search engine, a pretty nice organization of topics, good tools to find what you need, snappy performance for its gargantuan size, good admins, and a LOT of quality submissions. Having most of the drivel confined to a separate area where most anything is allowed ("Jo momma") helps keep the noise level down in the main forums. It's an incredible resource and we're lucky to have it. If you're getting all your information on this forum, then yes, you have less to keep track of, but you're also missing a ton of good stuff. And when it comes to databases of information like maps/routes, bigger is better - would you rather go to someplace that has 300 suggestions for routes to ride in a given area or 3?
All this being said, I certainly have nothing against additional information on this site too. To the admins here, knock yourself out. I just don't think it would end up contributing to the focus of this site, nor would it be very widely used.
- Mark
Mark, even though you're a self-proclaimed "old curmudgeon" (and you are
), I value your thoughts because your wisdom is obvious. However, in this case I have to disagree with some (not all) of your reasoning.
I work in Information Technology, specifically analytical systems. I am all about data, how to capture it, organize it, and make it usable for various purposes. ADV does about a good of a job as it can with the tools that is has available, but it has not extended its tool set beyond what is available in VBulletin (the software it runs). Your comment about it not being "too big" once you've "learned your way around" has some creditability, yet is a very subjective statement. Let's take an example, say I want to find a list of trail maps (GPS Tracks) that are in Pennsylvania, since I happen to live in Pennsylvania. I do the following:
1. Go to "Layin' Down Tracks" (this is the trails board, right?)
2. I see a bunch of sub-boards. I see two options that seem interesting, "GPS Tracks East" and "GPS Tracks North". Hmmm, PA is generally considered to be Northeast, which has no option. Let's try "GPS Tracks East"
3. I end up at a standard board listing of topics ("threads" in VBulletin lingo) Where to now? I see some threads about "PA", some about "Pennsylvania", others seem unrelated, but *might* have what I'm looking for.
4. I know, how about I use the "Search this Forum" tool? So I click that, and type in "PA" as my search term.
5. ADV responds with the message "D'oh... Our sucky search engine couldn't handle that term. Got Google?"
I think I can stop here, hopefully I've made my point, and if I haven't, it's this: that ADV has all the data, but the organization is simply not ideal. Sure, if you feel like wandering around the GPS forums for hours or days, you can come up with the info you're looking for, but why must it be that hard?
Here, I hope to utilize my Database tool, where I can do something like the following:
1. Define a category - "Trails" (or something similar)
2. Define columns such as "State", "Starting Lattitude", "Starting Longitude"," Ending Lattitude", "Ending Longitude", "Google Map Link", and maybe "Forum Topic Link"
3. This would allow organization/catagorization of the trail data, so that if you go into *my* database, you can sort, search, and filter by "State" to get to what you want to fast.
The whole concept of the database is extremely synergistic with the forum itself. The forum is where the initial data is collected and shared, and the database goes one step further in cataloging it and making it usable by others. I've already applied this paradigm here with my "How-To" database, where I'm putting a record in every time I create a new "how-to" thread for various forum activities.
I guess at the end of the day the question still remains as to why do this here, why not just do it on ADV? Well, I'm not an administrator of ADV, I am an administrator here. For now, this is my hobby and I like doing it, and if I want to dedicate my time to implement these suggestions then it is indeed my prerogative, and I'll surely "knock myself out." I fully expect some of the things I implement to be fantastic failures, but some will also be fantastic successes, and those are what matter.
