A new advice board

[markinOz]

I am thinking again. My wife says I should stop as it scares her, an usually costs us money.

An idea I had is to have a separate advice board on this site. It is not easy sometimes to seperate the wheat from the chaff looking for specific advice. Also, quite often the same questions are asked repeatly. Not just by new members either. If you are looking for advice on a particular topic, it is not easy to find.

A specific number of categories would be picked to make it easier for people to search for various solutions. This would not be a discussion forum per see. The advice would not be debated in this part of the forum. If people wanted to debate the advice they would do so in the general forum or post their own advice. People could submit advice on a number of fixed topics.


Some could be;

How to deal with rain out.
Mouth taping.
Face rash.
Machine settings.
Dealing with the professionals.
APAP vs CPAP vs BiPap
Software

There obviously is more, however they list should be limited to the most requested advice.

Love to hear if people think this is worth proposing to our hosts or not an especially bright idea.

[kteague]

Mark,

This topic comes up about once a year, and usually results in a big list of the pros and cons. Maybe one of our great link resources will post a link to those threads. All the information under Our Collective Wisdom is a starting place for newbies. It would be difficult to state advice on so many subjects and say they are not debatable since much is opinion or personal experience.

Some will say your perspective on this is brilliant, others not so much. Sounds like you are by nature an organzier and problem solver. Nothing wrong with that. In this particular instance, it would cause more problems for me than it would fix. I can scroll faster than try to click and wait on a bunch of different categories. That lag time navigating within a site is a deal breaker for me.

Kathy

[Guest]

Hi Mark,

See the Our Collective Wisdom the yellow button.....lots of good solutions.


Mckooi

[tuna]

I thought this was an advice board! Along with a help board. I like it just the way it is..

[Goofproof]

I thought this was an advice board! Along with a help board. I like it just the way it is..

Pretty much how I think of it. "If it Ain't Broke, Don't Break It! The only thing I can see wrong is the crappy phpBB software, and I can live with that, if you can put up with my mis-spelling & typo's. Jim

[Perchancetodream]

My problem would be having to click a link to go to any sub-forums. The current format took me a while to get used to, but now I prefer it to a more organized one. Now I can just scan down the list of topics and pick those I feel I might be able to contribute to.

[crossfit]

I would say that this IS an advice board. If you need something specific, check the yellow lightbulb or the red question mark for the collective wisdom and FAQ's. Maybe we could update the collective wisdom periodically but I see no need for another board.

I have been on apap for 10 days and doing great thanks to the information on those parts of this site. Anything that wasn't there was answerable by people in this part of the forum. Then there is also help files on the cpap.com site that hosts us.

[danmc]

I felt like you do in the beginning Mark (not long ago in fact) but after a few weeks I had skimmed out the stuff I wanted and then its maybe easier to keep up with a single board than many. I guess it becomes less a resource than a chat board at some point, at least it has for me. Search is useful for separating the chaff.

I think that though we are all used to forums with admins and separate boards etc, I agree with others that it ain't broke enough to change it.

You could of course collate some material if you like to organise. I have stacks of web hosting etc around that is managed via cpanel so I can throw up a site for you to use if you want, I pay for it all in bulk anyway each year and it would only take me a few minutes so no big deal. More organisation at minimal cost is often worth it.

Whoever administers this board may even allocate some space to the effort, nothing wrong with adding and organising an extra service rather than replacing the working one in my book.

[markinOz]

I hate it when my wife is right. Let's just not tell her.

[danmc]

Haha.

[Goofproof]

I hate it when my wife is right. Let's just not tell her.

That's one area of DeNile is a good place to swim. jim

[gasparama]

Mark and Dan, it's a little funny reading your posts about forums with several thread categories.

Each day, this is the first forum that I read. After that, when I go to numbers 2 and 3, they are so irritating because I have to wade through all the thread categories and even have trouble deciding which ones to use for various comments and questions. Every day, I wish the others had the same format as CPAP talk and were as well organized.

Perhaps we are just, after all, creatures of habit.

Jane

[danmc]

I think Google have recently been talking about information soup and search rather than structure to organise data..it makes a lot of sense even though it goes against what we feel is right.

I guess this forum is bit like cpap soup.

[Catnapper]

When I started here, I read every post, and learned that I didn't even know all the questions to ask. I started my share of newbie threads and kind people answered my specific questions. I love the way it is. You just never know what you will find in a thread, and it may have absolutely no relation to the title of the thread either. Just read them all and you will find out what you need and have some fun along the way.

There is so much to learn. If you just get an answer to one question you may decide you know all you need and go on your merry way, none the wiser for all the jewels you could find if you stayed longer.

Catnapper - Joanie

[jsmythe]

Mark,

This topic comes up about once a year, and usually results in a big list of the pros and cons. Maybe one of our great link resources will post a link to those threads. All the information under Our Collective Wisdom is a starting place for newbies. It would be difficult to state advice on so many subjects and say they are not debatable since much is opinion or personal experience.

Some will say your perspective on this is brilliant, others not so much. Sounds like you are by nature an organzier and problem solver. Nothing wrong with that. In this particular instance, it would cause more problems for me than it would fix. I can scroll faster than try to click and wait on a bunch of different categories. That lag time navigating within a site is a deal breaker for me.

Kathy

Very well spoken Kathy, I say " Ditto " to all that you said. It is a great idea Mark, but myself, like a lot of the others-for me it is more convenient to Click, rather than to search and sit and wait (I still have Dial-up )