Hi,
I know TNation coaches need place to post their stuff and whatnot, but cant articles be articles and forum be forum? For a while now, i get 5-10 new topic messages a day and i am having trouble going through them to know which ones are just, i am sorry, but it is sort of “spam” and which ones are actually made by people who want to talk.
Also, keep in mind the idea of how it looks for new members who come in and just look at archive and want to see if their question is answered, but they have to dig through 100 topics that are in a format of an article, and has no discussion. And yes, those 5-10 articles a day never have a discussion, and even if you try to start one, the authors do not even participate, which leads me to think they just use this place to post and post some more, never even looking back at what they posted ever again.
There are 2 buttons here - Articles and Community. I think that if an author doesnt care to chat with everyone every day, dont post it in community.
There was a similar problem a while ago when 1 coach did this daily. Then it stopped after some complaints, but now its even worse because now its every coach doing this.
p.s - everyone who agrees should post something here, so the admins of TNation see that its not just 1 person who is annoyed by forum becoming a dumpster for articles.
This is different from that. That coach was creating stuff every day and filling up the forums. What’s happening at the moment is of no fault of the coach at all. It seems like old articles are either getting converted to the forum style of article by someone/something triggering it, or some error in the overall conversion is having them show up as a recently made post despite the date of the original article. Many of these articles aren’t actually new, I’ve seen some go as far back as 2016/17.
I actually think linking the articles to the forums is a great idea from an interaction perspective, even if the article writer themselves doesn’t join in. Encouraging discussion can only ever be a good thing. BUT, I agree with you in that the way it’s been done appears very bodged at the moment and is somewhat annoying.
The problem lies in the articles using the exact same categories as the forums, an off-topic article is in the same place in the database as a thread that’s been created in the off-topic section in the forums. The only difference between them is the “article” tag.
Now, the bigger problem is T-Nation has such a wealth of content from so far back that there’s a ton of bloat in the database that’s hard to work with. They should have left all older articles to be as they were and had only the new articles appear in this way. An “Articles” CATEGORY in the forum with the tags then within them, a new way of storing new articles. Only articles that were actually new would be shown then (which happens just once every few days). For those that it annoys (which I don’t see it would because it would then be so infrequent), it should be quite straightforward to make it not show on their recent posts.
I’ve been a T-Nation reader because I appreciated the new knowledge, new science, and evolution of thought. Just regurtating bloat puts the brakes on that.
I do miss the random article button, which accomplishes the same thing.
I’m being forced to watch some awful romance movie, but had an idea based on my earlier comment. What if “article threads” were done instead?
The evolution of fish oil. The changes in meal strategy. Different coaches workouts in different stages of life. Why tnation decided to stop certian supps. The concurrance of Trt and steroid articles. Whatever else.
Dont give one article, give me a thread. I’d go down that rabbit hole.
@cdep89 I think the “category” idea is an interesting one. I miss the old “livespill” feature where coaches could interact on their articles. Posting them in the forums accomplishes that, but I can see the confusion for some of the articles that are older as they move over. I think a category could be a potentially friendly solve. It would be cool to hear from a newer member if they’re overwhelmed by the number of categories.
@Brant_Drake are you saying you’d have one thread and all the articles are posts within it? It would certainly be entertaining, but I don’t know that we’d be able to interact. I know we’re probably not getting into deep discussions some of the older stuff, but I’ve learned a ton recently from some of the conversations in @TC_Luoma’s recent articles in particular.
I was envisioning something that was almost a meta-article, in chronological order from the content to pull from, but all on the same subject. All of the articles on vitamin d in one place, or creatine, or strongman training, whatever the connecting thread would be.
I normally spend time in supps and nutrition, but the current top 15 posts are older articles. It’s fun to re-read, but I’d rather be able to find it when I want to.
I like seeing the old articles in the new format since it allows more interaction, but not all at once. Maybe just spread them out a bit more. And same thing with stuff like what’s going on right now with all the posts about products Biotest makes.
All the popular articles in the archives and new articles are being converted to “forum based” content because the interaction is easier and better, editing is easier, and it serves up better to search engines (keeping us in business, which is handy). It’ll be mildly annoying for a bit as the archives are moved over, then it’ll be finished.
Yea, i understand there is some reason WHY you do that, but we are asking for a fix because for months, forum is unusable. So, can you, at least, remove notifications about “new topics” that are not forum topics? Like, the most problem is that sometimes i see 20 notifications and it is super hard to know which topics are real and made by people who wanna talk, and which ones are just you doing your stuff.
Who knew something in US works just as dumb as politics in eastern countries lol. Someone “up there” has a brainfart, fucks up everything for everyone and fixing is not possible
I mean, why would the author of this idea wouldnt think that bombarding users with 3000 notifications through out the year would be a crappy idea, huh
For the record, authors have no control over the articles that are getting shifted over to the new system. They don’t even know about it until they’re notified of someone’s comment at the bottom.