To the moderator of this forum:I am from Brasil. I have many problems with my MRC Prodigy Wireless DCC. Considering that the Electronics and DCC Forum is very vast, with almost 140,000 posts ("a crazy thing"), I have a suggestion to make it easier to search by topic related to one certain problem: would it be possible to create subforums or subcategories? For example: General Electronics; DCC. And within this last category: Digitrax; Lenz; MRC; NCE; Bachmann, etc?
And even if it's "only" 13,500+ threads? Thanks.
It's not going to happen. The software that runs this forum is old and broken.
In many ways, it is a miracle that this forum is still up and running given the state of disrepair that the software exhibits.
Rich
Alton Junction
In my opinion, part of what you actually need might be included in 'community search' because its "search semantics" are properly designed in an important respect: that only results with ALL the sorting terms in a query are returned (paradoxically giving the effect of a mutual OR in logic). In many systems making longer queries with more terms pulls every thread with any one of the words in it, requiring you to slog through a ridiculous number of threads, often with only 20 or so results displayed at a time. That is not true of the revived 'community search', or was the last time I used it.
What I recommend is that you incorporate multiple relevant search terms in a query, then follow up by reading other posts in the thread(s) that pop up so that you can refine your query with more terms.
It was explained to me that when Kalmbach set up these forums, they wanted to avoid the issues on Certain Other Forums, where there are a great number of specific interest subforums to wade through. I have thought a number of times that Kalmbach could, and should, have amended some of the blanket categories or provided subforums within particular topics, but that was not done in any of the extensive 'site upgrades' so far, and I increasingly doubt, a bit like Tom Lehrer's Christian Scientist with appendicitis, that the supposed 'stage three' rebirth of the 'forum experience' is even a distant priority at Kalmbach Media... aside from more, and more intrusive, implementation of as many ad 'opportunities' as can be obtruded.
[Mod(s): you might consider moving this post to General Discussion, or duplicating it there, as it applies to more divisions than just DCC and electronics.]