ERT Premise

[COBOLdinosaur]

I guess my above post shut everyone up =o(

It is not a Q and A site.  The forums are geared to broad discussion.  That means they go off topic and explore.  Most of us have too much respect for you and your skills to respond negatively to your comment.  

If a regular user made that comment it would probably be point out to them that there does not seem to be a program to do what you specifically want, and exploring the alternatives is the best course, and may even lead to someone stumbling on to a program that does what you want, but Google has never heard of it.

Of course, if we had a nasty dinosaur, they would probably respond that if you want quick Q and A there are other sites that give quick answers and don't care if your problem is solved, but the will nag you to award points, rate the answer, or whatever else they do to proclaim success.

[Esopo]

I guess my above post shut everyone up =o(

In my case I just don't have anything else to contribute. Regex has never been my strength and the few regex editors I have tried do not have what you are interested in.

[VGR]

It is not a Q and A site.  The forums are geared to broad discussion.  That means they go off topic and explore.  

[...]

there are other sites that give quick answers and don't care if your problem is solved, but the will nag you to award points, rate the answer, or whatever else they do to proclaim success.

targetting one or two sites in particular ? ;)

As far as www.europeanexperts.org is concerned, it IS a Q&A site but with the same "broad discussion, expand and explore" attitude BECAUSE we want your problem to be solved ;)
(to be honest, I think the best benevolent "experts" of EE.com also have this attitude)

When the Question doesn't get any more suggestions, it's probably time to close it by choosing the person(s) that helped you the most, and if nobody helped you there is always the possibility of setting the answer to a "poor" rating.

After all, setting "the" answer(s) is a way to reward the "expert" that helped you the most, of course, but also and mainly to allow newcomers to quickly see what is ought to be the "best" answer. All the site is driven towards efficiency.

I don't think we "nag" our users, but it's only my opinion of course.

[COBOLdinosaur]

Don't get me wrong.  There is nothing wrong with Q and A or a reward based approach.  It is just that ERT has a different approach.  Virtually all forums and Q and A are aimed at building a  knowledge base of "answers".  

ERT is aimed at using forum content as raw material to build articles and tutorials.  Old topics with value information will get incorporated in that kind of content.  Info that might have some later value may get archived but most of the worthless stuff will just get deleted.

So when someone is looking for information instead of searching through hundreds of topics and getting small pieces here and there, they will be able to search on articles and get a single source where all the information is together in a well organized form, with links to related articles, and other content (both onsite and off site).

[VGR]

it's an original idea :)

And based on which criteria will a thread be considered as a future article ?

For the moment, there are not a lot of article, and I also think they should be arranged not by "title, author, description" but with keywords or categories [like the forum topics, in fact :D hence my probable confusion about Q&A/not Q&A]

an other note : if the forum contents that don't make it to an article is considered crappy and incomplete ("searching through hundreds of topics and getting small pieces here and there"), is it worth keeping the current layout of the forum ? Why not simply make one topic, "future articles", and let the mentors & users discute one subject or the other until they reach an agreement = article ?

[nicholassolutions]

I have a suggestion. I agree that ERT should not suffer from "If you don't have an 'answer' stay out of my question" mentality. That's not the issue though -- the issue is organization of information. When new topics arise as the result of an ongoing discussion, it makes sense to create a new  thread(s) in which the separate issue(s) can be discussed at length, e.g. http://www.expertsrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=444#4264

Ideally, this will produce two (or more) distinct and useful articles, which can be easily produced because each thread is linear and well focused. While articles could be equally  well produced by sorting through a thread which is not forked into separate topics, it is much more difficult to sort through the information this way. What is more, in most nonlinear "rambling" threads, it is often the case that an interesting issue comes up and is not completely discussed before the thread is again "hijacked" by another idea. In this sense, discussion is actually stifled by not limiting the acceptable range of ideas to discuss within a given thread.

Obviously, this requires that the moderators of each topic area pay close enough attention to the topics to know when a split is needed (and/or that regular members notify them when they think it is necessary), while keeping their hands off enough that topics are not frequently shattered into a thousand pieces. That requires (a) expertise of the moderators in their TAs and (b) maturity and insight. I think we have enough of both of those for this to work.

[COBOLdinosaur]

The basis of the idea for ERT is the original Greek University model. The basic principles are:

• An individual can both teach and learn at the same time
• Freedom of speech and expression
• Ideas are meant to be challenged, examined and improved upon
• The objective is expansion of knowledge, which may of not produce answers
• There is no artificial ranking.  Ones standing is the sum of peer respect.
• Nothing that is a natural progression of a dicussion or debate is off topic.
• Many stream of thought can evolve from a single query, idea, proposal.

My interetation based on examination and anylysis of the model; not necessarily a strict academic description of the educational model. We have the advantage that we don't need scribes, because we have a database.

We are still learning how to invent ERT.  The Wright Brothers crashed a lot of times both before and after the first flight.  They knew they had the right basic design, but it needed tweaking and there were no flight simulators or veteran pilots to learn from.  They had to invent pilots as part of the project, and we have to invent Mentors as part of ERT.

Right now we look like a lot of other forums because we used off the shelf software that gave us the basic functionality and DB support we needed to get started.  As we proceed the forum will start to look less conventional and the functionality designed for Q&A will gradually change and evolve into the functionality we need to help information flow as a stream.

One of the reason I am spending so much time on getting the custom RSS to work the way I want it, is becasue that same code will be the basis of a set of editing tools that will let us extract, aggregate, and format comments based on common themes rather than location; and put them into templates ready for final editing and presentation.  I travel very widly on the Internet especially on sites that are information sources and sites with forums.  I have not seen anyone else doing RSS feds with the detail level of control that we are going to have.  A lot of it will be made available for anyone who wants ERT on their Web Site and that is good for us, and them.

Consider Rod has a hit counter on the articles he supplied for the site.  I was looking at them this morning.  One of them had only about 40 hits when he put it up 6 weeks and now it is up in the 240-250 range.  That is not millions of hits, but it is 5 or 6 people a day being exposed to a page that has no direct promotion and probably not more than a couple of external links. Matt's articles, my articles and the re-directs from my EE links to my old site are at the top of the list of pages drawing traffic outside the forum, Darkin's article, and the series from Coral get good action.  It is difficult to get a reading on Batalf's because of the way we have it set up but I suspect his are also active.

So the strategy of promoting the site through content works, and any Mentor who want exposure for themselves their site or their business, does not need banner ads; they acna get quality exposure just by being part of the crazy experiment.  We are getting thousands of uniques visitors a month, but we are struggling to find a way to get some of them to register.  When I took a look at us on Alexa they say our page reads are 19.  That is the average number of pages a user is looking at during a session. That is really high.  I don't think I have ever seen EE over 4.  That has to mean the users like our stuff.  We now know that the search engines like us.  We have a PR of 3; Google results pages are showing as the referrer for 20-30 hits a day, and in the last several days we are also seeing 4 or 5 a day from MSN.  Those numbers are going to go up because we have done less than 10% of what we can do for SEO.

When we started this thing in September, I did not know if enough experts would understand it for it to live.  Now I know I am not the only one that likes the concept and with a little exposure good experts get right into it.  That is the key.  Mentors just making themselves available.  The rest is just chemistry.  Put 4 or 5 intelligent people together in a topic and seed it with a query, or idea and sometimes you get gold.

Right now Mentors have the tools to split off comments and move comments, but they are still getting comfortable with the role.  The questions how, when, why to use the tools are not yet answered; but they will be.  I expect that the free format will result in us producing content in response to need instead of putting stuff out on the site and then trying to find an audience for it.

Google evolved.  Yahoo evolved.  Amazon evolved. Most good sites evolved, or the only place you will find them is in the archives of the wayback machine.

I haven't got a clue if this is off topic, but it does not matter, I just needed a place to post my thoughts, and I hate blogs.

Cd&

[Huntress]

[subject split and moved to "Soapbox"]

[coral1]

[subject split and moved to "Soapbox"]

Well, that explains Cd&'s non-sequitur first post.

the series from Coral get good action

OH! The pressure. I can't deal with that kind of pressure.   :sad3:
That reminds me; I have might have another question about linking pics in the articles, but I want to see if I can figure it out myself, first.   :scratch:

[COBOLdinosaur]

I want to see if I can figure it out myself, first.

You better.  Otherwise we would have to treat it as homework [-(

Posting homework means you get spanked by Sandi.

 :sign5:

[Huntress]

Posting homework means you get spanked by Sandi.

The only one allowed to help with homework around here is me damnit!  Oh wait, that's ony at home.  Nevermind, go back to what you were doing.   :wink:

[coral1]

you get spanked by Sandi

Uhhhh.... that would be an incentive, NOT a deterrent.  :-$

Got most of it figured out. Still working on the class="imgFright"-"imgFleft" part of the IMG SCR=name tag. Heading back to the link you gave me awhile back, to do some more reading.    :thumbup:

[COBOLdinosaur]

It sounds to me like you are haveing too much fun learning that  stuff.   :-$

[coral1]

I wouldn't say I was learning it. :sad3:
But a working understanding, lets me 'kind of' keep up with the chit-chat around here.  :-$