If we come up with a list, I'll be happy to make the changes. HOWEVER - this will be a somewhat major restructuring effort. What will make it difficult is not my changing the forums structure in and of its self, it will involve moving existing threads to appropriate forums. For example, currently Six Sigma is part of the Statistical Techniques forum. If I split these two off, or if I split the current forum up into more than two forums - say Six Sigma, General Statistical Techniques and Process Capability - I have to go through the existing forum and 'Move' all relevant threads to the appropriate forum one at a time. Basically you have to go to each post where the title indicates it's a 'Move Candidate', you have to open that thread (as you do to read it), verify it should be moved (as opposed to retitled), use the Thread Tools dropdown (moderators have access to the Move item so I'd have to give volunteers {see below} special access for at least a day) to actually move the thread, and navigate back to the forum they were in (or if searching do another search) to find the next thread to move. I mention this because I want to make sure everyone knows that this is not a simple and quick process - especially when splitting a forum as opposed to adding a new forum. It typically takes 1 to 3 minutes to find and move a thread and get back to where you started.
But even adding a new forum, a couple of the current 'catch all' forums would have to be looked through for relevant posts. For example, if we put in a 'Lean' forum, someone would have to do searches for 'lean' to find relevant threads and then move those threads to the new forum.
Statistical Techniques and Six Sigma, for example, has over 3,288 posts. Only 1 person at a time per forum should be moving posts in a mass move like this, unless we divided it up by date ranges per person, so that would probably take a couple of days.
So we have 2 issues:
1. Coming up with the specific categories we want without going over board and trying to make up a list of 100 super-specific groups. Six sigma is currently grouped with Statistical Techniques. There are a lot of different statistical techniques - do we also want to split off, for example, Capability (process, machine, etc.)?
2. Volunteer list. Please don't volunteer unless you want to put in a serious day.
The 'Cons':
1. Too time consuming for me alone to move all posts, so several volunteers would be needed.
2. The list of forums on the main page is already several pages long. If I print out the main forums listing page right now it's six pages. I mention this because I want to make sure we don't go over board on specific divisions. I have mixed feelings about more forums from the perspective of keeping confusion to a minimum and relevancy. For example, I set up a forum a few years back for someone who wanted a forum on Vehicle Computer Firmware or something similar which ended up with only 3 or 4 threads. I finally merged threads in it into another forum.
The 'Pros'
1. Better discrimination for 'specialties' making searches easier and keeping a localized focus.
That said, please let me know in this thread if any of you would be willing to spend a saturday or sunday (or a saturday and a sunday...) helping me move threads to the appropriate categories. I can make changes to the forum structure on a friday night and then on saturday and sunday we can move threads. The best I can liken this to is an Amish Barn Building where the community gets together and builds a barn. Almost sounds like work, doesn't it!?!
The current forum categories are:
https://elsmar.com/elsmarqualityforum/statistik.php?do=popularforum_popup
