Brainstorming about Information Transfer

[marcusofcotton]

I loved watching Rob’s, currently Colby’s and I watched some of Ken’s.

Paul (Alaskabearhawk on here and youtube) has many good videos from the last 14 years!

[BravoGolf]

Jared Would it be possible to create a systems forum subsection? One for fuel, one for engines, one for EFI etc? Using the fuel system as an example. There have been many posts about fuel system design, fuel caps and venting but not in one location. It may be in the Bearhawk 4-place quickbuild or maybe the Patrol QB or Patrol Plans or the ever increasing General Discussion area. Much of the fuel system discussion is applicable to all models, but I may miss something in the 4-Place forums because I am focused on the Patrol.

A one stop location for fuel systems gives me the opportunity to see what may apply to my Patrol even thought the poster is writing about a Bearhawk 5. It would certainly reduce my frustration with the Google Search engine.

Scott

[jaredyates]

Jared Would it be possible to create a systems forum subsection? One for fuel, one for engines, one for EFI etc? Using the fuel system as an example. There have been many posts about fuel system design, fuel caps and venting but not in one location. It may be in the Bearhawk 4-place quickbuild or maybe the Patrol QB or Patrol Plans or the ever increasing General Discussion area. Much of the fuel system discussion is applicable to all models, but I may miss something in the 4-Place forums because I am focused on the Patrol.

A one stop location for fuel systems gives me the opportunity to see what may apply to my Patrol even thought the poster is writing about a Bearhawk 5. It would certainly reduce my frustration with the Google Search engine.

Scott

I think the better way to do this will be through tagging, rather than through trying to reorganize the channels. We can tag retroactively and still keep the threads where they are. One challenge about information is that there are several ways to need it, and only one way to sort it. If we were starting fresh, I'd be inclined to organize the channels differently, but we aren't, and we have quite an archive in the current taxonomy. I think good tagging will be even more useful, and easy to distribute the work. In the end we want to be able to find the answers from any number of different criteria.

Here is the section of the Vbulletin manual that talks about how the function works.

https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/thread_tagging

I haven't experimented with it yet, but we might need to have an elevated permission level for certain folks to add tags, which is probably the way we'd want it anyway. I can think of dozens of folks who would likely be appropriate for this kind of thing.

It is possible we can move away from the google search, or even that we will need to make more prominent the link to the original VB search. Back when we made the google search the default, we didn't keep any obvious links to the original, but it is still available for use. While the google search does have downsides, the native VB search was worse, at least back when we made the switch. The VB developers are always enhancing the software, and it may be that the native search is now better. Quality searching is an internet-wide problem these days, and while we can't change the world, hopefully we can make available the least bad option.

Perhaps the way it can end up is to have two search boxes, one for the native VB search engine and one for Google. Something that I'd love to find but haven't been able to spend the time on yet is a third party search that doesn't return results on off-site branding and URLs. Google used to have this option but discontinued it a few years ago as far as I can tell.

[kestrel]

I very much agree on tags. Many topics cut across different axes. Being able to apply multiple tags would be useful.

[jaredyates]

As of right now the limit should be 20 tags per thread, let me know if you are seeing something different or want more.

[jaredyates]

BravoGolf Scott and others, here is a brief tutorial on how to use tags:

https://bearhawkforums.com/forum/bearhawk-general-discussion-news/79639-post-tagging-and-searching-for-tags

In the process of making this post, I have also added a new link to the menu bar (Forums, Builder Map, New Topics, Today's Posts, etc) that says "Advanced Search". This is a link to the native "built in" vbulletin search engine. For conscientious objectors to Google like Bcone1381 you can use this link instead of the "Search" box to bypass Google all together. For now I'd like to keep both resources available because each will likely be helpful in shoring up the other's weaknesses.

As always, feedback is welcome especially complaints. I don't mind hearing what is frustrating about using the forum because it's the only way we can make things better. I can't promise that we can fix everything, but I'd rather have concerns on my radar than not.

[schu]

Jared,

As a systems engineer that does this type of work, I really dislike the idea of tags. The forum is already convoluted enough between safety information spread among various threads, spread among various sub forums, spread among various forums, frequently found in comments to posts that are posted out of order. Adding tags to this might help some, but for others that don't understand the concept of a tag or know which tag to search for, or know how how to categorize the content into tags this will just make it worse.

If it were up to me I'd disable comments and either leave the existing comments in place for find a way to convert them to posts so that the flow of information is linear instead of scattered, then I would try to find a way to make the forum for conversation only and place the operational and safety issues elsewhere.

I think http://bearhawksafety.com/ is a good start (thus making this post a response to the current thread, but also this thread) but only the official safety notices are there, not all of the other things found on the forum.

For example. The bearhawksafety.com site has information about shock strut changes, but doesn't have anything about poor fitting gas caps. There is mention about fuel systems here: http://bearhawksafety.com/4-place/august2020.html but that brief paragraph barely scratches the surface on the issues and how to understand if you have them or how to mitigate them. Can you imagine a new builder clicking that link and scratching their head?

My post tries to fill in this gap with user education, but that can't be called official documentation.

How can the forum be the source of information when the designer isn't even on it?

Add all of this up and I think the best way to solve all of these issues is to let the forum be for conversation but also post all of the other things that come up on bearhawksafety.com and let that serve as the service bulletin website, kind of like how Cessna had their service bulletins. In order for this to work you would need to post much more than the single paragraph or drawing that Bob provides. Every significant forum thread on safety should probably have a summary and consensus posted so that someone that doesn't have hours and days and weeks to keep up to date on the forum can go there and read about fuel caps and o-rings, how directional control effects fuel burn, what changes may be needed to the fuel system if you use EFI, how stainless rudder cables tend to wear out much faster than galvanized, etc. This means that either Bob will need to provide much more information and guidance, or the community needs to accept safety and operational notices from sources other than Bob.

How this fits in with everything else: I see bearhawk.tips as a builders resource on various ways to build the airplane, and the bearhawk newletter just that: a newsletter.

Ideally I can go to bearhawk.tips or builders manual or kit manual for building instructions, bearhawksafety.com to find the latest operational and safety information, and the forum to discuss with others new ideas, new safety concerns not vetted yet, or other information.

If the path to get safety information into the hands of others requires reading out of order (because of comments) forum posts that compete with the official documentation from the largely quiet (unless you call him) designer, then in my opinion we've lost. It's just too inefficient.

schu

[Utah-Jay]

Comments mess up the flow of information. I guess I have said it three times now

[jaredyates]

Thank you for your input as always. The tags aren't a requirement, just another tool that is available. We haven't removed any functionality by highlighting their function. Until more posts have tags, their function is limited, but there's only so much changing the world that we can do at once. It will be transitional for a time, with the length of time being related to the level of participation. Anyone can add tags, and tags only go on the first post of the discussion, so I'm hopeful folks will find it easy to help.

For comments, the disadvantage is that at the moment they aren't triggering bumps but the big advantage is that they can put a reply or follow-up right under the corresponding content. In other words I think they make the content much more linear rather than less linear. Imagine a case where someone (less-frequent visitor) comes to a thread where post number 21 needs follow-up, but the discussion has moved on and there are now 40 posts. The correcting user can quote post 21 in the creation of post 41, but future readers who may come to 21 may give up before they get to post 41 to find the follow-up that corrects 21. By using a comment, that correction can be housed immediately under 21 instead of who knows how far down. In more active forums, it may be tens or hundreds of posts down, and the result is anything but linear. I think because of that they do more good than harm, and I also hold out hope that the bumping issue will be resolved eventually (as advised by the developers), and I'm willing to wait. From the point of view of making a useful archive as opposed to real-time use, the comments are very useful from my perspective, all utility and no drawback. But as always it's ok for us to agree to disagree about this.

Your concern about there not being details about the fuel caps on the safety site, I agree, and that is what we are trying to solve in the safety system thread. The form is posted, but the results from submissions on the form are not, because naturally there aren't any submissions. They will be in some way once we get some, but the exact particulars are TBD depending on if/when we get any reports. I'm not in a position to retroactively distill and convert forum content from here to then post it there. I'm happy to provide support for someone else who might like to spend the time to do that. To me the forum is a great place to flesh out ideas with input from others, and while that does mean that there is a lot of input and some of it might not be as useful as others, it's a separate editorial task to then distill the best of those ideas into something singular and linear. The Beartracks is a great place for the results of that process, which is why I often reach out to encourage folks to write Beartracks articles to flesh out ideas that start here. The Beartracks does have a paid subscription, and generally speaking, I don't want to put safety information behind a pay wall. We have the capability at bearhawk.tips to make posts there public, and in some cases I do make the content available without needing to have a subscription. Until today, the safety site has been exclusively Bob's content, plus one update from Mark. The idea was to keep Bob's words separate from the discussions, which are easily supported by the tools here. But I'm definitely open to the idea of adding footnotes to Bob's udpates to link back to the forum or to Beartracks articles.

So concerning the transition problem of getting the safety things that we've already talked about here into the safety site, I'd propose the path of having someone write an article about the topic that distills the information, ideally for the Beartracks. The advantages of getting it out through the Beartracks channels are:
-Bob has put eyes on and approved everything in the newsletter.
-It goes out actively to 300+ subscribers, not requiring them to come visit the forum to get the update
-It ends up on bearhawk.tips and can be easily integrated into the KBM if applicable.
If we are dealing with a case where there is a disagreement between Bob and the author, then perhaps that particular topic isn't suitable for Beartracks, but we can still get it out there. I will say that these are extraordinarily rare. In the 10 years that we've been handling the Beartracks so far, I can only think of one case where Bob said "let's not put that in there" and it was a very major modification to the pitch system that fundamentally changed the way the tail went together. Much more often (but still rarely) he'll have some input that is usually quite minor and not substantial to the overall point of the piece. I can do some of this but honestly I get tired of hearing my own voice in the Beartracks and I'm sure subscribers do also.

If having someone write an article is "plan A", then "plan B" would be posting the a forum thread URL. Maybe we end up with a post on the safety site that says "there's some complexity to the fuel system, here are some threads that hash out venting, line routing, header tanks" etc with a link to a thread for each. To make this actionable, if you see a thread that is a good candidate for this, let's make a list. I'm going to need help with this.

As for getting Bob on the forum, I think of it this way... Back when he designed the Bearhawk he could have built one of them for himself, called it "done," and moved on to the next project, but thankfully he didn't, and instead put the design out there. Like every Bearhawk builder I've met, he has a variety of interests and far more amazing projects and ideas than hours to complete them. He's not interested in selling Bearhawk hats so he doesn't. He's not interested in spending time on a forum, so he doesn't. Incidentally, I don't think he likes spending time on computers, and doesn't type very fast, which is one of the reasons he prefers phone support. But I like to keep in mind all that he does do for us, and how much support he does provide, in the venues that he spends time. I've sat under the wing at events and heard him answer some of the dumbest questions as though it was the first time he'd ever heard them, knowing that it wasn't the first time because I had asked him the same dumb questions in 2008 and undoubtedly someone else did in 1995. His support is imperfect, but everything in the world is. We can't compare the status quo to the ideal, but rather the best available alternative. I don't for a moment lament his absence here, because I know the access and support that we get from him (on his terms) is perhaps unrivaled in this business.

[jaredyates]

Comments mess up the flow of information. I guess I have said it three times now

I know you keep saying it but I still don't understand, see my second paragraph in the post above. You might need to help me along a little on this. I can see how they pose a problem if you don't get notifications of them, but absent that, how are they not better rather than worse? By the way, this would have been a perfect candidate for a comment, but I want to make sure you see it.

[schu]

Thank you for your input as always. The tags aren't a requirement, just another tool that is available. We haven't removed any functionality by highlighting their function. Until more posts have tags, their function is limited, but there's only so much changing the world that we can do at once. It will be transitional for a time, with the length of time being related to the level of participation. Anyone can add tags, and tags only go on the first post of the discussion, so I'm hopeful folks will find it easy to help.

Believe me, I understand, but adding an additional tool even if it's not required, rarely helps. Platforms that have one way to do something but a good way to do it tend to have less issues than platforms that have 6 ways to do things. Adding onto the tar baby just makes a bigger tar baby.

For comments, the disadvantage is that at the moment they aren't triggering bumps but the big advantage is that they can put a reply or follow-up right under the corresponding content. In other words I think they make the content much more linear rather than less linear. Imagine a case where someone (less-frequent visitor) comes to a thread where post number 21 needs follow-up, but the discussion has moved on and there are now 40 posts. The correcting user can quote post 21 in the creation of post 41, but future readers who may come to 21 may give up before they get to post 41 to find the follow-up that corrects 21.

The problem is that the information appears out of order and you must reread the thread to get it all. A simple rule should be if the information isn't relevant enough to the rest of the thread to appear in order at the end, then start a new thread. What we end up with instead is threads inside of threads with the latest post in the subthread up the stack from the main thread all in the name of not cluttering up the original thread.

Your concern about there not being details about the fuel caps on the safety site, I agree, and that is what we are trying to solve in the safety system thread. The form is posted, but the results from submissions on the form are not, because naturally there aren't any submissions. They will be in some way once we get some, but the exact particulars are TBD depending on if/when we get any reports. I'm not in a position to retroactively distill and convert forum content from here to then post it there. I'm happy to provide support for someone else who might like to spend the time to do that. To me the forum is a great place to flesh out ideas with input from others, and while that does mean that there is a lot of input and some of it might not be as useful as others, it's a separate editorial task to then distill the best of those ideas into something singular and linear. The Beartracks is a great place for the results of that process, which is why I often reach out to encourage folks to write Beartracks articles to flesh out ideas that start here. The Beartracks does have a paid subscription, and generally speaking, I don't want to put safety information behind a pay wall. We have the capability at bearhawk.tips to make posts there public, and in some cases I do make the content available without needing to have a subscription. Until today, the safety site has been exclusively Bob's content, plus one update from Mark. The idea was to keep Bob's words separate from the discussions, which are easily supported by the tools here. But I'm definitely open to the idea of adding footnotes to Bob's udpates to link back to the forum or to Beartracks articles.

So concerning the transition problem of getting the safety things that we've already talked about here into the safety site, I'd propose the path of having someone write an article about the topic that distills the information, ideally for the Beartracks. The advantages of getting it out through the Beartracks channels are:
-Bob has put eyes on and approved everything in the newsletter.
-It goes out actively to 300+ subscribers, not requiring them to come visit the forum to get the update
-It ends up on bearhawk.tips and can be easily integrated into the KBM if applicable.
If we are dealing with a case where there is a disagreement between Bob and the author, then perhaps that particular topic isn't suitable for Beartracks, but we can still get it out there. I will say that these are extraordinarily rare. In the 10 years that we've been handling the Beartracks so far, I can only think of one case where Bob said "let's not put that in there" and it was a very major modification to the pitch system that fundamentally changed the way the tail went together. Much more often (but still rarely) he'll have some input that is usually quite minor and not substantial to the overall point of the piece. I can do some of this but honestly I get tired of hearing my own voice in the Beartracks and I'm sure subscribers do also.

If having someone write an article is "plan A", then "plan B" would be posting the a forum thread URL. Maybe we end up with a post on the safety site that says "there's some complexity to the fuel system, here are some threads that hash out venting, line routing, header tanks" etc with a link to a thread for each. To make this actionable, if you see a thread that is a good candidate for this, let's make a list. I'm going to need help with this.

As for getting Bob on the forum, I think of it this way... Back when he designed the Bearhawk he could have built one of them for himself, called it "done," and moved on to the next project, but thankfully he didn't, and instead put the design out there. Like every Bearhawk builder I've met, he has a variety of interests and far more amazing projects and ideas than hours to complete them. He's not interested in selling Bearhawk hats so he doesn't. He's not interested in spending time on a forum, so he doesn't. Incidentally, I don't think he likes spending time on computers, and doesn't type very fast, which is one of the reasons he prefers phone support. But I like to keep in mind all that he does do for us, and how much support he does provide, in the venues that he spends time. I've sat under the wing at events and heard him answer some of the dumbest questions as though it was the first time he'd ever heard them, knowing that it wasn't the first time because I had asked him the same dumb questions in 2008 and undoubtedly someone else did in 1995. His support is imperfect, but everything in the world is. We can't compare the status quo to the ideal, but rather the best available alternative. I don't for a moment lament his absence here, because I know the access and support that we get from him (on his terms) is perhaps unrivaled in this business.

I have no issue with Bob not being on the forum, what I have issue with is that the only source for official information is not on the forum which is viewed as the most significant source of information.

What I'm trying to communicate is that the information coming from Bob is sparse or in old beartracks or a phone call and it doesn't cover all of the issues. Because of this many other resources have come up to fill the gap such as your stuff or Eric Newtons stuff. The problem is that now there are 6 sources of information, none of them are complete, perhaps the least complete one is the most official one, and now we are adding more tools to the mix.

Honestly I don't have any expectation that it will get better, I'm only offering feedback, and that feedback is simply this: We need a single source of information for safety and operational data and it needs to be pretty complete and organized.

Thanks,
schu

[jaredyates]

I'm with you on consolidation generally being better, but unless we take on a programming staff, we have to work with off-the-shelf systems and their capabilities.

[schu]

For comments, the disadvantage is that at the moment they aren't triggering bumps but the big advantage is that they can put a reply or follow-up right under the corresponding content. In other words I think they make the content much more linear rather than less linear. Imagine a case where someone (less-frequent visitor) comes to a thread where post number 21 needs follow-up, but the discussion has moved on and there are now 40 posts. The correcting user can quote post 21 in the creation of post 41, but future readers who may come to 21 may give up before they get to post 41 to find the follow-up that corrects 21. By using a comment, that correction can be housed immediately under 21 instead of who knows how far down. In more active forums, it may be tens or hundreds of posts down, and the result is anything but linear. I think because of that they do more good than harm, and I also hold out hope that the bumping issue will be resolved eventually (as advised by the developers), and I'm willing to wait. From the point of view of making a useful archive as opposed to real-time use, the comments are very useful from my perspective, all utility and no drawback. But as always it's ok for us to agree to disagree about this.

I just had a great idea on how to deal with this. We could make comments of comments. In fact, make it nested so we can comment to a comment to a comment on a post to the thread. That way we can highly organize our comments and make sure that one comment that addresses another comment isn't confused with another comment on a post. Just make sure that when a comment of a comment of a comment of a comment of a comment is posted the thread goes back to the top so that we can click on it and search for the updated comment.

[jaredyates]

I was just talking with Jay about this and realized the utility of comments depends on whether someone is reading the thread from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top. The first case is someone who comes to the thread after it has had several posts, the second is someone following it in real time. There is definitely a philosophical difference between an entirely flat view and a multi-threaded view. An example of the latter might be something like Reddit. Another example is here: https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/forum-view.asp?fid=2 The cool thing about that particular forum software is that the viewer can select between a threaded view and a flat view, pleasing the needs of both readers. The comment in the VB software adds a small additional layer of threading. I tend to favor more threading than less, but that's no doubt a personal preference. While it is good to envision an ideal situation, we're confined to the boundaries of the VB system.

[Nev]

Jared the third case is where someone has contributed to the thread. If a comment is made they will then receive an e-mail notification of it (if subscribed). But it won't show up again Todays Posts etc.

If someone hasn't contributed to the thread and is unsubscribed and a comment is added say 2 weeks later (which often happens), only the people subscribed to that thread become aware of the new comment.

I'm not going to tag you in on this because I can see you've contributed and will get a notification

[500AGL]

Wow you guys write too much info in each post. My adhd kicks in and my eyes glaze over.

comments s*%k.

hate them, zero ability to continue a thread based on them, zero continuity, worthless.

And now you know my opinion of the little comment box.