Supporting Charity and other Flea markets

[b4man]

This may or not be the best place for this topic but I wanted more exposure to this topic than the BoD forum.

There was a thread started in the Off Topic forum regarding the Lexington Women's Club Market in late April. I moved it to User Announcements in order to get more attention. My thought was that maybe we could add another Forum or subcategory to list market/sales events members find and provide our support for them.

Opinions?

 

[cskipper]

It would be good to have a place to list activities. I think that we need to be careful about selecting what events we can or want to provide support to - there are a ton of worthy causes, and obviously a limited amount of interested staff, if not members

 

[ehpoole]

I guess that it seems, to me, that the User and Staff Announcement Forums should provide an adequate forum for such. User Announcements for announcements by user and/or non NCWW-sanctioned announcements by staff. And Staff Announcements for NCWW sanctioned announcements.

I could be wrong, but I'm concerned that a dedicated forum would be very low traffic and possibly overlooked.

Nonetheless, I am curious as to other's thoughts and I will obviously support whatever the concensus decision proves to be.

 

[cskipper]

Something else to consider - define "supporting". If I go to an event by myself, is that NCWW support? I'm thinking not.

If posted in User Announcements the original poster would need to keep it bumped to the top. Could these be added to the calendar - or do we want it to become cluttered with every bazaar/fair/show folks attend?

 

[ScottM]

Something else to consider - define "supporting". If I go to an event by myself, is that NCWW support? I'm thinking not.

If posted in User Announcements the original poster would need to keep it bumped to the top. Could these be added to the calendar - or do we want it to become cluttered with every bazaar/fair/show folks attend?

While adding to the calendar is a simple task we need to be sure we really want to do that. Between NC and the surrounding states there are probably 100's of these events annually. The calendar could become so large as to in fact loose other NCWW events due to the volume of entries.

 

[ehpoole]

IIRC the event calendar is setup to display a maximum of 4 events (to avoid hogging the user's display), so Scott's concern is certainly a valid one.

I was going to suggest that we could maintain a Sticky with upcoming events (edited by staff, bod, and admins), but the truth is we really need to try and clean out some of our old stickies first. There are some forums with so many stickies that we are already in danger of pushing all new content onto the second page! We would not be the first site to make such a mistake, but I think we would certainly take a hit from our users is new content got pushed to the second page.

We really need someone to go through all our old stickies and determine which are no longer relevant as well as which stickies could be condensed into a singular sticky to help cut down on the clutter. I suspect a good many could be condensed and covered by a single sticky under the heading of "Frequently Asked Questions" or "Self-Help Guide" and the like.

We could really use volunteers in that department because the Admin's plate is pretty full already and is likely to stay that way for some time. I would guess that Steve and I have probably been putting in 40-60 weeks most every week since the upgrade, so that does not leave us with a lot of free time for such tasks.

The above said, however, I think it is a positive thing for our members anytime we can hook a member up with an activity of interest to them. The key is whittling things down to just those activities that our membership is likely to take an interested in and participate.

 

[ScottM]

I will take the task to review and cleanup the old sticky threads. Any I have doubts on I will post in the Moderator's forum before taking action.

We really need someone to go through all our old stickies and determine which are no longer relevant as well as which stickies could be condensed into a singular sticky to help cut down on the clutter. I suspect a good many could be condensed and covered by a single sticky under the heading of "Frequently Asked Questions" or "Self-Help Guide" and the like.

We could really use volunteers in that department because the Admin's plate is pretty full already and is likely to stay that way for some time. I would guess that Steve and I have probably been putting in 40-60 weeks most every week since the upgrade, so that does not leave us with a lot of free time for such tasks.

 

[cskipper]

I'll help too. Is there something special to deleting a sticky?

 

[ehpoole]

Cathy, I have not needed to delete any stickies just yet, but I wouldn't think there would be anything special with regard to deleting them if need be. If you encounter any problems, by all means feel free to ask, it's what we are here for. FWIW, I would probably just opt for a soft-delete on the stickies you want to eliminate, that way if there are any concerns (or accidents) the delete can be easily undone.

Scott & Cathy, thank you very much for taking on this task. I think it will really help to cleanup our forum views -- particularly in the forums that have an almost overwhelming number of stickies.

Steve, please feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts on the process.

 

[ScottM]

I'll help too. Is there something special to deleting a sticky?

There might be a better way but the way I do it is to go into advanced edit mode in one of the posts of that thread. Down at the bottom is a box you can check to "unsticky" the thread. Just click the box and save. This process works on both open and closed threads.

 

[cskipper]

There might be a better way but the way I do it is to go into advanced edit mode in one of the posts of that thread. Down at the bottom is a box you can check to "unsticky" the thread. Just click the box and save. This process works on both open and closed threads.

Scott, you can also click on the "Administrative" drop down menu, select Unstick and Proceed..