EXAMPLE: Sticky Thread - Hack Categories

[Wayne Luke]

Does Yahoo or the Open Directory have too many categories?

Don't know I don't use these services it is too hard to find anything. I would hazard a guess that they do especially with DMOZ having 400,000 categories and Yahoo probably just as many. Sites are classified wrong or not at all depending on the whim of a single person. I see very little oversight in the process. Dmoz has the SitePoint Forums under "Social Groups" and Yahoo originally refused to list us because of lack of content. I guess 500 unique articles, over a thousand Flash based tutorials and over 20,000 pages of original discussion isn't enough for them.

Why use them when I can use Google and find exactly what I am looking for in the first minute at the site?

I'm not sure what "standard" you're referring to, but it's well-known to assist the reader in scanning a long list.

The standard that links should be the same color or clearly designated as links.

I never said I was a Web Usability Expert. I do know some and am learning more every day. I agree a better way of indexing available hacks is needed. I disagree with the method of using sticky threads to do so. There are almost 3,000 threads in this forum. You can't make me believe that listing each one in a thread is going to make it easier to find information. Even if you just listed the thread and its title you have megabytes of information to pour through in one thread.

Now let's say I am looking for a hack on encrypting passwords in vbulletin 2.0

I could read this massive sticky list. I wait for it to download (I am on 56K dial-up). It loads. I hate opening new windows so I would have to scroll down to find what I am looking for. Now is this a "User Status", "Registration", "Admin" or "Misc"? I go for Misc first because it changes the way data is stored, it should have no effect on how the end user utilizes the software. Maybe I find it maybe not... Actually if I don't find it in the first screen of information I will most likely hit "CTRL-F" and type in password. If I don't find it in the first 20 or so matches I give up. Most people give you ten matches.

So now I go to use the search engine.

In the box I type in my keywords - Password Encryption. I select the vBulletin Hacks forum because that is what I want. Then I select "Show results as posts" because I like the snippet of text that helps me find what I am looking for. And there is exactly what I want in the first listing of the search in the fifteen results returned. It took me ten seconds (even on a 56K modem) to do this.

I would much rather people post their hacks for release on vBulletin.org. The organization is there. You can have multiple discussions per hack and things would be easier to find... There just doesn't seem to be the support for this. I thought about posting the individual hacks there myself but then I would get more email and ICQ than I get now because my name would be attached to them and people expect support.