Another one very happy here and huge thanks to Ron and the other mods who obviously work hard to keep things running smoothly. I agree the stickys are a great way of keeping track of the popular threads and from a personal point of view I like the fact that people know how to get a message to me if tehy have a specifically bloodstock related query. I'll continue to run my sales threads as we move through sales season, but it may be worth making those into temporary stickys while the individual sales are taking place.
I concur with the majority of posts on here, thanks to the admin team for the constant drive to improve things. The board goes from strength to strength and it is nice to see everyone getting along swimmingly. Happy to be here
On the whole I would say that the forum is very, very good and certainly most enjoyable. However, just a few points. Now that the forum is more buoyant with a lot more activity why not consider sub-sections??? Would possibly make the place easier to navigate. Although it’s certainly not dour I think the forum could benefit from an injection of a bit more humour. I’m not talking about unseemly jokes about the trainer’s wife and the stable lad but a little more humour, wit, hilarity and irony is never a bad thing, methinks. I’d also like to see the number of posts made and the points total, currently next to each posters name, disappear. This is because it would appear, and by definition encourages, certain individuals to simply make some posts solely to boost their overall total. This is very much to the detriment of the forum as you just roll your eyes and shake your head at this behaviour. Also, number of posts/points accumulated is in no way relevant, or has any bearing, to what someone has to say but appears to be marketed as if it is. A personal perspective is that I’d like to see the emoticons completely wiped out. Most of us grew out of using them by the age of 7 and I’ve never yet seen one that enhances a post in any way. As my regular readers are aware I’m not one to blow my own trumpet and do agree that the self-promotion by some after a winning advice is somewhat ridiculous and unnecessary. As a wise old sage once told me ‘there is no praise as meaningless as self praise’. Also, agree re the introduction of quizzes (although deffo not the easily Googleable type). Finally, at times a little more insight and opinion would be welcome. Say more than simply ‘in the next I fancy x, don't ya know’. These are though very much minor points and I’m not having a go at any one person. On the whole the forum gets a big thumbs up from this correspondent. Certainly, if I had to list all the ‘plusses’ I’d be here till midnight. And no I didn’t type this at 23:59:58 it was mid-morning!
Cor blimey, RV, think you’ve just broken the all time record there for the number of emoticons used in 1 post! Nassau, old boy, are you attempting a bit of humour there?!?
Thanks for finding the time to put forward your views on the forum/site. We have over 100 members on this forum so I'm hoping to get at least 50 voters before I start reviewing. Meanwhile, I will answer a few points. Sub Sections. This is something I have been thinking about on and off since I joined. On balance I think it would be a good idea if we could get the sections right. However, I have seen sub sections elsewhere and get the impression that some are pretty empty so I have a slight concern that by not having everything to the forefront sub sections could die out. I don't have the admin authority to do it myself, otherwise I would have tried it out by now, knowing I could change it around with experience. If I can get the administrator to do it, we would have to be fairly certain about the structure as I guess he wouldn't want to be changing things around too much. Also, once other forums see what we have done they may want the same. The best solution would be for moderators to be able to structure the forums they moderate. I will put this forward.. Meanwhile I will put up a thread to capture views on how to structure the Forum. Even if we can't get the sub sections I could develop an index thread as a trial. The introduction of more variety might help decide the best structure (eg no point having a sub section with one entry) Variety. I'm all for this. Please add any suggestions into the Forum Structure thread. Also volunteers for Quiz masters. Daily Racing Threads. My latest thinking on this is to re-name these threads " The Daily Racing Preview - Date" and have a separate "Daily Chat Thread - Date" where anyone can chat about anything, including Racing but not expected to produce knowledgeable write ups. Maybe a "Weekly Racing Review" also. Humour. All for this too. Unfortunately my sense of humour is so dry it usually goes unnoticed. I did set up an Amusement thread a while back which went well for a short while but it gradually disappeared. Maybe that's not what as required. Again some ideas can be posted in the Forum Structure thread.
I must agree with the general consensus that the forum is great and that Ron et al are doing a brilliant job. On a side note i would be wary of sub-sections because they can make it very time consuming navigating about. I would tend to check the forum on a daily basis and would assume (though i may be wrong) that the majority of the regular readers and contributors do likewise. There are rarely more than 10 (roughly) active threads to sift through. I think this is a reasonable number and does not warrant sub-sections. If the number of active threads starts to grow to over one page then i think there would be valid reason to consider dividing things up a little. Please feel free to disagree with me but i have been a member of another forum which has so many sub-sections that it's impossible to keep track of what's going on. I prefer everything to be in one place, though i appreciate that others may feel differently. P.S. Despite the unanimous praise for the forum on this occasion i still think that a thread such as this is a good idea just to ensure that things are still running as people would like. With any luck the outcome will be the same as on this thread but it might well be that a new idea emerges that keeps moving things to the next level. As the old saying goes "It is easy to get to the top, but hard to stay there". We must all constantly strive to improve and the forum must do likewise.
