**Promoting the board**

I must of read his non-Hamilton quotes, hence the confusion.

 

Simple solution to get more traffic: create a controversy about tyres.

 

Sorry, I was about to post them but then I got peckish soooooo.....

 

'Soft' advertise all you like, but get your own house in order first.....

Not sure if it's already been covered, but as far as I can tell this F1 board is the most popular on not606 outside Premiership football. It is however, lost in a sea of obscure boards with little traffic such as International Football, Betting, Cricket, Rugby League etc etc. Minimally we could do with getting 'bumped up the list' - this site is a complete mess for that kind of thing.

What I am saying is that we're hard to notice, and hard to find. Out of sight out of mind as they say. A good solution would be to be bring in a side bar allowing for quick access to all the most popular boards as they used to have in the original 606 - something I really miss and something this site is absolutely crying out for. Also a cursory Google search for 'not 606' belies the fact that this site is anything other than a obscure corner of the internet for Southampton, Hull, Norwich City and Sunderland fans....

Ideally someone ought to come up with an 'uber' forum site - one that ties up all the other forums in some way, joining up communities. It would either, with permission, pull latest posts from other sites, or better have posts pushed to it, or it could simply be a site that links each board within each site to its sister boards on other sites for ease of access - perhaps supporting some form of auto-login capability. Well there you go - a freebie idea for the more entrepreneurial amongst you

 

Manny yes, Silver we're probably better off without.

EDIT: Silver chill, I was alluding to the prediction championship

 

I've been hoping Manny will return when uni exams are over, which would be any time now, I think.

 

Yeah, must be done within a fortnight at most. Much as I'd like him back, if several of us acknowledging Schuey did a decent job last season can't coax a "I told you so" post, I don't think he'll return.

Some fair points about bumping us up the forum list BCS, but the overall site struggles with a somewhat distant owner. We're also due to move to an upgraded version of the forum software at some point, which addresses a few of your points. Hopefully we can combine moving us up the list with the move. I'll certainly raise it on the mod board though.

 

To be fair, Football is always going to be at the top, The one between us and football is Horse Racing which is currently more posted on than here by about 10,000 posts.

 

The general chat area is shameful and lawless.

I have been on some other forums where they sail close to the wind on a few things, but even they would probably have deleted 75% of the content on 606 general chat thread.

Not a good advertisement for sane minded sports fans......

 

This is probably the worst thing to try and encourage Manny to get back here, but oh well
http://www.formula1.com/gallery/other/2013/802.html

 

I have always thought that GC should be moved to the bottom. This is primarily a sports forum. I don't really mind what goes on in GC but it shouldn't be the welcome rug to the site.

 

For what it's worth, when I was first directed to this site, the first thing I found was 'General Chat'. I decided then and there not to bother, and did not even find this very buried F1 board. I think it was a few weeks later when popped in again, having seen someone's link which by-passed the disgraceful 'anti-advert' of GC.

General Chat should be out of sight* to non-members. It is an absolute disgrace and has been a considerable source of embarrassment to me, since I have young relatives and associates who look for what I've written.

*Actually, "out of site" would be even better. The apparent lack of intelligence there is quite unbelievable. It looks like some backwater for semi-literate half-wits who automatically throw insults when they find disagreement. Quite unbelievable. Unmoderated and totally out of control. Ridiculous.

 

I don't recall venturing in to the General Chat section... I'm now intrigued. If I'm not back by sunset, send in the search party!

Edit:
Yup... that's a mess.

 

I wonder how many journalists Raikkonen's set that alsatian on.

 

We do not speak of general chat in these parts.

 

I tried to post this before, but my phone messed up, so take 2:

The problem with GC is that really, it's what the site was created for. If everyone's sitting comfortably, I shall tell the story (or at least the cobbled together version I think is true) of not606...

Not606 pre-dates the end of 606 by quite some margin, probably a year. Members of the Rangers (and I believe Celtic) fraternities of the BBC 606 grew tired of being heavily moderated, and wanted somewhere where they could spout what they liked, without fear of it being deleted or themselves being banned. Mick (the site owner) was part of that group, and set up not606 for this splinter group, as a place where moderation was non-existent, and people could post what they liked. I believe to begin with GC was all that the site consisted of, possibly with a Rangers and Celtic board. At this point in time, members numbered perhaps a dozen.

Fast-forward a year, and the BBC announces the closure of 606, leading to lots of people wanting somewhere to turn to. Mick seizes the opportunity and creates a load of Prem boards, and promoting not606 on 606 brought a lot of communities over here. At this time, Mick was quite active on the forum, and so when people wanted a forum for Horse-Racing, MMA, whatever, it got added. Originally the F1 section was just "motorsports", until he was asked to sub-divide it.

But really, the raison d'etre for not606 is GC unfortunately, and whilst the forum has arguably outgrown this, so it really is just a corner of the board nobody except the regulars visits, it's the reason Mick set the place up, and judging by his post history, the place he's most active. If we ever move to new software (which was mentioned back in January but seemingly has gone quiet), then perhaps we can get GC moved then, but until then I can't see any massive changes to the site happening. At least the chat-box has been hidden away in GC now, as that used to be what the site greeted you with.

 

No... but apparently they openly talk about parts in general chat.

 

NEWS!

Mick has already bought the new vBulletin software for the forum, however he's not a big fan of it at the moment as it's slow and missing a lot of functionality. If you want to know what it looks like you can see it here (If the link doesn't take you to the forum page, click the link top right). As such, he doesn't want to transfer us across until it's more usable, and at the moment the progress vBulletin are making is very slow.

However, the comments about GC haven't fallen on deaf ears, and Mick is looking to add a tab system across the front page, something like this:

please log in to view this image

The tabs would be something like: Football | Horse Racing | Motorsport | Off-topic This will have the dual effects of shifting us up the board so visitors know where we are, and hopefully will shift General Chat away from the landing page of the main site. Mick's making the changes at the moment, so if anything seems a little odd/broken for a while, that's likely to be the reason. A cursory look at the main page seems to show he's already made some changes.

Edit: Looks like the change has been made, the homepage now resembles the example above.

 

not sure im a fan of the tabs. coming on blind and unaware like a newbie would be. it looked like this was a football forum. took me a while to realise there were tabs and find the motorsports section..

 

The tabs don't seem to work in Chrome... had to move to Firefox to get them working properly. Not sure I'm too keen on them either TBH.

No biggie though... I usually use the mobile app.