There are a select group of members of this board whose insights are almost always valuable and appreciated. These are the kinds of members whose posts you look forward to and bookmark when you find them. Some of these folks have been tuning cars for longer than some of us have been alive. Others are folks who are just very good at explaining things. Others yet simply take the time out to answer questions as best they can with clear factual knowledge.

If they are willing to participate, I think these experts would do well to have their own forums given to them, where "best-of" type question/answer threads could be relocated. Members could submit questions, and if the questions were approved (by moderators and/or the experts themselves), they could get posted in the appropriate Expert forum (one for Evos, one for regular Lancers, etc.) and the experts could chime in.

How could these forums get "initialized"? There are a bunch of threads already in the tech forums that are "gems" - lots of great information by authoritative people, but not necessarily stickied. These threads could be copied into the newly formed Expert forums (and cleaned up to remove noise) so people could get an idea of what level of posts/responses are appropriate for the new forums. The idea is that these threads would be locked after the experts had "spoken", and then the expert forum would become a living FAQ.

OK now for the tough part - who should the "experts" be? Two ways someone can become an expert I think - appointment by admins/moderators, or nomination by some minimum number of users (I am thinking something between 100-200) and approval of the nomination by staff.

Experts would have authority to approve posts for/move posts to the expert forums and would be the only ones who could post there (to limit noise). Any clarifications of questions/answers could be dealt with in PM's, and then appended to the original expert forum thread appropriately.

Any thoughts? As usual, I am trying to distill the best information and contributions so you don't have to be a search expert to get to them.

 

I would like to second that, and if I may add:

I don't necessarily think that specific people necessarily create all the great threads. Rather, every now and again certain posts develop a life of their own and become a gem. Maybe “Hall of Fame (Shame)” forum of sorts would work better, that way regardless of who started the thread or who posted information it receives the recognition you are looking for. And of course any superfluous posts can be deleted.

 

I'm open to finding and archiving the more important posts in a specific section of the site... either a new page or forum.

Mark

 

Something that has worked well on other forums is a "Recommend this post for hall of fame" button.

Nice thing about such a button is that the best posts will naturally rise to the top.

 

I'll have to look into that as a hack.

Mark

 

Im not sure if adding a fourm just for "good" members would be a positive thing. I mean, who gets to decide? If you add a poll, whats to stop people from creating fake accounts for the sole purpose upping a members rank?

I think adding a sort of rating system would work better. Something similar to the "Personal Sales Rating" would be a good idea.

 

There is a reputation system built into the forums we could use, but I would imagine that getting abused as well. Couldn't hurt to try it out though

Mark

 

It's a good idea to distill good valuable info from educated (or uneducated) guesses or opinions..... However, I doubt that anyone posting in this forum has been tuning cars longer than I've been alive

 

 

You are right this would have some abuse potential. My thought was that admins/moderators would still have ultimate review of who was able to contribute to these forums.

Practically, I also think the time someone would have to invest to game this system would be pretty substantial for pretty minimal rewards (that could be overridden by admins/mods anyway).

This is another option. I guess my idea was not so much to give individual people visible numeric ratings, so much as to take highly rated messages by helpful/informative people, and make them (the messages and the people) available in a forum.

 

Oh, I misread. Posting the most helpful threads into one forum is a great idea. Sort of like a mini-FAQ.

 

I thought everyone on this board was an authoritative expert on all things Evo/Lancer!

I can't imagine that someone would spend the time to make themselves "expert" when they weren't in fact knowledgable about the area. Invariably, other users would notice the lack of knowledge in the posts made by the self-proclaimed "expert" and weed him out anyway.

 

Well, actually you are not quite right on this one. Unfortunately, there are folks here who intentionally or unintentionally look like bona fide experts but in reality they are not..... It's very easy to sound quite knowledgeable in many fields without having any experience or depth of knowledge simply by parroting the experts, quoting from credible sources or simply expounding on theories.... Hell, I do it sometimes while just participating in a discussion or contributing to a thread.
A real expert would be someone who has worked extensively on the subject and has had repeated successes and vast hansds-on experience on the subject. Actually, the expert would be someone whose advise will never result in damage or failure. I can tell you for a fact that there are "experts" out there who are tuning and working on ppls car who are incompetent at best but have glib tongues and a line of BS a mile long.... Unfortunately by the time they are "weeded out" they already did a lot of damage. Not only that, but some of them defend themselves quite vociferously and effectively and continue their harmful charades

 

Gee, I feel so special. I don't know what to say, I... oh you didn't mention me specifically did you

Sounds like a good idea. I like the comment about the recommend this post. Maybe have it so if X number of members rate the post 5 stars or something, it gets bumped to a highlighted section, or the title changes to bold, or something like that.