Feedback on Grow Journals

[GrowVital]

Hello friends.

I just joined and—right off the bat—I have some feedback that has been making me furious in every forum and each thread within them.

Grow Journals are a beautiful thing. I consume a bunch of them, I am most certain they are a substantial part of what people are looking for when joining a community like this one.

I started in another forum and generally, I would (very happily) browse through the journals, watch the progress and read about the thoughts and factors for decision-making of the grower.

The forum that I started in had a thread length of around 30-60 pages for journals—about half or quarter the size of 420 journals—but still tedious.

When I came here and saw the quality of the journals I was surprised and happy. When I saw page counts of 170... [insert "ain't nobody got time for that" meme].

So, my feedback:
Can OP posts be tagged?
Can there be a function "Watch only posts by OP / and posts that have been highlighted by OP".

OP could highlight posts that are vital to the understanding of his own entries.
If a grow really gets to me, I make a long read out of it (when time is there) and take in all those little details.
For the rest of the time—manual skipping happens anyway.
Technical simplification would make reading much more comfortable.

That's all. ^^

 

[GrowVital]

On second thought, I see how this cannibalizes the community aspect of a forum.
Reducing a conversation to a monologue might not be the healthiest thing for a conversation-based platform.
Tricky.

 

[GrowVital]

Here's how it could work!

Since there's already 2 main stages of Grow Journals (on-going & completed), the above mentioned feature could only be available for completed grows. A best of both worlds kind of thing.

 

[Richard Richardson]

You can switch the display mode of the forum threads at the "Display" menu at the right side of the upper gray toolbar.

Choosing "Threaded Mode" enables you to see all posts in a list format. You can scroll through the replies without reading them and only click on the posts from members that you want to read. You only see one post at a time, the others are in a list of links in a box above.

The format can be changed back to "Linear Mode" for normal browsing.

 

[GrowVital]

Thanks for the feedback, man.
I guess my evening schedule just changed!

 

[TorturedSoul]

Here's a Thought

There's another thing that can be done, but it requires the thread's author to do it. When someone is posting in a thread and switches to the advanced editor view, they have the option of changing the subject for only that specific post - as I have done with this one.

Journal thread authors can do this in order to "highlight" an update or something important. If someone does this - particularly in a very active journal that might contain several thousand posts, lol - it would probably make it easier to use the forum's search routine to view only "official" journal updates. That's even better, IMHO, than merely searching for the thread's author's posts, because a lot of times they participate in the general "conversation" in their threads but post their updates in separate posts.

I can't swear to it, but I think I might have seen something like this done in one of Canna and Nismo's threads.

Again, it would depend on the journal posters' individual willingness to do this. And I would guess that the vast majority of them haven't given it any thought (and may not even be aware that they can use the advanced message editor in order to produce a different subject title for an individual post within a thread).