I note that our Forum now has wisdom scattered over 118 pages from around 12 years. And that we, the owners, are now on our own in the sense that we can no longer rely on SLM Co backup.
And that using the Search function does not always get to the best post, because sometimes the terms used are different etc.
For example, let’s say you were concerned about the chainplates or the bobstay fitting and whether your chainplates need to be replaced, whether tiny cracks are normal, how often you should replace your chainplates, and with what metal you should replace your stainless steel chainplates. Searching for ‘bobstay fitting’ doesn’t always get to the threads that talk about the issues.
To make our 118 pages of 12 years of forum more useful, I thought of us collaboratively creating an index of crucial posts.
Of course this raises issues. Whether it’s worth doing? How best to do it? How to keep it up-dated? Who should do it?
I note that John Cole (hereafter JC) had started the idea of a separate ‘Maintenance’ sub-forum to which he would copy useful posts. But JC has a day job and we owners need to shoulder responsibility for ourselves.
For JC: how can I add bold or change the font size in a post to indicate a hierarchy in an index?
As a way of starting the process, in a separate post I’ll post a first stab at an index to the Forum, dealing with issues about the standing rigging and spars. I will add more details to that index post in the next day or so. And I may add some links to older Yahoo message list - I noticed that some of the older threads, when moved to the SLM Co server - seem to have lost attachments and coherence (ie some threads didn’t make sense)
Doing that exercise took time, of course. And it also revealed that not all the issues have been well covered in the Forum. So seeing the index and the gaps in knowledge might also prompt some of us to write posts to fill in those gaps.
I’d welcome debate about the question of indexing/FAQing here.
But please put additions/pointers to other posts (the ones I missed) about standing rigging and spars that I missed at that post (which might, in the future, be made a sticky if JC and you all agree), not this one.
As the initiator of the ‘index: standing rigging and spars’ post, I should be able to edit etc that index post to keep it up-to-date (so that just reading the index top post, rather than sorting through the whole thread, would be all that is needed).
Cheers
Bil (who can usually improve his posts by edits!)