Our group has been growing strong for over a year now, and our content has grown enormously! We've started getting some tunes that get reposted as a new discussion, because we don't realize it already has a discussion thread devoted to it (I've been guilty of this, myself!) As the 'moderator' of this group, I'd like to try to keep it as organized as possible, and when I (or others) realize we've got duplicate discussions of the same tune, I do try to link them to each other, so future readers will be able to easily see ALL the submissions for a particular tune. I'd like to enlist ALL of you to be on the lookout for that, and either notify me when they find it, or go ahead and hit 'reply' and create the link yourself. So, that brings up searching the social group, for tunes already posted. I have been maintaining three "Table of Content" discussions, with clickable links to all the discussions we have posted in the last year (plus). One way to see if a tune has been covered, is to go to "Official Tunes" and "Other Tunes" Table of Contents, and browse the discussion. I try to keep these three Table of Contents on the first page discussions. It's easy to glance at the 'official tunes' and see what's covered, but the 'other tunes' has several different discussions of the tunes covered (and 'bump' posts in between, as there is no 'sticky' function available to me!). Anyway, to most easily search the "other tunes" discussion, I'd suggest using your own browser's search (or find) function. I believe using "Control" or "Command" + F, usually brings up "find" in most browsers. Then just search for a word. I did that, searching for Cumberland, and found two discussions. One entitled Cumberland, and one entitled Cumberland Gap. Now I guess when I'm done with the discussion, I'll need to go check out to see if that's a duplicate! When the "Other Tunes" discussion gets to being on more than one page, I'm thinking you will have to search each "Page" within the discussion "Table of Contents" to get all the results. The other way to search for things within this social group, using the Cafe's search function: Up near the top of the page, to the right, click "Advanced Search", choose "GROUP MESSAGES", type in your keyword and click "search now". It will give you results for ALL the social groups, so you might get a result from a different social group, but it will also find all the discussions within our group that contain that keyword. Please notice that there is another place in our social groups, that says "search". In my browser, it's within a grey bar, a couple of inches from the top, toward the right. Don't use that to try to search for tunes within our group. It does not work.
Is there any way to make the important stuff like "Read Me First" Welcome Aboard, and Tables of Contents "sticky" so they'll stay at the top? Maybe "how to post your Youtube or other video" would be good to have at the top too?
I think only Scott T. can do the sticky kinda voodoo. or it is limited only to the main forum. no one knows why.
Oh, how I wish it were possible to make some sticky topics, believe me! Scott & I discussed this early on, and he said it wasn't available to the social groups. I work hard trying to keep the table of contents near the top of the first page, having to do it manually! I surely don't mind typing up a discussion outlining how the group works, how to make a video and upload it to youtube and insert it into a message. I can choose a title for the discussion, so that anyone looking in the table of contents, it should be evident of the content of the discussion. In fact, I urge everyone to give some thought as to the title of a new discussion they start, so that it has some relevance to the subject matter, and means something to someone browsing the table of contents.
Oddly, Google doesn't seem to catalog this area either, so you can't even Google it. It's so frustrating I'm often tempted to write my own spider that would index this area. It might be worth it, I wonder how long older messages in this group will be kept.
I just remembered that there are a few of you computer geek types out there, that might be able to figure out something a write or create something to search our forum..... I don't even know the right terminology, as I'm more of a WYSIWYG person, haha!
Yes, it wouldn't be that hard, it would be about a day and a half's work to set it up. Then you could add cool features like being able to see just the posts with video, just the official tune threads, browse tunes alphabetically, catalog tab and abc, play audio easily, integrate with blogs and social media, and probably a few other useful things.
I thought I'd post again in this discussion, to bring it to the top of the discussions, since we have such a large group now! Nowadays, when I want to check to see if a tune has been covered, I search the group messages by using the 'advanced search' option near the top of every page, on the right side. Click it, then click on 'group messages' in the search type, then type in the name of the tune you are searching for in the box for 'keywords'. This will bring up every time those words were mentioned in any post in all the groups, but you can easily find which ones are for the Song a Week Social Group. There is also a very informative discussion, which I try to keep on the first page, called New to Our Social Group? ~ Read Me First!!. I suggest all members and visitors to this group, read through that discussion, to give you an idea of how the group works, and how best to get everything you can from it! If you have any questions after reading that discussion, you can post them there, so your question, and the answers you get, will be there for others to learn from!
