Mumsnet Talk

<hugs Trills>

You support me, don't you?

Because, of course, we are right

Oh, good Helen.

I'm being helpful <preens>

Not just moaning [arf]

I generally use Active and hardly ever go into any topics.

But that's because I just want to piss about.

"Sparkly" suggests a vajazzled Talk page. (That would be quite a nice entry to mumsnet, actually -- a cheery welcoming vagina.)

Yes, a Talk page that mentioned and linked to Active, and explained that it is a good window into the whole of MN would be good.

Sometimes I think that the problematic nature of certain topics is partly to do with people using them in isolation from the talk site as a whole, and so failing to get what Mn is. And that is because their users sometimes haven't grasped that there is a whole-of-mumnset talkboard, i.e. Active.

Helen, while you are doing this revamp, have you considered the possibility of stickying a few threads in various topics.

There's a great support thread for suicidal/self-harming teenagers for example. And one's like The Brave Babes. They are a great way for newbies to get support quickly.

I think there's an asthma one too, and a few others scattered around various topics. I'm not talking about quiche-y threads, but ongoing support threads for particular situations.

There are about 15 topics I would like to check regularly, but they aren't particularly active, so I'm not going to trawl into topics, find it, click on it, find out nothings new, then do the same to the other 14 topics every day.

What I would love is a little personalised menu with links to your 10 favourite topics, so I would have Behaviour/Development, Skiing, Camping, Baking etc all just one click away to look at. I'd check them more often and post on them more often that way.

Agree with cleaning up the topics list too, way too many of them are ghost towns.

So, for example, in teenagers you could have threads sticked for "teenage mh" and "teenage SN" rather than a whole empty topic for each?

Yes TSG - that would be great. A way of checking "last 24 hours for specified topics" would be perfect.

I rely almost entirely on Active, or very occasionally In The News to see if a thread's been started, but then use Topics if an interesting thread I've been following drops off Active.

And my lurk-to-posting ratio's about 100-1, too. So where I post may not be a good guide to what I read.

A "My favourite topics" version of Active sounds good.

I yearn to have a good file of MN threads. I could happily spend a week sticking them in the right topics, none of which would be AIBU. It would be so cathartic - and then when someone wonders where their AIBU thread about cats or baking or cars is, they'll have to work it out for themselves. It would be like some social Darwinism experiment - how many MNers stay standing?

I'm with Maryz too. I do similar to lougle, and when bored flit around various boards learning all sorts of stuff. Often posters miss out on really valuable advice by posting in chat and AIBU, because a lot of 'expert posters' tend to confine their posting to specific boards, am thinking of many of the SN crew but also relationships, employment and legal have some very knowledgeable posters who I rarely see anywhere else.

I just reported a non-AIBU in AIBU and was told Posters do, on occasion, start threads in the wrong places

I think that means "shut up and stop bothering us"

I agree, there's way to many topics.
But can someone define Chat for me?
It is the topic I use the most, and surely, like in RL, chat can be about anything.

"on occasion"

I think it would be more true to say "posters do, on occasion, start threads in the right place"

I wonder if, when mn was young and small and the whole site was quite slow-moving, the significance of Chat was that you could have live-time talk with whoever was around, whereas in the topic-based conversations you might just post a relatively serious question or answer and then walk away and do the ironing in the knowledge that an instant reply was unlikely. Now, the whole of MN is chat in that sense -- live-time nattering.

Back in the day, Floaty, when you logged in you could get "messages posted since I last logged in".

And you would get a few dozen threads to have a look at, from every topic. It was great, you could really keep up and you ended up reading about things you thought you had no interest in, like gerbils and crochet!

Chat was started for real time "chat" and there was huge opposition, as it was thought that everything would end up in chat - which it did until aibu came along

Would MN work faster if we killed AIBU threads after 6 weeks?

I wish they would kill/archive most of their content after 90 days, as with chat. I hate the thought that my tedious comments from 2007 about some trivia or other are around for ever. Since the distinction between "chat" and other topics is pretty non-existent now it seems arbitrary to archive chat after 90 days and keep the rest available.

We have had many discussions about deleting the AIBU threads after a few months. We never get anywhere ...

I am also on your side MaryZ and not just because you backed my 're-order hidden threads' campaign.

It would be great to have a 'favourite topics' drop down or similar, because there are some topics that I read via topic (Bloggers, Freelancers for two examples) and other than that I wander through TIO and AC.

Yes, I think if they delete Chat after 90 days they should also delete AIBU (and name it FightyChat)

Thanks Tee

And everyone else who is on my side. We will be lonely (as oppose to one lone) voices in the wilderness.

Maryz - you have inspired me to go and explore