A newbie forum might be good. It could feature targeted "getting started" FAQs. It would encourage newbie type stupid, obvious, and occasionally stupid-profound questions by being a strict no-judgment zone (a side benefit may be that we get to roll our eyes a little more in the other fora). If it takes off, it might even develop into a platform for more formal 101 articles and coffee courses.

On the other hand, I have the impression that newbies are getting up to speed a lot faster now than they ever did. If that is true; we may not need to do anything about newbie noise.

Personally, I find the real noise is the buzz of annoyance in my head when every new product is ***game changing***, and everything else that's new is ***shocking***. But this is not just HB's problem; the internet as a whole is turning into the intertabloid, and my mind is turning into mush.

another_jim wrote:Personally, I find the real noise is the buzz of annoyance in my head when every new product is ***game changing***, and everything else that's new is ***shocking***. But this is not just HB's problem; the internet as a whole is turning into the intertabloid, and my mind is turning into mush.

I agree - product and product marketing induced noise is the issue. As long as there was one "master" thread per device - that was okay.

But there are 10's if not a cool 100 of GS/3 related threads. As many as there are Linea threads and Kafatek threads... As a comparison, the DC Mina has one, barely breathing thread.

The idea that machines would have their own vendor threads went belly up when the GS/3 café was (prematurely) shut down. Lucky us that Reiss Gunerson and John Buckman kept the Londinium and Decent threads at bay. Not sure that is optimal though as interesting topics are going away.

Dan - I think the solution you left out was to have product subforums. So a La Marzocco subforum. A londinium subforum. Cross pollinate between forums, vendors can also participate but only within their forums (help keep the fake news down by having the designer explain rationale behind designs - when Bill Crossland left LM and thus was able to post a lot of the GS/3 "secrets" became known).

Other than that, the Stack Overflow approach is probably the best. And short tempered moderation will scare the heck out of newbies...

AssafL wrote:Dan - I think the solution you left out was to have product subforums.

We considered that long ago when the Brewtus Group and S1 Cafe were in their prime. We even considered sponsored subforums.

Instead, this site embraced the "less is more" ethos. I think that makes the site more approachable and focused. I've participated in other non-coffee forums with a subforum for topic variants (e.g., car model). The result is endless fragmented conversations since members adopt "their" subforum and ignore all others. The site owners who are motivated by ad sales are happy with overlap, but members are subjected to built-in repetition if they wander outside of "their" subforum.

As you can guess based on the Guidelines on mega threads I posted, I'm not a fan of jamming every conceivable topic into a single thread just because the thread participants own Product XYZ. In most cases, what's good advice for owners of Product XYZ is good advice for others. If the question at hand is really specific to Product XYZ (e.g., "Where can I get a replacement ABC for Product XYZ?"), a separate thread asking that question is (a) more likely to get a specific answer, and (b) more likely to be found by future visitors, reducing the probability of them needlessly reposting the same question.

As for other sites like Decent Espresso, Londinium, KafaTek... I don't see any harm in company-owned community platforms, whether they're on Facebook, Instagram, or a dedicated site. More times than not, the results of discussion ABC on vendor site XYZ are brought up again here since many members belong to more than one site. That said, vendors may find maintaining a website is more work than they thought (that was certainly the case for me ).

There are at least 3 additional possibilities:

1: restrict posting for some time after signing up.

2: Moderate all first posts until proven worthy.

3: Force new users to only post in one section till moderation is removed.

Both are way more restrictive than what you propose.

The first probably has the effect of discouraging participation which might not be a bad thing. If you can't be bothered to watch for a week or 3 before posting you probably don't belong.

Ira

HB wrote:Instead, this site embraced the "less is more" ethos. I think that makes the site more approachable and focused. I've participated in other non-coffee forums with a subforum for topic variants (e.g., car model). The result is endless fragmented conversations since members adopt "their" subforum and ignore all others. The site owners who are motivated by ad sales are happy with overlap, but members are subjected to built-in repetition if they wander outside of "their" subforum.

Then again - those work. As do the Reddit "train of thought" discussions.

The "less-is-more" ethos is great for a nascent market. Where one can discuss the market as a point-to-point slow-paced evolution. Espresso has left that train station and is now rife with products, speculation and ideology (still can't get over how quickly the Robur got dumped as a titan to being the lowest of the lows - only demagoguery works that fast!).

While the concern that the diehard fans stay within their LM and Kafatek subforums - which is probably true - I'd suggest that the ones who stay there - are the gearheads who we would all gain from them staying there.

One point that is entirely true and brought home by the Brewtus point - compared with auto or audiophile forums - is that many makers have the zeitgeist for only a short time. The LM and Kafatek are far between.... Maybe the EK43 is another... The rest star for a while and flame out of the zeitgeist at some point or other. Unlike Toyota or Honda.

So my guess it is a matter of choosing the subforums wisely. Maybe a Faema E61 and compatible subforum. A profiler subforum, etc... Just like there is a lever subforum.

A somewhat technical note - in RADAR and SONAR technologies, we have a concept called CFAR (constant false alarm rate). It implies that there is a certain level of noise that people are willing to accept. Above that (= lower the "squelch" threshold), and the noise becomes overwhelming. Below it (=increase the squelch threshold) and you are in the occasional tumbleweed zone.... So a nice approach is to figure out how to carve the H-B turkey in such a way that the noise level remains within the "okay" CFAR.... In other words - if there are TWICE as many posts today as there were in 2010 there should be TWICE as many subforums as there were in 2010. BUT spread out so the posts spread out uniformly amongst them....

ira wrote:Upper left corner, pick "Menu" and then Unread messages. Don't feel bad, took me 8 years to find it.

I find Unread topics even more streamlined and useful.

ira wrote:There are at least 3 additional possibilities...

To me, these options border on visitor hostile. Enabling the filtering of discussions you don't wish to see would accomplish the goal of reducing "noise" without erecting checkpoints every 10 yards. For example, a preference that allows:

• Filtering out selected forums
• Filtering out topics started by members without a site history
• Filtering out topics started by members without a site history until there's replies from others with strong site history
• Filtering out topics started by selected members (similar to the existing foes option, but applied to topics)
• Filtering out topics containing "stop" words
• Filtering out selected topics

If your goal is to focus on specific forums/topics and ignore the rest, I think the above would do it. A variant of the existing Trending Topics might do the trick.

AssafL wrote:In other words - if there are TWICE as many posts today as there were in 2010 there should be TWICE as many subforums as there were in 2010. BUT spread out so the posts spread out uniformly amongst them....

I don't have the exact dates, but it seems like there's twice as many in the last 9 years, if not more: Buying Advice, Repairs, Brewing, Cafes, and Water are all fairly recent additions "seeded" by overflow from other forums.

HB wrote:To me, these options border on visitor hostile. Enabling the filtering of discussions you don't wish to see would accomplish the goal of reducing "noise" without erecting checkpoints every 10 yards. For example, a preference that allows:

• Filtering out selected forums
• Filtering out topics started by members without a site history
• Filtering out topics started by members without a site history until there's replies from others with strong site history
• Filtering out topics started by selected members (similar to the existing foes option, but applied to topics)
• Filtering out topics containing "stop" words
• Filtering out selected topics

If your goal is to focus on specific forums/topics and ignore the rest, I think the above would do it. A variant of the existing Trending Topics might do the trick.


I don't have the exact dates, but it seems like there's twice as many in the last 9 years, if not more: Buying Advice, Repairs, Brewing, Cafes, and Water are all fairly recent additions "seeded" by overflow from other forums.

I think that is valid. But it is also coming from the standpoint of existing members responsibility, which is half the equation. The other half I feel is creating the sharing environment without the "give me" feel to it. I am sure I have taken more than my fair share but I also took the time to read the backlogs before I joined (not every word and not thread by thread but I grazed over the topics and read ones that were of interest to me. To me it wasn't bad, I came here to learn and lucky me there was plenty of info already written. That being said people are natural adverse to "googling it" and I am not sure how to make it a norm for people to do so, unless they are already inclined.

@jim I too also feel the mush of extensively reading people's thoughts and found turning to books by proper writers as a cure.

HB wrote:To me, these options border on visitor hostile. Enabling the filtering of discussions you don't wish to see would accomplish the goal of reducing "noise" without erecting checkpoints every 10 yards. For example, a preference that allows:

Yes, they are visitor hostile but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. You're the only one that knows, but what percentage of registered users still participate after 1 month, 3 months, ...? How many people who ask already answered questions for their first post remain for the long haul. If the forum is about making money, the visitor hostile is an issue, if it's about furthering the art of espresso, it should not be an issue. This is the best place to be at the moment, if you want to participate, jump through the hoops.

But yes, being able to filter out most of the forums in my "Unread Messages" results would be a start as long as there is a button to show the hidden ones when I have more time.

But, the noise is new, only bad in the last year or maybe two and it's getting worse fast.

Ira

It would be nice if there was an easy way to avoid some specific forums for specific machines. As a personal example, BDB threads interest me not at all. But I do open HB each time to the "unread posts" multiple times a day, but that still ends up being two to three pages quite often.

Maybe a sister site that is "Your guide to mediocre espresso."