HB wrote:It actually alternates between between the two taglines.

I never noticed that until I was writing my last response and noticed it said exceptional espresso.

So there is an increase in topics started by day 1 members of around 6% over the last seven years.

For what it's worth, I glanced at the first 5 pages of recent topics. Judging from subjects alone, only two stood out as "newbie" topics.

You're right, I am overly sensitive to noise and looking over the first few pages like you did, I don't see much noise in the thread titles, but it also shows up as noise in threads, look at the last page of "Post a pic of your home espresso setup" for an example. I'm not saying this is easy or that I know the answer. To many categories and the board fails, to few and it fails differently.

Something that might be useful to me is a filter that shows unread threads so I don't have to go through all the categories with unread messages, especially if at the end I could say, mark all these read.

Ira

I'm not seeing a particular need for change, but that's just me.

However, if I were a newer 'newbie', reading this particular thread would have me off looking for a more welcoming and open forum, before discovering whether or not HB is, in fact, such a forum.

Bret wrote:I'm not seeing a particular need for change, but that's just me.

and me.

I'm not sure, "what's the best rig $500-1500" will ever be answered once and for all. But, my sense is that such newbie questions are particularly interesting these days as we seem to have more products than ever that facilitate excellent espresso-making by home baristas, e.g., La Marzocco Mini, Baratza Sette, KafaTek grinders. When I first joined HB, similar newbie questions focused on re-purposing well-established commercial gear for home. Not nearly so simple today.

And of course for those uninterested in newbie questions, there's always the option of not clicking on newbie threads.

ira wrote: Something that might be useful to me is a filter that shows unread threads so I don't have to go through all the categories with unread messages, especially if at the end I could say, mark all these read.

Ira

The Menu->Unread Posts filter does something like what you are describing, it actually shows topics where you have unread posts. If you use this in conjunction with the Mark all as read" feature it could really speed up your browsing workflow.

Bingo. My HB bookmark goes directly to unread posts. I browse through those, view the ones I desire, then hit "mark read" and carry on. Works great.

+1
I don't read a lot of the posts, I roll my eyes at some of them, I notice when Dan has revised the subject for searchability, but it would never occur to me that anyone else's queries should not be allowed space to be ignored in.

dominico wrote:The Menu->Unread Posts filter does something like what you are describing, it actually shows topics where you have unread posts. If you use this in conjunction with the Mark all as read" feature it could really speed up your browsing workflow.

Yes, but I'd like it for every unread post, not just the one's I subscribe to, how else will I see new posts I'm not subscribed to?

Oops, it looks like what I want. It never occurred to me to look deeper than the main menu. I wonder how many people don't know what Menu leads to?

Ira

ira wrote:I wonder how many people don't know what Menu leads to?
Ira

Ummmm.....newbies????
Sorry, Ira, but you kinda had that coming....

ira wrote:Something that might be useful to me is a filter that shows unread threads so I don't have to go through all the categories with unread messages, especially if at the end I could say, mark all these read.

As Dominick noted, that functionality already exists. I don't read every thread and use the Unread posts/Mark read options to pick and choose. That said, I've often thought an "Ignore thread" option would be helpful to tune out noisy threads for all views. I admit that I often skip mega threads since they are mostly chatter magnets.

ira wrote:I wonder how many people don't know what Menu leads to?

The more popular menu choices under MENU are represented elsewhere, e.g., Unread posts/Recent topics/Recent posts also appear on the main index (on the upper right). Less popular menu choices like Unanswered topics/My posts are only shown in MENU.