I feel like it would be a lot easier to actually find partners with the SP Forum tool rather than the Plans and Partners tool. I never try to find partners with the forum because I know that's not the place to do it, but I just feel like it would be really effective. The forum has a lot more action, a lot more people browsing who might happen to see a plan or a partners-needed post and say, "Yeah, I'd be into that." Just a thought.

A forum for finding partners would be more current and visible. It could be a seperate subforum in each of the regional forums.

Agreed! In the past I have used the sp forum for this purpose. (only once)

Matt and the elves have been discussing this. We all seem to agree that Plans and Partners has not worked. The question now is this: create a separate forum, make a subforum in the regional forums, or put a sticky thread in each regional forum?

SP members, please respond.

The only thing I'll offer right now is that based on the experience with making Classifieds a subforum of Gear, subforums don't work well because they may not be obvious to the user due to the layout. Making a separate forum for Classifieds seems to be working much better.

My personal approach for this is to have a entire section dedicated for partners and then fill in the sub forums, but I could see how that could be a problem. Part of the problem of putting the partners inside of the regional forums is that then we have mixed conversations between talks and those who want partners.

On a site called "CascadeClimbers" people post trip reports in different forum locations as seen here:
http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthr ... te_Reports

And people certainly look through them. But they have a cool feature which if it was formatted in a separate forum would need to display "All the recent Partners posts" which over time could replace the one on the top menu of sp (if the old plans and partners goes very little activity). CC has that for the new trip report section all bundled in one spot as seen here:
http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthr ... ripreports

Bob Sihler wrote:The question now is this: create a separate forum, make a subforum in the regional forums, or put a sticky thread in each regional forum?

SP members, please respond.

The only thing I'll offer right now is that based on the experience with making Classifieds a subforum of Gear, subforums don't work well because they may not be obvious to the user due to the layout. Making a separate forum for Classifieds seems to be working much better.

I don't think the sticky thread option would work Bob. I think it would be critical that multiple threads are involved... all this couldn't be going on in one thread, even if it was one thread for each region. Each person who wanted to visit an area or do a particular trip might want to start their own thread.

Perhaps a seperate set of regional forums? Based on your experience with the classifieds, which would be one option, I see two remaining ones... I don't really have a preference.

Lay it out like this:

Regional Forums:
California
California Plans and Partners
Canada
Canada Plans and Partners
Colorado
Colorado Plans and Partners
etc...

or this

Regional Forums
California
Canada
Colorado
etc...
Planning Forums
California Plans and Partners
Canada Plans and Partners
Colorado Plans and Partners
etc...

(edited for grammar)

I had suggested subforums in some odd thread many ages ago. A separate forum seems to work great for 14ers.com, but then that's a more regional site, and one large separate forum would be a jumble of posts probably ranging from the Sierras to the Adirondacks to the Alps to the, I dunno, Ethiopian Highlands.

I wonder if maybe such posts shouldn't show up on the front page forum feed too. Yeah, it's less visibility, but depending on volume it could potentially clog things up on that end.

For what it's worth, I think Plans & Partners should be its own forum, possibly with regional subforums. That is, rather than make a P & P subforum in each region, make a P & P forum, possibly with regions as its subforums.

I would say that my usual entrance into any forum thread is the little "Recent Forum Posts" feed on the homepage, which is a good feature. Anything anybody posts in any forum shows up in there based on when it was last responded to. Simply by being included in a Forum, P & P posts would benefit from the same advertisement provided by the "Recent Forum Posts" tool. That would be a big plus.

I keep trying to think about how this all works from a web design standpoint, and it is tough because I know nothing about web design. I'm glad there's a dialogue about it, though, and I'm sure there are some very savvy SPers with good ideas out there.

In the meantime, seriously, does anyone want to do some moderate ice climbing with me in VT/NH this winter? For real, SOMEBODY must want to climb ice with me. I have a 4 x 4 and everything.

Well?