I was just having a discussion with someone in another thread and it prompted me to post this. Before the conversion to the new website, the Learning Center was a place that articles containing good, correct information about keeping chickens were found. Staff would select the articles that they found worthy of being in there and move them over, and new members with questions could be directed there to read and learn.
All new articles had to be posted as member pages. If the articles were well-written, factually correct, and good quality, a staff member could move them into the Learning Center so that they were easy to find by people looking for information.
Since the conversion, this is no longer the case. Anyone can post in the Learning Center at any time. I took a look through just the Hatching Eggs and Raising Chickens section, and it's a little cluttered in there. For instance, in just a quick browse, I found that information regarding how to incubate or raise chicks has been buried by tons of posts about how to build various brooders and incubators. There are also a lot of articles in there that have nothing to do with the topic of that section - I found a Coop page that someone had written up about building their coop, a guide to training chickens to do tricks, an article on sexing chickens which might fit better in another section, and even what appears to be someone's personal journal about breeding. It's very hard to dig through all of that to find the info that you are looking for, and it might be overwhelming for a newbie who's just looking for some quick information.
Plus, since anyone can post anything they want in there, articles aren't getting fact checked before they are posted in the Learning Center. That means that incorrect info could be added and no one would catch it - so the Learning Center might not be a good tool for learning, because people could get bad information from it.
So would there be a way to go back to the system where all new articles are posted as member pages, and staff can move the ones they feel are a good fit into the Learning Center? And would it be possible to maybe clean it up a little and remove the things that are already in there that don't really belong?
@Nifty-Chicken
All new articles had to be posted as member pages. If the articles were well-written, factually correct, and good quality, a staff member could move them into the Learning Center so that they were easy to find by people looking for information.
Since the conversion, this is no longer the case. Anyone can post in the Learning Center at any time. I took a look through just the Hatching Eggs and Raising Chickens section, and it's a little cluttered in there. For instance, in just a quick browse, I found that information regarding how to incubate or raise chicks has been buried by tons of posts about how to build various brooders and incubators. There are also a lot of articles in there that have nothing to do with the topic of that section - I found a Coop page that someone had written up about building their coop, a guide to training chickens to do tricks, an article on sexing chickens which might fit better in another section, and even what appears to be someone's personal journal about breeding. It's very hard to dig through all of that to find the info that you are looking for, and it might be overwhelming for a newbie who's just looking for some quick information.
Plus, since anyone can post anything they want in there, articles aren't getting fact checked before they are posted in the Learning Center. That means that incorrect info could be added and no one would catch it - so the Learning Center might not be a good tool for learning, because people could get bad information from it.
So would there be a way to go back to the system where all new articles are posted as member pages, and staff can move the ones they feel are a good fit into the Learning Center? And would it be possible to maybe clean it up a little and remove the things that are already in there that don't really belong?
@Nifty-Chicken
We just need to make sure we're making it very easy for peeps to create great articles and get those articles placed into the correct sections properly. We were trying to reduce the # of amazing articles that were buried and lost in the Member Pages section.
