Embassy reports: pls check if topic already exists!

[steven]

Hi,

and thanks for considering putting up an embassy report! We could not stay up to date without!

Have a look first though if there is already a topic about the embassy you want to write about. It is much more useful for others if all the info is gathered into one topic, which I can easily link to from the website, and this way I don't have to manually merge topics all the time.

You can do a search on the forum here, or have a look at the embassy reports section of the visa pages: I link out to the reports there.

With the increased activity on the forum, it has become a necessary new step to keep things organised and easy to find.

Thank you once again,
Steven

[TautTruffle]

Steven: Embassies and border crossings are very concrete subjects, but there seems to be a quite a lot of hidden or stale threads which might or might not contain good information about a given border crossing or embassy. It's just a suggestion, but would it not make sense to sticky exactly one discussion thread per embassy and per border crossing, for example?

[steven]

Hi Tauttruffle, no. The point is exactly that one thread is used, so we don't get hundreds of threads that need to be cross-referenced, like you used to get on the Thorn Tree. Exactly one thread per embassy and per border crossing is stickied on the website. They are not hidden. If you read the border crossing guides, you will see exactly that.

Read the website first. All the info is gathered up there already.

With the visa guides it is different because there isn't a lot of info anymore since most countries went visa-free or e-visa now.

[TautTruffle]

OK thanks. So the real issue is a bit trickier: useful information is sometimes hidden in the wrong threads! In the "trip reports", for example.

Simple idea: link the stickied thread for each border crossing to its page on the site.

[steven]

Simple idea: link the stickied thread for each border crossing to its page on the site.

Maybe I wasn't clear. I have done exactly that. Have a look I would say.

I won't sticky those threads, because if you have 60 sticky threads they will crowd out new threads.

The problem of useful information being hidden inside forum posts is an old one. That's why I decided to write a travel guide. I extract all the useful information from forum posts and condense it in the travel guide, so people don't have to wade through all that information.

Of course, then there is still the problem of people posting the same questions and answers in new posts. That's why I constantly merge topics so that, for those looking through forum threads, they only need to check one thread instead of 10.

It's not perfect, some things fall through the cracks, but it's the best I can do given my limited means.

I hope this explains my thinking to you. These concepts have been refined over the past 12 years. There is always room for improvement but for now this is the best I have come up with.

[TautTruffle]

OK thanks for the explanation. Obviously you know best what works, this was just meant as constructive feedback after I spent some time researching information and then had terrible difficulty finding it again later.

(I see now that I was mistaking the "red sheet" icon to mean "sticky" when in fact it means "unread posts" - apparently it's storing the threads I've been reading in a cookie. Not bad. The sticky icon is a padlock - best not abused, yes.)

My basic point is that border crossings are "hard" circumscribed information, so to me a ruthlessly top-down approach to organization makes sense. Like with Travel Sharing basically, i.e. a separate section with one topic per crossing (or perhaps per country combination), created by you and using a standard naming format (eg. "Georgia-Azerbaijan (Shikhli)" "Georgia-Azerbaijan (Lakodekhi)", each one hard-linked to the equivalent travel guide page. But that's just the way I would do it.

True, it wouldn't stop people dropping crucial information elsewhere. The obvious way to mitigate that is tagging - i.e. a tag for each border crossing or country combo or whatever, which can be added to any post or thread anywhere, allowing it to surface "in the right place". But PHPBB probably doesn't have that feature (yet).

Another future possibility: a map! All those border place names can be overwhelming for newbies! I seem to remember seeing a map somewhere but now I can't find it. But I'm getting offtopic!

Once again: this is just feedback, not criticism. Thanks for your work on this super useful resource.

[bwv812]

Another future possibility: a map! All those border place names can be overwhelming for newbies! I seem to remember seeing a map somewhere but now I can't find it. But I'm getting offtopic!

On the border-crossing forum page (viewforum.php?f=9) there's a prominent message at the top asking people to first check the border crossing page.

There's a map with all border crossings at the top of the border-crossing page that it links to.

[TautTruffle]

Indeed. So, next step: a way to navigate directly between (1) points on that map (better still, one that uses an open non-Google alternative, maybe based on Mapbox) and (2) the corresponding entry in the Travel Guide and (3) corresponding forum discussion thread.

Again: not criticizing, or asking for support. Just providing feedback based on personal experience. Feel free to ignore it.

[steven]

That would be great, but as a non-programmer, I have tried in the past to make a open-source version of the border crossing map, but failed. It never had the same functionality as the Google map.

Linking to the articles and forum threads is a possibility. If I get other requests for that function I will consider it. You are the first to bring it up in 13 years though.