One of the problems that most forums face is that the really informative stuff gets buried under a bunch of useless BS. I was talking with Dave (TheDavel) about creating a section separate from the forum where the more informative stuff can be archived and kept safe from useless chit-chat. Unfortunately, as the forum grows and more and more threads are started, we know that will probably become a reality.
Our version of vBulletin suite comes with the forum, a blog section (which I have disabled at the moment), and a Content Management System (CMS). If you look at the top, you will see a tab that says "Articles". If you click it, you will see that I've been playing with the layout and writing articles. There are several options available such as promoting a post to an article, as I did with Erin's 'Essentials' thread...or you could just write one from scratch. The really nice thing is that you can save your article and work on it at your leisure, it doesn't display until you publish it.
I'm hoping to have some technical articles, reviews, industry news, and other interesting stuff. I would also like to do a wiki of sorts to archive some reference stuff. I'm trying to decide if I want to build it in the CMS or use an external source such as http://www.caraudiojunkies.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Anyhoo, that's what I'm shooting for...I want CAJ to be both a fun place AND informative. I've created a usergroup called Tech Editors and I've initially included a few of the more technically-minded posters: erinh, caraudiofab, TheDavel, chad, Glenn. I'm sorry if I overlooked anyone...if you would like to join the group, please let me know.
Tech Editors have the ability to create an article directly to the page, however, anybody can submit an article in the form of a single post here. Once the post is reviewed and tweaked, it will be promoted to the articles section. Technically, I could promote a whole thread to an article, but it would have to be tweaked quite a bit to make it work.
So are any of you interested? I'm not looking for any regularly-timed thing...there is no pressure or deadline. I'm just giving you a different avenue to get your info out. I'm open to any suggestions, questions or snide remarks. Also, if you know of any posts that you feel deserve to be put in the spotlight, point it out to me.