[Howard & Katelyn]

Brady, first off, welcome to the new Navigators community site! You bring up a great point about how we can all share recommendations like this.

My first instinct is to suggest maybe forums or groups for each state (similar to how we might handle international destinations with a country as the main group/forum). I’m tagging @Blessed2RV because Lupe had some great ideas and thoughts on this as well.

Perhaps a structure could be:

Florida Travel – Group
Restaurants – Forum
Activities – Forum
Accomodations – Forum
Medical and other services – Forum (Lupe, you mentioned this I think, right?)
Travel Logs – Forum

Then for each forum, you have a thread by City? That way someone could add to the list of favorite restaurants in Orlando that was started by someone else, for example.

Thoughts?

Howard

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by  Howard & Katelyn.

[Brady]

I like the thought of being broken down by state, but I don’t think we would want 50 different Tabs. Maybe we reverse the thinking on having 5 tabs for Restaraunt, Activites, Accomodations, Medical, and Travel logs with the subcategory under those being broken out by state. Just a thought.

I also sent an email this morning to your [email protected] address as I didn’t have a way to send you an email from within the site (or one that I can find). It seems I am limited to only be able to communicate with my “connections” which at this time is just Steph.

Thoughts?

Thanks

[Howard & Katelyn]

Not opposed to different org structures and I can see the logic in making it top level Restaurant, etc. Brady, to confirm your thought on this, you would have Restaurant for example as the group/forum, and then there would be a forum topic for each state. Is that what you mean?

There is an issue with messaging our (Howard & Katelyn) account. Since we are not “members” according to the system, no one can message us or reply to anything we send out as admins on the site. I’m working on a solution where I create a membership for just our account type and will be testing to see if that resolves.

You SHOULD be able to go to someone’s profile who isn’t a connection and message them. Once you are connected, you can then just type their name, site nickname/handle, etc and message directly in the messaging system.

[Brady]

Howard,

Yes, the Restaurant as the group forum. I really don’t have the layout defined in my mind, but thoughts were, if I were traveling, and wanted to look for a place to eat, then Restaurant>State>City>Places to eat – editable list by all members so the data is dynamic and not a static post that becomes too long and frustrating to find things.

This might not be doable, but I think it is more efficient to group/forum specific to what you are currently looking for, plus it should cut down the number of tabs on the front end.

Regarding the connections, Steph helped me with that yesterday and she was able to figure it out. I figured the reason we couldn’t message you was due you being an admin, funny how this seems to be the case in other forums as well. Does your system allow you to have an alias email address that you could assign to a normal user account, and then have that alias point to your admin email? This way you could maintain only one contact email and avoid the challenges of multiple accounts to keep up with.

Thanks

Brady

[Howard & Katelyn]

Got it. I really like the idea of all of us sharing recommendations and helping each other out.

Editable by all members becomes the challenge. Easy to do for a Wiki page (which I could theoretically add to site design), not sure if possible in the forums besides an admin/moderator copy/pasting from lower in the thread to the top/first post. There is precedent for this copy/paste style on other forums I frequent. The advantage is the reader just needs to visit the first page for a master list of all the recs (and I have even seen where admin/mods simply link to the specific comment about a place in that first post). Downside is maintenance by mods.

Regarding messaging us: IF I can get the unique membership tier figured out, I think that would be easiest to manage for us. That way, members can message us directly AND we can stay logged into one account on the site for posting/commenting. Otherwise we would need to login/out in order to switch over to the other account for realtime messaging.

Joys of engineering a new site with lots of features, right? 😂

Howard

[Brady]

Just a thought, but could you take the initial message and “pin” it to the top, that way it doesn’t scroll away when looking through the other posts, kinda like locking the header in an excel spreadsheet. That way you- or anyone(possibly)- could cut&paste to the body of the thread.

[Lupe & Philip]

Yes, this is what I was hoping we could have to help each other out. Recommendations for restaurants, medical/dental/healthcare, repair shops, attractions/must see spots, free experiences, trails, boondocking spots, etc. It would really benefit those of us traveling to new locations and say, for example, we need a local doctor, or a repair shop, etc. I’ve already added some of the restaurants to our list based on your recommendations Brady! 😄 Thanks!