Good comments! A wiki would be wonderful but would probably best be set up by teams of 3 on each topic, with the team first browsing the site for good threads to use, consolidating the info, and then putting together the info in a wiki. A better search function would really be helpful but there is still two problems to address. The first is that when I searched through ES I often found conflicting information. Sometimes it was because one of the answers was not correct but sometimes it was because someone was addressing only a part of the OP's idea or question. This is a problem with NOOB's because - transition into the second problem - many or most of the threads that contain useful info here are really detailed. They contain really excellent info but it is hard for a rookie to digest, or to be able to put several threads together to make something useful. That is why the posts I have made asking for overviews have been sooo helpful to me...and why the wiki idea would be good...and also why making subforums would also be helpful. Any tool that you can find to help manage the wealth of education here would be a major blessing. How about some flash tutorials? or open forum chats on a topic? I know these things sound like a lot of work..but I think it would save time in the long run for the 15-20 guru's that answer so many of the questions. After I learn something I often go back to the forum and search on my question. I am usually shocked to find out, now that I understand the words and ideas, that my question was repeated sometimes more than 20 times, but often in a slightly different form. I wonder how much time it took those people to answer that question 20 times? Maybe another thing to do also, you could come up with a 4-5 minute video and make watching the video mandatory before they can register here. The video should just be an overview of this site, showing the wiki, search feature, tutorials, etc. I know this would take a mountain of time - I was a computer teacher in my former life that did some lessons on video and multimedia - but the results saved so much time that I would gladly do it again if I had the opportunity.
I concur - this is one of (if not thee best) forums I have found on the internet. I think a close second would have to be the vcdhelp.com page, on multimedia. One of the differences between this topic and others is that actually trying to do something often requires a significant chunk of change, so it seems that people are more hesitant to go ahead without asking lots of questions. Multimedia editing, on the other hand can be done for almost free so people are more willing to jump in and get their feet wet. There are also possibilities with the technologies delved into on these pages to hurt yourself or others, but I don't think anyone has ever been hurt editing home movies unless it was because their mother-in-law hit them on the head with a stick because he included a picture of her putting her wig on....
for the past couple weeks in order to just become a novice in this topic. While browsing I had an idea...is it possible to subdivide the battery technology forum into subtopics, one for each kind of technology? i.e. LiFe, LiPo, Nixx, SLA, other, etc? it would make it easier to find info, not only searching but also just from incidental browsing.
