ANNOUNCEMENT: Title formatting for this board

[PSMKay]

You may have noticed that the topics in this board all start with a word in capital letters.  These are topic tags.  As Plays & Musicals is our busiest board, this has been done to make it easier to sort through topics.  When browsing for a certain topic, you can sort the board alphabetically by subject and all of the topics about say, Calling or Professionalism or New Works will all group together thematically.  (To do this, click on the word "Subject" at the top of the topics list. 

Using a topic tag also helps the moderators merge threads that are on the same topic, so that we don't wind up with, say, 4 separate threads about costuming understudies.  We're stage managers.  We like to keep things tidy.

When you start a new thread, if you know what tag it should get, feel free to start your topic title with that tag.  It should be all in caps with a colon afterwards.  (Ex: MORALE: Should I be buying coffee for my cast?)

If you don't know what tag your thread should have, you can leave it off and a moderator will tag it for you.

For reference, the tags used to date are listed below.

Animals, Asms, Auditions, Calling, Cast, Communication, Costumes, Dear Abby, Electrics, E-Scripts, Finance, Forms, Health, House Management, International, Job Description, Morale, Musicals, New Works, Pay, People, Policies, Pre-Production, Producing, Professionalism, Prompt Script, Props, Rehearsals, Reports, Running, Safety, Scenery, Scheduling, Shows*, Sound, Teaching, Tech**, Technology, Tours, Understudies, Venues, Work/Life Balance

* - for questions related to specific shows
** - Tech rehearsals/tech week, not technical theatre

Edit updated list of tags & added formatting-Rebbe

[planetmike]

Is it possible to search for articles in each topic? It would be nice to be able to see all the posts "tagged" with a topic.

[Rebbe]

When you are looking at the Stage Management:  Plays & Musicals board, can click on Subject (in the  bar with column headings) to sort alphabetically by subject.  Then all topics with the same tag will be grouped together.  You could also use the site’s search function.   

[planetmike]

Hi Rebbe, Thanks for the tip about sorting by clicking on the Subject header. I didn't know about that option. It's not too helpful though as you then have to page through up to 22 screens of posts looking for the topic you're interested in.

Using the Search box wasn't useful, as it brings up everywhere that the search term (the tag in this case) appears. The Advanced search at http://smnetwork.org/forum/index.php?action=search;advanced was a bit more helpful, after choosing only the "Stage Management: Plays & Musicals" discussion area, and checking the option "Search in topic subjects only." 

[PSMKay]

As the software we are using does not permit topic tagging, the "sort by subject" option along with manually-added subject tags is the best we can do right now. 

[Rebbe]

If you are looking for something specific right now, you can also send me a PM and I’ll see if I can help.  If I remember a thread covering the topic you’re interested in, I may have better luck finding it.   

[planetmike]

It's really not a big deal. I tried to find earlier topics on one I recently posted. I tried to find if anyone else had raised a similar question, but didn't have any luck. Maybe if a "topic" gets a certain number of posts, it could be a child discussion group of "Plays and Musicals?"

Thanks very much for the SMNetwork web site. It's been a very helpful resource.

[PSMKay]

You're welcome, glad it's been useful for you!

If a thread is very popular it should be stickied at the top of the board.  The staff knows to keep an eye on the top 10 posts as listed in the site statistics and sticky things accordingly. 

Child boards actually bury things deeper and make them somewhat harder to find to our guests.  It is important to remember that SMNet's traffic on a daily basis is actually 10x higher than the number of registered members, so we need to keep things as guest-friendly as possible.  Search functions are tricky on a specialized board such as this one - there are so many different, yet synonymous terms, and the search engine only indexes words that are longer than three letters.  (e.g., "AEA" won't turn up anything, but "equity" will.)

Don't stress too much about making duplicate posts, or reopening a topic that has not been addressed in a while.  We've been doing this forum thing for years now, and some of the stuff from a very long time ago could stand to be revisited periodically.  Moderators also have the ability to merge posts on similar topics and frequently do so - it's part of our job.

If you're looking for something in particular and the site search isn't turning up enough info, it is also worthwhile to check with a moderator - they all know their boards really well, and may recall a buried post that could be helpful.  (Although we'd prefer if you ask a mod only if you've already searched and come up empty-handed!)