I wonder if Alex can plead the case for us? There seems to be a lot of forum support (on top of the more-important scientific reasoning/evidence) and by not creating a sub-forum which risks being boring and dead, the worry over doing work for nothing goes away... I am all for Gars becoming Gars and Bowfin. We make a couple stickies that only we will read, but at least we can link any confused people to them.
Gar & Bowfin Subforum Merge - Discussion
- Thread starter Wiggles92
- Start date
I also think a gar and bowfin subforum would be suitable. Over on AP it worked fine. It also seems like many of the gar forum regulars are those that are mos interested in bowfin to begin with.
will do so when Li is done with the rest of the things im bugging him to do...hahaha
i'll talk to Li and some others as well. this shouldn't take hardly ANY work. i've worked with forum software on a cursory level (at least in making/modifying forum settings), and it's merely a name change to this forum which should take less than 10 minutes (if that). threads can be moved later on, and it should start being populated by new threads on its own anyway.
i would request that we be able to put together stickies from threads, etc...i know xander is busy, but the current state of the stickies (even though there are many benefits compared to how it was) is not ideal (and no one person has the time to fix that).
again, probably a 5-minute fix, and that's if one struggles with the spelling of the word "bowfin" --
--solomon
going to have to disagree with you, convincing a team of people to agree on the same thing almost never takes less than 10 mins...
we definitely need to re-do the stickies, and adding more bowfin stickies will surely add to the clutter. but all that really takes time that none of us (members and staff alike) seem to have much of in excess these days...
will start pushing the gar/bowfin case when i'm home. but in the meantime, what will help our case is patience and no one shooting their mouths off
here is what Ryan sent
Why to move them (Bowfin) and some arguments against moving them plus how and/or why those arguments can be negated (in red):
--Ryan
Why to move them (Bowfin) and some arguments against moving them plus how and/or why those arguments can be negated (in red):
- Bowfin and gars are extremely closely related and form the infraclass Holostei.
- Bowfin are very primitive ancient fish.
- Bowfin are known from the Triassic period (250 million years ago) therefore are more ancient than many fishes.
- Bowfin are before the Teleosts (majority of all fishes) on all accepted phylogenetic trees therefore are more primitive than most fishes.
- At least one mod wants to see snakeheads in the "Ancient Fish" forum despite the fact that they are definitely not ancient fishes; this came up in the one thread about getting a dedicated bowfin sub-forum. Snakeheads are only known from the Early Eocene (55.8 million years ago) and are of the family Channidae of the order Perciformes which is composed of 40% of all fishes and said order is considered by many to be the most modern order of fishes. Just a side note, Being able to breath air does not make a fish primitive!
- Forum traffic for bowfin is not large enough to warrant a separate forum but has increased enough lately that moving them to the gar sub-forum to make a "Gars & Bowfin" sub-forum is a logical decision.
- If they get even more traffic as a result of the move, then maybe they might even deserve their own sub-forum.
- At least two mods are against giving bowfin their own sub-forum because of the lack of forum traffic for them; this issue came up in the bowfin thread.
- In comparison to the work that would need to be done (new sub-forum, move threads, new stickies, assign mods to that area [spread mods thinner/need more mods], etc.) to give them their own forum, combining them with the "Gar" sub-forum would require mcuh less work and would probably not necessitate the adding of more mods.
- I'm fairly certain that a great deal of interest and activity have been generated on bowfin now as a result of the multiple threads on bowfin in the "Gar" sub-forum and "Ancient Fish" forum.
- There seems to be some correlation between interest in gars and interest in bowfin; it seems that many gar keepers are also bowfin keepers or want to keep bowfin.
- Said correlation will most likely help with bowfin-related forum traffic since both fishes could be discussed in the same sub-forum rather than two separate ones.
- While bowfin do fit in the "Coldwater, Temperate, and North American Native Fish" forum, they are a much better fit in a "Gars & Bowfin" sub-forum from an evolutionary standpoint rather than for a locality standpoint as is the case with their current designation.
- The "Coldwater, Temperate, and North American Native Fish" forum is basically a "catch-all" for any random fishes that don't seem to fit elsewhere but meet at least one of the requirements to be in said forum; it's pretty hard to sift through that forum for information on bowfin.
- It would be easier to locate the appropriate place for where to post about bowfin if they were combined with gars to form a "Gars & Bowfin" sub-forum.
- It's much easier to locate "Gars & Bowfin" than to decided which forum a post about them belongs when you have many potential choices based on your knowledge level ("Ancient Fish", "Other Monster Fish", "Coldwater, Temperate, and North American Native Fish", etc.)
- Members would come to be at least somewhat educated on the topic of fish evolution (at least primitive fishes) since a sticky on how and why the bowfin belongs in the same sub-forum that gars are in.
- Learning is always good, right?
--Ryan
Hey, delete the bacon part; you know that I was just joking around (as I noted).
Crap, I left out the "e" in "came" in my second red statement...
EDIT: What's the deal with the unordered lists? Why do they only display as ordered lists? Or is my browser to blame? Just another thought...
Crap, I left out the "e" in "came" in my second red statement...
EDIT: What's the deal with the unordered lists? Why do they only display as ordered lists? Or is my browser to blame? Just another thought...
going to have to disagree with you, convincing a team of people to agree on the same thing almost never takes less than 10 mins...
we definitely need to re-do the stickies, and adding more bowfin stickies will surely add to the clutter. but all that really takes time that none of us (members and staff alike) seem to have much of in excess these days...
will start pushing the gar/bowfin case when i'm home. but in the meantime, what will help our case is patience and no one shooting their mouths off
you are correct in that the convincing could easily take longer than 10 min...any time you get that many heads in a discussion it's bound to take a while (which is also unnecessary given the logic here, but "office" meetings never really progress logically). i was saying the ACTUAL act of changing the forum name takes less than 10 min...i've done that sort of change-up many many times and it took less than 5 min. the problem is when too many heads are in charge of too much, then even logical and simple changes become excessively difficult and slow.
there is a time for solving the pinned topic issue, but like you said, none of us have it right now. in the mean time, the bowfin modification is simple provided the "powers that be" just do it...there's really little need to discuss it as all the pros vastly outweigh the non-existent cons...
funny how there has also been quite a bit of discussion and traffic based on these two threads recently...that's gotta mean something
----solomon
Hey, delete the bacon part; you know that I was just joking around (as I noted).
Crap, I left out the "e" in "came" in my second red statement...
EDIT: What's the deal with the unordered lists? Why do they only display as ordered lists? Or is my browser to blame? Just another thought...
fixed
you are correct in that the convincing could easily take longer than 10 min...any time you get that many heads in a discussion it's bound to take a while (which is also unnecessary given the logic here, but "office" meetings never really progress logically). i was saying the ACTUAL act of changing the forum name takes less than 10 min...i've done that sort of change-up many many times and it took less than 5 min. the problem is when too many heads are in charge of too much, then even logical and simple changes become excessively difficult and slow.
there is a time for solving the pinned topic issue, but like you said, none of us have it right now. in the mean time, the bowfin modification is simple provided the "powers that be" just do it...there's really little need to discuss it as all the pros vastly outweigh the non-existent cons...
funny how there has also been quite a bit of discussion and traffic based on these two threads recently...that's gotta mean something
--solomon
have already brought it up...let's see what happens from here
