I was just wondering what everybody thought of this hardware forum on Neoseeker as a whole. Anybody have any suggestions or complaints? Any ideas that might help the forums pick up some more traffic?

Over all, the hard ware forums are pretty good. Its clean, mostly on topic, and we have a good community. I cant think of anything that could use some improving.

We could use some more traffic though.. I've noticed that a lot of members dont even know these forums exists; I'm always seeing computer help threads in Loungin, that should be here. If more of the members knew about these forums, that would help out a bit more.

I totally agree. In fact, the addition to the Loungin Helpdesk's guidelines about our hardware forums here on Neo was added via a PM from myself to Enigma.

There's already a Hardware tab containing several links to hardware related pages in the site's homepage. Making them more prominent is what you are referring to?

Is there any way we can make the hardware forums appear in more google searches? I just did a few searches for variations of computer building, computer hardware, and over clocking, and this forum only showed up under "computer building forum", and it was the second.

Also, what if we had a hardware portal? We have all kinds of portals for various games, but I dont think I've seen one for computer hardware. www.hardware.neoseeker.com may work. We could even do our own hardware reviews (as in if we just bought a new processor, we could post a review on how we like it), and even over clocking guides for certain hardware.

That is a fabulous idea!

I see no reason why the cornerstone of this site shouldn't have it's own portal.

I think user written guides would be amazing, but if you want to write guides I think the BEST thing to do is to write it for formal submission as an official article. Write the guide in a way so that it is laced with references that you can supplement in the forum.

For instance, if you were to write an OC guide for the Phenom processors, you can also supplement it with some Phenom Q&A threads which are linked from within the article.

An area where Neoseeker members can also submit other content like a portal is also a good idea, but let's wait a bit on that since I'm making some changes in that area as well.

Anonymous told me a lot about the hardware user reviews a few days ago, I actually didn't know we had any for hardware until then. I knew there were game reviews, I just never saw the ones for hardware.

Redemption, when say you write the guide for formal submission as an article, what do you mean by that? Would we just type up a guide and post it on the forums, or would a select good ones be posted as an actual article?

Not trying to sound pushy on the portal idea, but that would work great for users to post some more in-depth reviews on some of the parts in their own systems, as well as somewhere to post some guides. I can talk to Avalith and work out some ideas when the time comes.

One thing I feel that may divert traffic away from these forums is the fact that every single piece of hardware has it's own individual forum yet an extremely small amount hold any discussion...actually, comparatively very few hold any posts at all.

If someone had a question about a C2D E6850 and stumbled to Neoseeker via a Google search or the like, and found the E6850's profile page and then went to the product's specific forum...they would see that one of the most popular processors as of late has absolutely ZERO discussion revolving around it. Then, rather than being the only one posting on an obviously dead board they leave and go to a different site without ever being aware of the general Hardware Forums that actually have quite a bit of discussion about that processor and others quite similar to it.

I'm pretty sure(though not 100%) that the forums fall into place for the hardware products because that type of scripting is possibly hard coded for each product submitted to Neo.

I was thinking of a few ways this could be altered to benefit the forums here.

Rather than linking to the dead/extremely slow specific forums within the product's profile, the tab that says "forum" could alternately link to the hardware forum that would circumference discussion on that product. If it was a CPU, the tab would link to the Motherboards and CPUs forum. If it was a CPU heatsink, it would link to the Cases, Cooling, Overclocking and Computer Building forum...ect, ect.

OR...

Keep the forum link within the profiles the way they are and add either one or two more tabs. One tab that would link to the certain hardware forum that mostly circumferences that type of discussion(eg: a CPU would have an additional tab that linked to the Motherboards & CPUs forum) and/or add a tab that linked to the Hardware Forums in general.


Through a few different avenues you can see that Neoseeker is relatively high in Google hits and whatnot, but I think that somebody only seeing a dead discussion board is a big deterrent against continuing their search through the site. This is a big site and there are lots of things to click on, and it's much different from any proboard that some new members might be used to navigating through.

I feel that a hardware portal would be a great idea. But what kinds of things would we put in it that neoseeker hasn't covered yet?

The only thing I see that is a bit annoying is when we get new people in the hardware forums they ask for help and don't post there system specs so we need to ask and wait for them to get back to the forums which is days sometimes, not sure how we can get them to post there specs when they ask the questions. Maybe a banner in big letters when they first enter this area.

I've seen some forums here that have a message above the post window. Someone can probably easily change a setting to 'If you are posting a question about your computer, please provide your computer specs' or something similar.

quote The Slayer

I've seen some forums here that have a message above the post window. Someone can probably easily change a setting to 'If you are posting a question about your computer, please provide your computer specs' or something similar.

That looks pretty good! Its simple, to the point, and friendly.

And for those who are too lazy to look it up..

quote

Note to Guests: Hello, and welcome to the Overclocking Forum! If you are looking for help with a computer problem, please post your computer specifications along with your question. They'll help you get help faster. If you don't know how, just ask!

one thing i find is that if you dont know where to ask about a certain topic then there is no general hardware thread.

For the most part we just use this forum as the 'general' computer thread. If someone has a question just about a processor or motherboard, then theirs the motherboards and cpu's forum, the storage forum, operating systems, video cards/monitors, ect. Maybe we could change the name of this forum to make it sound like its more for 'general' hardware questions too..