Piano World master sticky

MacMacMac

You might remember that I created the digital piano master sticky thread on Piano World a couple of years ago.

The files that it links to were in Google drive in a user account that I use for that purpose only. By chance (mistake) I looked at gmail using that user profile and I found a couple of dozen long-standing emails. People were requesting access to the files found there.

But why? The files were open to "anyone having the link" ... and that link is in the sticky thread.

It turns out that the links were invalidated as part of "a security update". What that means I do not know. But the links are no longer valid. I could establish new links ... but I have no way to update the sticky thread over there.

The thought occurred to me: Would those items be of any value here in Clacksville? And would it make sense to create a sticky for them? Is that even possible?

These are the items in question:

Prices Paid spreadsheet
Piano Actions spreadsheet
Headphone Specs spreadsheet
Piano Virtual Instruments spreadsheet
How to Set Up Virtual Instruments

Drew-r

MacMacMac

This is just one IMO, but my experience was (with trying to use that PW sticky google drive a few years ago ) a rather tedious project for an ipad user to scroll through a list of every PW/DP topic/post that occurred after the sticky-link-google-thingy was set up.

That experience ( the few times i tried to find nuggets in that massive sticky pile) left me thinking that a worthy PW search tool would be far less cumbersome, but maybe this is just me, maybe PC users are better able to quickly find nuggets from the sticky mass without it requiring hours of sifting.

A much older pet-peeve of mine that dates back to the mid-90’s, people - even techies - in general often have p-poor skills in giving their posts/database entries a good title; “good” as in logically suitable for some other person to come along months or years later and find useable info from their titled entry in said DB.

CyberGene

If people are interested, we can introduce a special tag for this kind of threads. I am a bit opposed to the notion of super-sticky (pinned) threads that happen to bloat the entire screen of PW since they are always on top of the other threads and they are not that often updated.

I think the tags here work better and so people can directly open these "sticky" threads by selecting the proper tag.

MacMacMac

The idea of the master sticky was to have only one sticky. (On PW Frank would add more stickies from time to time … annoying. But Frank is not here, right?)

The admin could pile as much into that sticky as needed. The sticky would have little or no content … just links to the real content. So the sticky would never contain more than one post, and only the admin could edit it.

If you don't want a sticky of that sort, how can tags be used to implement something of that nature?

Also … back to my original question: is there a need, want, or demand to have links to the items I listed?

vagfilm

For the american members, the piano price list is a useful tool (for the most part, europe has fixed pricing, that is usually much lower than US listed prices).

The other stickies are not so important if there is a good search engine.

The last sticky on VST connection could be turned into a tutorial (again, easy to find through a search and could be a attraction point to new members).

Drew-r

vagfilm

Agreed, the prices-paid thread, despite increasing trend for members to not follow the basic instructions on its use, serves a useful function a la “ blast from the past” … but since it has its own place separate from the google drive, it may be a bit OT here 😉 but this also reminds that PW Prices-paid thread increasingly goes off the explicit topic. I find it very informative the way many users avoid posting some of the most relevant, nice-to-know facts that they don’t type into the pre-fab’d fill-in-the-blanks for prices-paid info …. like the actual price paid and from which provider/seller/location did they contract their deal🤐

CyberGene

There's an extension that enables the so called super-sticky threads that will always be on top. If we decide to have such, I'm really about only one single such thread, and no more to avoid clutter, and we can reuse my Welcome thread and just put the most important threads as links on top of it.

However I think creating a new tag such as "important" that can be assigned to a few of those threads may actually be better because one can click on that tag in the navigation panel and see the list of all these threads with corresponding timestamps of last activity, etc. which would be quicker for navigation rather than having to open one sticky thread then scroll to top, then click separate links.

Picotin

CyberGene

What about a wiki page on www.pianoclak.com ans links in your welcome post?