About the Job Listings forum (formerly "PING Gus")

Gus

Anyone can post any old guff here. Would it perhaps be better to enforce use of the template ?

I wonder where people might go to discuss jobs posted here ? Should there be a Job List Discussion forum as well ? Do they need to discuss the jobs ?

What will happen to the classifieds ?

Just a few thoughts.

Hex (or is that “He”?), you never fail to get my attention.

Yes, anyone can, but I’m hoping to recruit a moderator (or two? :wink:) who will keep a bit closer watch than we do on the rest of the site.

I see the biggest impact of the templates to be merely a reminder. The templates remind posters that this is basic information many of us would like to know when viewing their listing. When you use a posting template, you can preview the post. This presents you with a standard posting form, filled with your input, along with BBCode formatting.

I hope diligent posters will use the templates to just get them started. By hitting the preview button, they can remove fields that are not relevant to their post to unclutter things up a bit. They can also add anything they want.

I don’t want to force template use because registered members who are logged in can post as they please – although I’m afraid they might log themselves out unintentionall if they use the posting templates.

I figure people should discuss positions in other forums. Teaching positions seem appropriate for discussion in the Teaching in Taiwan forum – I hope you guys haven’t narrowed your mandate to only curriculum and policy discussion.

The Living in Taiwan, Open and Misc forums may be suitable candidates for sharing insight about other types of positions.

I do have a specific motive for migrating the career database to the forums. Let me segue to your last question to tell you about it.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to publish an offline edition of the website – one whose sole purpose is to expand the website’s audience (that promotion thing I’ve been accussed so often of ignoring). There are scripts for phpBB to facilitate this. But, because my technical expertise is limited, I hadn’t found a way to put together this publication until now.

Hopefully sooner than later, people will start seeing a simple listing of the classified forums in popular bars and restaurants around Taipei. This will be a list of the latest threads, which readers can read by using the topic numbers. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about: segue.com.tw/sample.pdf

Also, this forum can be a destination for moderators who want to move job listings from their forums. I was browsing through the Tech in Taiwan forum yesterday. There are a handful of threads seeking professionals. These could be move to the Job Listings forum.

Here’s a twist
Even better, moderators might move a listing from their forum to the JL forum, and then move it BACK to their forum! This might create the effect of being listed in JL, but open for discussion back in their forum. (This just occurred to me now, and I’m NOT asking any moderator to do this. Please don’t accuse me of creating work for you :slight_smile:)

[quote=“gus”]I figure people should discuss positions in other forums. Teaching positions seem appropriate for discussion in the Teaching in Taiwan forum – I hope you guys haven’t narrowed your mandate to only curriculum and policy discussion.
[/quote]

No, I don’t think there should be any narrowing of the scope of Teaching. There might potentially be some overlap with Legal, or Culture, but we will be able to split threads over there when necessary.

Just had a look at the pdf. Looks good.

Comments from someone concerned about the recent changes to the Jobs database/forum:

The new career.segue.com.tw pages on the front are slowly coming along. I haven’t figured out why the recent links sometimes result in a “Header Error”. The main purpose of these pages is to encourage posting in the forum.

If I can get the “Recent Postings” stuff working in the career.segue.com.tw forms, this will addressed somewhat. Worse comes to worse, we could have a Recent Posts page WITHOUT a job posting form (like segue.com.tw/topics.php)

I’ve played around with the settings a bit – have a go now, and tell me what you think of the formatting now :slight_smile:

Good point. I’m a bit pressed for time, so I haven’t thought things through completely. Plus, I still have a couple of related login issues to fix. I’ll eventually separate (bring back) the contact people field

This is a bad thing? I’ll balance this ‘inconvenience’ with the hopeful publication of the print Segue Classifieds

This is a tough one. I don’t really want to ADD forums to Segue – although adding separate “Job” forums would solve more than one problem (see my number 2 above). I’ve brought up with Richard Hartzell the possiblity of having a separate set of forums, which use the SAME registrtion database as these forums. Let’s call this other set “Segue Strict.”

The Segue Strict forums could operate under different policies and different posting restrictions. Putting Several Job forums there would satisfy my requirement that they be in a phpBB format – from where I can easily pull titles and dates for the Print Segue Classifieds. However, I couldn’t expect volunteers to moderate discussions there MORE strictly (who has the time? certainly not people who’d do it for free/as a hobby)

Thanks for the feedback! Keep it coming :slight_smile: