Can the Historical Chase sub-forum be restored?

[Mike Johnston]

I know I have asked this before, but I think it's important enough to put some effort into. In the previous format, there was a section for "historical chases." Now, most of the posts weren't actual chase accounts at all, but many dealt with personal experiences of some of the most noteworthy storms over the past 5 decades. I think this is a record that is worthy of preserving. Does anyone else?

The problem is the historical chases have been just mixed in with all the other Target Area posts, and therefore sorted by the last posting date. Of course, the last posting date of a particular thread is completely random for the historical posts, and one must sort through hundreds of threads to find an historical account. I truly hope there is a reasonable, cost-effective way to re-segregate the historical section to preserve it for the ages.

 

[Jesse Risley]

Mike,

The administrators are on board with this request, and this was noted as a previous recommendation to Tim. It's likely that this will be done soon whenever Tim makes the changes that were noted a couple of weeks ago with his response in the other ongoing thread. Beyond that, I don't know what would be involved in restoring that sub-forum, so at this point it will be up to the site ownership to restore it.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Just a quick note that yes, we will be separating out the historical threads as you described. This should be done in the next several days.

 

[Mike Johnston]

Just a quick note that yes, we will be separating out the historical threads as you described. This should be done in the next several days.

Thanks for addressing this, Tim. I'm sure it probably just fell through the cracks when the last reorganization was done. But, making the effort to put it back together should be worth it (as long as it doesn't involve great cost) for the historical record.

IMO, one of the great strengths of this forum is the organization. I belong to several discussion forums of several topics of interest and I've always felt Stormtrack is top notch in terms of quality posts.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Thanks Mike... we are starting on this now.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

What do you all want the criteria to be for a thread to appear in Historical Events? Most pre-2000 threads can go in there, obviously, but how about Target Area threads for 2010 and 2011? Do they go in there? The FCST threads too? Also do you want to use the a YYYY-MM-DD thread name convention so they can easily be sorted, or do you want no specific thread name rules? Let me know what works best for you all.

Feel free to look at some of the threads I have in there right now for ideas.

Tim

 

[Mike Johnston]

Thanks for your efforts on attempting to restore the historical section, Tim. Also, thanks for soliciting feedback from the members.

My own thoughts:

On the conventions for the threads, I'm don't think it's that important to stick to a strict protocal as we do for the regular Target Area threads. First, many of the threads being restored from the "old" historical section had free-form titles already, so someone would have to go back and manually re-title the threads, which I'm not sure would be worth the benefit. After all, if someone is interested in the Andover tornado recounts, they will know fairly well to search for a thread including "Andover" or "04/26/91" anyway. Also, I'm not sure for historical events if there is enough distinction between "reports", "forecasts", and "nowcasts" to warrant any separation. After all, many of these accounts consist of childhood recollections, second-hand accounts, or general historical research. So, I think allowing free-form title threads is about the best we can practically do.

With regard to the date cutoffs for what constitutes an historical thread, I'm afraid that's all in the eye of the beholder. For me as a 50-year old, it would probably be pre-2000. But for a younger member it might be pre-2010 (although some events like Joplin, I recognize it will ultimately go down as an historical event.) So, do we take an approach like sports hall of fames, and have a certain "waiting period" to admit an event, upon reflection, in the context of the long reach of history, or simply transfer threads on a one-year interval? Probably no perfect answer for this, but maybe other members have some thoughts.

 

[Rob H]

For browsing purposes, a title schema would be very nice. Have it follow YYYY-MM-DD <brief description> or something. I would volunteer to manually re-title threads if it came down to no one else wanting to do it. Let the threads have whatever content people want to contribute, but if there was a FCST/NOW thread on Stormtrack, the thread starter might want to link to those in the first post.

I would think a chase year would be long enough to reflect on an event (so we could start talking about 2011 events if we desired). I love analyzing days like 6/17/10 and 5/24/11, and there's a lot to be gleaned from those days that wasn't captured in anyone's forecasting or nowcasting. Pre-2000 dates certainly count as historical in more ways than one - the data available is often substantially less than with an event like 6/17/10. Allowing some newer dates will benefit those who really like digging into the meteorological aspects.

 

[Shane Adams]

Yeah I agree. There were multiple schemes when I posted a new thread this morning, so I just mimicked the most recent threads.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

OK... so for Historical Events we'll go with a de facto "YYYY-MM-DD: Subject" convention so that threads will be easier to sort chronologically as the content grows, but it will be an unwritten convention. The mods will adjust threads manually whenever they have time, and there will be no consequences if someone starts a thread with a different format. In some cases, YYYY-MM-DD might not be ideal, such as in the case of general discussion about a multi-day outbreak.

As far as events in the past 10 years, all of which have a Target Area thread covering them, we'll selectively move a thread from Target Area to Historical Events if it's a significant chase event or the thread gets bumped regularly with new discussion. Whether the DISC, FCST, NOW, or REPORT gets moved, or all four, is still not clear, and we can work this out over the next couple of months. In the meantime, myself and other moderators will look through Target Area in our spare time and work on this. Probably no more than 3% of all of the Target Area threads will get moved into Historical Events. This will keep the 2000s category at a very reasonable 3 to 4 pages, keeping it limited to the cream of the crop. We'll also try to handle the moves so that a redirection link gets left behind in Target Area, in case anyone is looking for old threads there.

Tim