This bit of meta is brough to you by kff17's comment (http://www.thekeyplay.com/comment/282825#comment-282825) in ChicagoHokie's "Jarrod Hewitt, 2016 D-Tackle" thread which left me thinking, how do we want to organize our recruiting discussions?
There was a "Football: Official 2016 Recruiting Thread" thread started by ltrepeter2000, but that hasn't been maintained in what seems to be over a year. As such, for the time being I hid it. A good deal of the massive TKP community cares about discussing recruiting, but the discussion is a bit segmented. This is my proposal:
A) For new scholarship offers, decision day information (time and date), announcements, release of a top 3, 5, 10, etc list, significant change in a prospect's recruitment, or any new information simply start a new thread.
Ensure the same thread doesn't already exist beforehand. Include all relevant links and a summary in the new thread. Create a sensible title: "YEAR POSITION FIRST NAME LAST NAME INFO", e.g. "2016 WR Phillip Patterson's Top 6". Spell the kid's name right. Use the "Forums" drop down to start the thread in the "Recruiting" forum.
If the information is from Twitter, embed the relevant tweets from the original source (in all likelihood the recruit himself). Take a few seconds to find the original source / tweet. Avoid embedding a tweet from a 247Sports staffer that's just a link to a bolt which contains nothing more than a recruit's tweet, Hudl video and summary. That information is what you should prepare for your thread.
If you don't know how to embed a tweet, this is how: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169559-embedding-a-tweet-on-your-....
If you don't know how to embed a Hudl video: http://public.hudl.com/support/highlights-recruiting/highlights-for-medi....
If embedding tweets or Hudl videos are over your head after reading through those two links, don't start a thread and stay out of the self checkout line at the grocery store.
B) I can make a new thread every four months for general recruiting discussion. "2016 Recruiting Thread I", "2017 Recruiting Thread I". Do y'all want this?
C) Alex will continue publishing his interviews and articles to the front-page. There's no change there.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Comments
Solid ideas Joe. I like it.
Can we still have the debate over the value of star ratings every single recruiting thread? Because that would be awesome. /s
Clearly a comment from 2 star. /s
Is there anyway for someone to periodically update a general recruiting page? Maybe a writer or just someone super into recruiting?
Yeah like if someone could maintain a table of offers. It could list the player, position, other offers and a link to any relevant articles Alex has written. Then you could have another table for te his Alex has written about but might my have offers yet. Or that might be too much work. I don't mind how things are now. So long as no one decides to be a dick about it.
This is probably what most people want, but it would be a lot of work to update and maintain. Not a thread, just a page that tabulated: recruiting class, player, position, relevant links, Alex's articles, etc.
@TKP_Recruting does a great job of who we offered, top 5s, etc. My general reaction when seeing a re-tweeted offer is " we offered a DT (or whatever position)... Cool". But I have no context. Having a centralized reference of who we've offered, at which position, who has verbaled, etc.
Then, if there's breaking news we can make a new thread as usual.
Do we have a recruiting coordinator? Just thinking they could maintain the necessary threads and verify #sources.
Do we have a recruiting coordinator?
Yes. Stiney. We should just have him do it.
I don't mind helping him stay organized...
I nominate French as the recruiting coordinator. My only suggestion is that people stop using 247 as an end all be all."we" thekeyplay can do our own thing.
When the threads get too long, it gets difficult to follow. That's why, to me, an official recruiting thread is just not practical. There are too many players and too many twists and turns. I think Kumah alone had about 4 topics.
Yeah, I think open recruiting threads are pretty useless. Individual threads for individual prospects.
That's my stance too. One massive thread becomes a mess over time.
i laughed
Don't laugh. That is serious advice that could possibly save mankind.
I was thinking when reading ltrepeter2000's great thread that it would be helpful if the thread, post, etc. could be edited by any user. In theory Alex could start a thread with a table or list or something and anyone could update it (like Wikipedia) when some new info breaks. This would help spread the workload around rather than place the huge task on one person.
great idea
Should go without saying, but just make sure that the poster provides information that is current and relevant, and if it is #sources, then make that clear. Wikipedia isn't known for it's profound accuracy. Maybe have a separate section for unverified scuttlebutt.
That is what VTGuitarMan and his swift justice is sworn to protect us from! I had in mind that this would be some tracker that would have recruits specs, ratings, offers, top whatever list, decision, etc. Posts would still be made about visits or high priority material. Just some sort of home base for recruiting info.
Permalink @ top or bottom of page to the proposed table...or to an automatic @TKP_recruiting/@AlexKomaVT tweet aggregator.
I like the idea. Making TKP website a one-stop shop to see those tweets, instead of having to search and go through individual twitter pages.
Ok, I won't start a thread but dammit I can do a self- checkout at the grocery store. :-)
I wish there was self check-out available here in Peru, but the bag boys who carry your groceries to your car no matter where it is parked, and never accept tips, those guys I REALLY appreciate.
Starting a thread is still out of my league, lurking and laughing is just my old-guy style. Thanks to all who work so hard to make this site so ridiculously fun to read and learn from.
OT: don't remember if you've had military service (edit: yes, navy pilot) but the baggers at the Commissaries work only for tips. It's hard not to feel bad just taking my own bag out to the car, as I usually don't buy much and they've added self checkouts. .
I like the idea of proposal B. Maybe even do it quarterly. That way instead of having a year long thread that gets cumbersome and outdated after a few months, you get a new thread with relatively up to date info. I know you guys are already stretched pretty thin, but having staff managing the quarterly posts would ensure that they stay up to date.
I also really like the idea of standardizing the format of the posts (content and titles).
On a somewhat related note, has anyone seen or heard from ltrpeter2000 lately? He was a pretty regular commenter that always posted good info.
....is lurking. Baby #2 almost here, job changed a bit so less time on a computer. Still have my swivel up but Joe and his team have been doing a pretty bang up job so I have only been chiming in if it hasn't already been brought up or if I think I have a unique perspective on a topic.
As for this topic, if we go to a consolidated post on a regular basis I will be glad to help. Maintaining data is something I have a knack for.
I like the suggestions about standards for posting. I hope those will take hold.
Probably the biggest issue is curation; in that respect, I like point (B) because it says "here is the official stuff that we know at this point." I might even build on that to suggest a link like the "French on the Bench" at the bottom of the Active Discussions to the "official" (staff) posts (Alex's stories and quarterly updates from Joe and anyone else). I think interest in recruiting is just as high as film reviews at this point, so it may merit its own section. I know we have a recruiting forum, but a direct link to filtered posts would be very nice. I know I tend to go straight for Active Discussions rather than the Forum link; that may be worth polling the TKP community - "how do you find the content that is interesting to you when you visit?"
Maybe the Active Discussions can even be parsed/grouped a bit. Headings for Football, Basketball, OT, Recruiting, Front Page, etc. based on the tags assigned when making the post. That way there's a clear delineation of "here's what we're talking about" and people can easily spot topics of interest. That may help in eliminating double posting and weak threads that provide little information or just ask questions because stuff is hard to find, especially if you're not here every
few minutesday like me, and unread threads build up. We certainly don't have a big problem with this, but maybe it's something to think about. This basically feeds off the question in the previous paragraph.Aside directly to Joe - if there are more things that I can do (curating, merging threads, etc) to help out, let me know. Maybe that's more of an infrastructure/CMS/TKP 3.0 issue, but keep it in mind. I'm happy to help.
C'mon! Who really avoids the self check out line?
Ehhh.....
I do, most of the time that I'm shopping somewhere that has self checkouts, my cart is too full to not have to pull bags off the scale before I'm done. Also I would argue that while they might theoretically save you some time, in practice it takes longer since you can't do all the things you would normally do while the cashier is checking out your items, like getting your payment ready putting full bags in your cart, and browsing the overpriced impulse candy.
Joe,
I just saw this thread and something just popped in my mind.
1. under the recruiting subhead, create both a football & basketball recruiting directory(already there)
2. create a form field feature that only allows users to enter a header that shows (recruiting year, name, position, state) a standard format, so each recruit will have their own thread
3. ask the moderator(s) to make sure double headers are eliminated or code them out in the header form
4. allow these threads to show recent post first, rather than original post first. (this will keep the recent information at the top so you don't have to scroll to the bottom)
5. I am not familiar with how the TKP forum rearranges posts but i believe the most recent activity moves the thread to the top, which will prevent you from having to scroll for a recruit with recent information. Of course the source post will have to scroll but they will reap the rewards of legs.
This approach takes little effort to maintain, is fairly simple to implement and helps to easily navigate the various recruits with out having to go through every thread to find information on one recruit. All the recruit's information would be in one thread and it would self maintain itself. I believe no other site does this either, personally I would love it, its a pain in the arse to have keep clicking and reading 500 threads to find information on one recruit. If all the recruits information was in a thread on that recruit alone it would make life so much easier.
also if the information is irrelevant it can easily be down voted, which would require no changes
other posters have posted an idea about the title similar to mine and I would like to apologize, I quickly scrolled down, to post to the comment section, without seeing your posts. I know, I am new, so I don't want anyone to feel like I took their idea.
Everybody is the same here, we are all Hokies. Well, except for those LOLVA lurkers.
I really think this place needs a compiled database of targeted recruits that is its own section, not just a post on the recruiting forum. That's the one area where I feel TSL is ahead of TKP, their recruiting section is on point. But I think that would be really easy to set up here.
Also, and I'm not sure how practical this is, I think it would be awesome if TKP gave its own rating on recruits in addition to the standard battery of rankings. I'd be much more interested to hear how French rates an O lineman than how some 247 analyst who has to evaluate thousands of recruits does the same. The brain trust here could do an amazing job at projecting how a specific recruit would fit into our system.
It would be like the Malibu rum commercials where they predict sunshine for everyone's weather. "Committed to Tech? 5 stars!"
I think option A is the only way to go here. Like mentioned above threads get ridiculously long as is with with off topic reply's to comments while they are mostly hilarious and fun sometimes they just make it hard to follow the main subject.
keep a google doc as the master list with a link on this page and any updated information from the thread can be added to the doc? Can access control it with just the creator being able to update or allow posters with the link to update.
like this?
that's what I was getting at. maybe add in some columns for their top 3/top5 whatever their latest is, announcement dates if it's known etc. good start.
an example could be tino ellis with his top 6 coming out soon which will include VT, UMD, WVU I assume and his announcement date 7/31
Since it's been brought up before about increasing Tech's recruiting footprint, and that would depend on the vision you have for this website, but why not a whole new section designed to create some interest among players in Virginia Tech. Not necessarrily a hudl type thingy, but something legal, and cool and trendy and maybe interactive.