then what's the search function for?
to quote a certain "wise" guy, "THIS THREAD IS POINTLESS. LOCK THREAD. DELETE!"
and quoting the same "wise" guy again, "Do we need such useless, time-wasting threads about things that are, needless to say, OBVIOUS?!"
Darn, I nearly forgot about this thread.
It is obvious that we are not on the same frequency, so I shall explain it in detail for you, so at least you understand the whole idea.
The whole idea IS to leave the thread there for people to SEE, for people to pop down and see whether they found the right person. Also, it allows aspiring musicians to be more easily noticed. I admit that perhaps, it may not be necessary to open a thread for EVERY single musician type, due to bandwidth constrains (a hindsight on my part, my apologies). But if we use the search function, there would be two disadvantages to it:
Firstly, the search tool
I typed "Guitarists" under search, and got a whole spew of results. While most of them were looking for guitarists (or advertising themselves), a glaring number of those were also irrelevant.
I typed "Keyboardists", and easily more then half the threads were NOT about keyboardists looking for bands.
The same result was achieved with the keyword "Bassists" and "Drummers"
One would end up trawling through a mass number of pages, looking for a potential bandmate, except this time, through even more rubbish! At least, if you trawled through 10 pages in the Musicians Wanted/Available, you would find at least 3 or 4 people that perhaps, fit your criteria. But the search function? You're trawling through threads that are NOT even relevant as well!
Also, notice one thing. To the left column, is a SEARCH function. At the top of the page, is ALSO another search function. But by typing the same keycode into BOTH functions, you'll get TWO DIFFERENT results.
Also, 2nd disadvantage.
I've noticed that SOFT is flooded with guitarists. At that time when I first suggested this idea, there were a LOT of posts for guitarists.
In fact, everyday, a new thread about an avaliable guitarist would pop up.
Now, this leads to certain threads from being bumped off the first page and into the pages behind.
Unless you're really badly looking for a particular person (or a non-guitarist), no one would want to trawl through 10 to 20 or even the whole forum to look for the person.
It's like searching for a needle in a haystack
The idea of breaking it up into smaller sub-forums would allow a lot more ease in searching for the right person.
So, if I needed to look for a vocalist, I would look for the Vocalist sub-forum, and try searching for the right one. I may not be successful, but it makes it less frustrating.
Also, you also must consider that not ALL SOFTies are come here regularly like some of us.
For me, I come online every night, so looking for one person may not be too difficult.
However, to those who are irregular, looking for the correct person would mean trawling through the forums like crazy, and many would just swear, throw their keyboards up in the air, and resort to finding that person somewhere else.
WHICH would KILL the whole point of SOFT being a musicians hub. If you can't even find the right musician at what we deem as the "biggest musician's hub in Singapore" (other people will disagree with me, but I'm sorry, I've yet to see any other anywhere else), then what's the point of SOFT? We can't even help our own fellow musicians find the right people!
One more thing to add:
If you post an ad, you definitely want to be found. You're looking for a band/musician and you want to find the right one.
If you leave it hanging there, it seems relatively pointless as well. Afterall, it can be there for a month and nothing happens. Fair enough, I have considered this (thanks to guitarsan, you helped me to see that flaw) and still think that its best to leave it there.
There's a higher chance that THAT right band/musician would see your ad and reply to you. It may take a day, a week, a month, etc. But at least, it saves him/her/them the trouble of trawling through countless pages, and saves you the trouble of bumping your post
Do you understand where I'm coming from?
To Eugenesmasher and guitarsan, thank you for your comments. They are relatively constructive and I HAVE to agree that, perhaps, joining certain musician threads would make the forum a lot less sparse. It had not occurred to me
