Unbuilt projects subforums misused, confusion on where to post

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totoro

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If i understand it correctly, unbuilt section of the forum is for projects that were planned and explored but never reached service and have since been abandoned. Correct me if that's wrong.

For projects that are in development, not yet in service, there is the general section.
Correct me if that is wrong.

And of course, for projects that ARE in service, again the general section is the place to go.

If the above is correct, a lot of topics should be moved from unbuilt subforums into the general section.

If the moderators agree but dont have time for it, i offer my service of making a list of such topics with their links, so easier transfer is possible.

Additionally and optionally, one or two more sections could be added to the general section. Like naval and missile sections.
(It really depends whether logic would be division by service (army/navy/air force) or division by platform type/launch platform medium)
 
I tend to police the Postwar Secret Aircraft Projects forum from time to time on this point, but not the other sections. That would be up to the moderators of other sections to enforce (or not).
 
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totoro said:
If i understand it correctly, unbuilt section of the forum is for projects that were planned and explored but never reached service and have since been abandoned. Correct me if that's wrong.

For projects that are in development, not yet in service, there is the general section.
Correct me if that is wrong.

And of course, for projects that ARE in service, again the general section is the place to go.

If the above is correct, a lot of topics should be moved from unbuilt subforums into the general section.

If the moderators agree but dont have time for it, i offer my service of making a list of such topics with their links, so easier transfer is possible.

Additionally and optionally, one or two more sections could be added to the general section. Like naval and missile sections.
(It really depends whether logic would be division by service (army/navy/air force) or division by platform type/launch platform medium)
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I think a lot of forum members simply put things in "unbuilt" because they are under development and are technically "unbuilt", although the purpose of those sections are as you've mentioned. Otherwise, I also think a lot of the members are hesitant on using general Military section, well, because it's too general.

Also, I think Paul has made a comment on that matter a good while ago, noting that he doesn't want to add more sections to the "General" category, since that would actually cause more chaos than getting things sorted. While I am not sure if that was exactly what he said, I think that was the gist, and I do agree to it to a certain degree.
 
People will keep adding present day projects in unbuilt section if not A) discouraged to do so or/and B) if encouraged to do it elsewhere, like by adding more categories in the general section.

it would also help tremendously if the title and description of the general section was more clear. like this:
instead of "general", that it'd be called "In service systems & projects in development"
and that the description for it reads: "Discussions on systems that have reached service, both historical and present day ones; also projects currently in development"

I don't think we know if adding more categories would create more chaos. Certainly, right now it's chaos with bunch of topics in unbuilt subsections being there when they should not be there. If someone wants to search for true unbuilt projects, they have to sift through most topics which are NOT unbuilt first.
But as said, change of title and description doesn't cost much to implement but it would make it clearer what's the section about.

I will start making a list of topics that could be moved to general section in the coming days.
 
totoro said:
Certainly, right now it's chaos with bunch of topics in unbuilt subsections being there when they should not be there
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Chaos is a big issue, I agree. I take note from your post
 
Which sections are you talking about?

Secret Postwar Aircraft Projects seems in a fairly good state - most of the topics seem valid.

I can't vouch for all the other Secret Project sections though, I rarely read them.
 
I do think there is actually some reason to rethink the forum structures.

The reality is there is increased demand for topics of a general aviation and military nature as a percentage of posts. I used to see these as somewhat of a distraction from what I regarded as the "core forum business" but perhaps that is doing a disservice to members.

"Secret Missile, Bomb and Gun Projects" attracts posts about new missile projects and even well known and much produced missiles, simply because it has missiles in the name.

Also, sometimes people search for existing topics to post in and don't notice which forum that topic was in, accidentally repurposing it against its original intention.

I fix up all the topics like this I encounter, but it has to have been a topic of interest to me for me to read it - I don't read every topic, every day.

So, suggestions on how it could be reorganised to fit better are welcome.
 
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overscan (PaulMM) said:
Which sections are you talking about?

Secret Postwar Aircraft Projects seems in a fairly good state - most of the topics seem valid.

I can't vouch for all the other Secret Project sections though, I rarely read them.
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missile section, by far the biggest issue. that's why i believe making a separate missile section is warranted:


There are probably more topics, these are just ones from the first page. Some of these have been started as actual unbuilt project topics but their names were vague and there were soon enough hijacked by people adding posts about actual in service missiles or missiles in active development. Which is also a problem.

Space section (there are likely more, but I am not knowledgeable enough to tell them apart just from titles)


Naval section:

land:
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
The reality is there is increased demand for topics of a general aviation and military nature as a percentage of posts. I used to see these as somewhat of a distraction from what I regarded as the "core forum business" but perhaps that is doing a disservice to members.
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I'm possibly wrong, but visiting the full forum sections almost daily, I have some feeling that actually two forums co-exist. The core secret projects sections and the general section acting like what was "key publishing" forum.
I have this feeling because of the ever increasing activity in the general section. One of the reason is compulsive posting on breaking news with little value for the long term. Also long discussions end in messy threads. Some very active posters from this section are rarely seen on the core sections. I think that "thread contamination" referred by Totoro is collateral damage from compulsive posting. Seems that it occurs when someone has a headline and needs to post it before being overtaken by another member.
 
In my opinion, the confusion results from the very use of the words "built and "unbuilt".
The real distinction to be made is between production types and the rest.
Anything that ever was a project, a one-off prototype or even several prototypes should be in the "Projects" sections (sub-forums/boards). Anything that led to a production batch, however small, belongs in "Aerospace".
 
Many of those flagged topics (you are quite right about them) started out intended as Projects discussions but have been hijacked, yes. often due to poor choice of topic name I think as well as some forum posters behaviours. The M1 topic was originally about historic M1 Abrams replacement projects then got hijacked for current projects.

Perhaps something like this:

Projects and Prototypes (never-built designs and prototypes)
- Early Aircraft Projects and Prototypes
- Postwar Aircraft Projects and Prototypes
- Drone/UAV Projects and Prototypes
- Missile, Bomb and Gun Projects and Prototypes
- Space Projects and Prototypes
- Naval Projects and Prototypes
- Army Projects and Prototypes

General Discussions (actually built equipment of the past, present and future)
- Early Aircraft
- Postwar Aircraft
- Drones
- Missiles
- Space
- Navy
- Army

Then we have an exact mirror of each Projects topic in the General Discussions section.
 
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Agreed. I always thought that the "Aerospace" header was a little too vast as it encompassed anything that was ever produced in aviation. Mirroring the "projects" and "built" sections would remedy that.
 
Stargazer said:
In my opinion, the confusion results from the very use of the words "built and "unbuilt".
The real distinction to be made is between production types and the rest.
Anything that ever was a project, a one-off prototype or even several prototypes should be in the "Projects" sections (sub-forums/boards). Anything that led to a production batch, however small, belongs in "Aerospace".
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Originally these were "Secret ...." (deriving from the typical Midland Counties book naming "Secret Projects of the Luftwaffe" etc) but that was attracting posts about Aurora and other speculative "Secret" stuff, I changed to "Unbuilt" hoping that made more sense. It may not.
 
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Stargazer said:
Agreed. I always thought that the "Aerospace" header was a little too vast as it encompassed anything that was ever produced in aviation. Mirroring the "projects" and "built" sections would remedy that.
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The initial purpose of most non-project sections was mostly to siphon off posts from polluting my projects sections. I agree that the balance of posts today is a lot different to 10 years ago. The amount of new 'secret projects' information being posted is decreased, and the more general discussions increased a lot.
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Many of those flagged topics (you are quite right about them) started out intended as Projects discussions but have been hijacked, yes. often due to poor choice of topic name I think as well as some forum posters behaviours. The M1 topic was originally about historic M1 Abrams replacement projects then got hijacked for current projects.

Perhaps something like this:

Projects and Prototypes (never-built designs and prototypes)
- Early Aircraft Projects and Prototypes
- Postwar Aircraft Projects and Prototypes
- Drone/UAV Projects and Prototypes
- Missile, Bomb and Gun Projects and Prototypes
- Space Projects and Prototypes
- Naval Projects and Prototypes
- Army Projects and Prototypes

General Discussions (actually built equipment of the past, present and future)
- Early Aircraft
- Postwar Aircraft
- Drones
- Missiles
- Space
- Navy
- Army

Then we have an exact mirror of each Projects topic in the General Discussions section.
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That sounds very good. If i may just suggest, for extra clarity to users, that "general discussions" be labeled "General Military discussions"
 
There is also a category which can arise confusion which is modern projects in development. It's impossible to know if they are going to end cancelled or into series production.

I suggest creating a new thread at General discussions from the moment it enters series production, keeping the original thread at "unbuilt". Thus, future developments will be placed depending on being translated into hardware or not.

Related to the dispersion of information which difficult research I suggest to discourage the creation of wide inespeciffic threads like UAV would be replaced with more specific subject threads in order to avoid some threads growing into the infinite.
 
I understand the issue but i'd go about it the other way around. If it's a fully funded by government (not a demonstrator or company funded project with uncertain future) project, i'd put it in general section. If it gets cancelled, it goes to unbuilt section. Reason being that more than 50% of fully funded projects (at least high profile enough that someone will make a thread about it) will indeed see active service.
 
totoro said:
That sounds very good. If i may just suggest, for extra clarity to users, that "general discussions" be labeled "General Military discussions"
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Then where do you put discussions about civilian aircraft?!
 
totoro said:
If it's a fully funded by government (not a demonstrator or company funded project with uncertain future) project, i'd put it in general section. If it gets cancelled, it goes to unbuilt section. Reason being that more than 50% of fully funded projects (at least high profile enough that someone will make a thread about it) will indeed see active service.
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Again, why limit the question to military aircraft? Civilian aircraft are also to be covered and discussed.
Also, I think there may be some overthinking as to where to put what. If an aircraft is in planned production, but still in the prototype stages, it should remain in the "Projects" section. If production takes place, a moderator can always move the topic to the proper section — or better still, create a new, separate topic linked from the old one, to clearly separate what was discussed hypothetically from the facts (and also to avoid those 50-page long topics...)
 
Stargazer said:
Then where do you put discussions about civilian aircraft?!
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Into a separate civilian section. Because civilian aircraft is gonna have like 20% of the total aircraft posts. So it should not be impacting nomenclature of the remaining 80 %.

If systems start by default in unbuilt sections, they will tend to stay there even after they enter service. That's simply human psychology. After all, moderators do not get paid and why should they do the extra work of continuously moving stuff around.
So what I propose is to gauge which type of projects have a good likelihood of reaching service and have such projects go straight into general discussion sections. Again, most big item stuff that is funded by government tends to reach service. For every A12 Avenger, Comanche helo, Crusader artillery - there are several other big item projects that did reach service. So the statistics are on the side of trusting that when billions have been invested, something will come out of it. Will there be some projects that will die before entering service and moderators will have to move them around? Sure. But it will happen less often than if all projects start in the unbuilt section and then successful ones have to be moved to general section.
 
A thread i created about Proposed Taurus cruise missile variants was, i suspect as a result of his discussion, moved from the Secret Missile, Bomb and Gun Projects section to the Military section.
I understand that this is a complicated issue for the moderators, but i am unhappy with the decision in this case and i think it illustrates a lot of the current problems with the categorization of threads.

When i created the thread, the intent was to collect information on unbuilt Taurus variants. Thats why i used the Secret Projects section and named it Proposed Taurus cruise missile variants. My posts represented a majority of the contributions to the topic and all of them focused on variants that have never been built and that are to my knowledge not currently in development.
In September people started posting news about Taurus in the thread, probably because there was no other existing thread about Taurus and as a result it has now been moved to the Military section.
Considering that this was never the intended purpose of the topic i feel like a better solution would have been to move the off-topic contributions to a new Taurus News thread. I understand that this would represent a lot more work for the moderators, but i think moving a thread with research contributions to the General section damages the primary purpose of this site.

A very similar thing happened to the Vought Jtacms thread, that was at some point hijacked by people posting news about Atacms, resulting in it being moved to the Military section.
In my opinion moving all these threads does not solve the issue of a few posters hijacking topics by spamming news articles and makes it harder to actually find information on Unbuilt Projects.
 
I think the main 'problem' ( if we can call it that ), is that there are two types of projects; 'dead' projects, and 'living' projects.
'Dead' projects, are things like Luft'46, TSR.2, and the new Caproni stuff that has recently been posted here. They've completed their llfe cycle, and while there they may be more information to be found, there will be no further development, production, service use, etc.
'Living' projects, are things like GCAP, NGAD, and FLRAA. Things like these are currently in development, but may either proceed no further than their current state, or make it into production and service, but at the moment it is not sure what will happen.
Then there is also a third class of 'Schrodinger's' projects. M-1 Abrams dvelopment is a classic example of this. There have been upgrades and developments, which have been proposed, then cancelled or abandoned, and so are 'dead', while others are still very much 'living', but which are placed in the same topic as the 'corpses'.
It sems to me that the primary organisation of the Forum should be to separate the 'dead' from the 'living'. This would, of course, mean splitting the 'Schrodinger's' topics . . .

cheers,
Robin.
 
Building upon Overscan's suggestion I'm suggesting the following:

1730331885403.png
The idea of separating civilian and military types, however logical, would result in too many sub-forums, and also would complicate things when a family of aircraft was produced in both civilian and military versions.
 
Antonio said:
... One of the reason is compulsive posting on breaking news with little value for the long term.
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Respectfully disagree. Retention of this ephemeral data becomes increasingly valuable as time passes due to source site link rot, reorganization/renaming of resources (that's you, DTIC) , paywalling, or just plain disappearing. The interwebz are far more fragile than dead trees.
 
Well, to complete the picture we just have to decide where currently in development projects should go. Maybe a vote?
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Agree - and that's a great reason to include some kind of summary, otherwise all you end up with is a link. Link is something (you can try the Wayback Machine for it and get lucky sometimes) but not as good as a summary.
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I usually skip link-only messages. Most of the time I cannot see if anything interesting is pointed to, and they are infesting the forum like a plague. When I do click on those links, nine times out of ten they are a waste of time.

Give a summary, and I will read. Without a summary, I will skip.
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Well, to complete the picture we just have to decide where currently in development projects should go. Maybe a vote?
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If a project is in, or in the past has reached production - aerospace or military. This should, in my opinion, involve moving topics there from projects.
If in development, or never went further than prototype stage - projects.
 
Stargazer said:
The idea of separating civilian and military types, however logical, would result in too many sub-forums, and also would complicate things when a family of aircraft was produced in both civilian and military versions.
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Seems like an eminently sensible proposal to me.

To put the cat among the pigeons.... there are a few threads knocking around for non-military, non-aviation projects. Certainly one for architecture, I think there are a couple of car threads, there are definitely a few ocean liners in the Naval projects forum. Does this kind of material need a 'home'?
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Well, to complete the picture we just have to decide where currently in development projects should go. Maybe a vote?
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My view of the forums is very much like your own, the cancelled/unbuilt stuff being the primary focus. My preference is therefore something along the lines of the 'Living' vs. 'Dead' projects.
 
Arjen said:
Give a summary, and I will read. Without a summary, I will skip.
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Totally agree. I very rarely click on links to pages or videos.
Sharing a link is kind of a "lazy" contribution to me. Besides, link often become broken after a few months.
That is the reason why I save every contents of interest and prefer to share files which will live on in the forum.
 
totoro said:
People will keep adding present day projects in unbuilt section if not A) discouraged to do so or/and B) if encouraged to do it elsewhere, like by adding more categories in the general section.

I don't think we know if adding more categories would create more chaos. Certainly, right now it's chaos with bunch of topics in unbuilt subsections being there when they should not be there. If someone wants to search for true unbuilt projects, they have to sift through most topics which are NOT unbuilt first.

But as said, change of title and description doesn't cost much to implement but it would make it clearer what's the section about.
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Well, I'm happy about the fact that there's someome who's as picky as I am, since I am already guilty of bothering mods a bit too much by requesting moves and merges quite frequently.

Though there's always the problem of limbo or "standing at the boundary" projects that makes it quite tricky where it should belong.

And I share some opinions with these posts below to a certain degree.
Antonio said:
There is also a category which can arise confusion which is modern projects in development. It's impossible to know if they are going to end cancelled or into series production.
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Voltzz said:
I understand that this is a complicated issue for the moderators, but i am unhappy with the decision in this case and i think it illustrates a lot of the current problems with the categorization of threads.
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A good example is KEPD-150 Taurus L. It's currently in a limbo status where Taurus GmbH is holding active talks with variius Korean companies to built it under the new name KEPD-350K2, though this proposal is yet to formally enter development just yet.

Should we cleanup the Taurus Projects threads and create a new thread in the in-service section for general KEPD-350 related discussion, where should the KEPD-350K2 fit into? It makes sense to post this into the either thread.

The thing is, for individual members, making their own decision is easy. What's not easy is to keep everyone fo follow the same decision.

What follows is that we get two concurrent discussions about the same topic for these kinds of limbo projects.

overscan (PaulMM) said:
Also, sometimes people search for existing topics to post in and don't notice which forum that topic was in, accidentally repurposing it against its original intention.
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I think it would be great if there's a way we could encourage forum members to use "search title only" function more often. A lot of threads created on-the-fly could actually be avoided if forum members did so.

Antonio said:
I have some feeling that actually two forums co-exist. The core secret projects sections and the general section acting like what was "key publishing" forum.
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I'm also guilty of this so I concur :oops:

Arjen said:
I usually skip link-only messages. Most of the time I cannot see if anything interesting is pointed to, and they are infesting the forum like a plague. When I do click on those links, nine times out of ten they are a waste of time.

Give a summary, and I will read. Without a summary, I will skip.
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I give a short summary of what I link most of the times, yes, but sometimes (albeit rarely) it does feel like even the summary isn't requured because it's such an important topic and the title captures the essence good enough.

Though I mostly agree. Especially considering how good LLM chatbots are nowadays, you don't even need to summarize thing yourself. I think it is indeed lazyness.
 
I think it could also help if there's a general posting guideline (separate from rules) that is visible to forum members with ease. Things are obviously quite clear if you are mindful enough, since "Forum Rules" is linked in the front page, but I think it would be better to separate the rules (things like "don't post your fantasy projects") from posting guidelines ("first search forum for existing threads before posting.", "Google is your friend", rule revision 12, etc.).

Maybe those things should be made red? It would be a heck of an eyesore and would be aesthetically very unpleasing so it would be great if there's another way.

Several things I could think of :

  • Search with titles only before you search.
  • When searching, use the country name, demonym of said country and abbreviation (especially often a problem with Korean countries that are very often called ROK and DPRK)
  • Thread title guideline (this has also been discussed in a separate thread)
 
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Hello,
if this philosophy is applied, I see plenty of threads that should be moved from "Aviation & Space" to early aircraft or postwar projects and prototypes. For example: Fairey Rotodyne (1 prototype), NA XB-70 Valkyrie (2 prototypes), Romano 120 (1 prototype), NC.510 (3 prototypes), cyclogyro (no series), XF-85 Goblin (1 prototype), Bell X-5 (1 prototype), Lockheed Have Blue (1 prototype), NA X-15 (2 prototypes), SE.3200 Frelon (2 prototypes), MB.480 (2 prototypes), XB-42/43 (2 prototypes of each model), YB-60 (1 prototype), C.450 Coleoptere (1 prototype), etc.

The history of each of them is now closed. No more prototypes or production will be built or fly again.
 
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We've vacillated over the years as to whether prototypes belong with production aircraft or projects.

We've also flip-flopped on current but as yet not in production projects.

I guess we should make a firm call and amend the rules appropriately.
 
I remember that we had this discussion before, when the current layout was implemented a few years back.
I think at that time the decision was made that if a contemporary project - like NGAD, AIM-260etc. - was cancelled that the mods would move it to the relevant project section. I don't recall this happening in most cases.
But a lot of these threads, like NGAD and B-21 one, are 95% speculation and prediction posts rather than actually directly related to solid news. So they are much harder to classify.
I also recall that prototypes were classified as 'built' and therefore were not suitable for project sections, which did feel odd to me. This mostly seems to have been ignored.

I think there is a danger of too much salami-slicing - Paul and Stargazer's proposals have 14 sub-forums, which would be fairly hefty to navigate and - as Maro.Kyo says - if members don't follow the rules and still post news or other tangentially-related material in project posts then we still have the same problem.

In terms of organisation I was thinking along these lines:
1730372857943.png

The Contemporary sections would be for current projects, which could then be filtered out to the other sections as and when they become production items. Upgrades, new variants etc. would go into the other production strands and not into the project thread.


The golden rule should always be - search first and then post. I've lost count how many times I've seen the same video or Twitter post posted to 2-3 threads by 2-3 different people within the space of a few hours.
Same with links without summary - usually pretty pointless.


But any moving of threads is going to be a massive job for the moderation team to split out all the non-project posts (and vice versa). I'm not sure its feasible to do this for every post since 2006, so it's going to have be give and take really.
 
I understand that this forum's entire premise is on projects, especially secret / unbuilt projects, which is primarily why I frequent this site so much, as opposed to Axis History Forum, where the posts hardly touch on such things in depth and is almost exclusively either very niche topics or very broad ones. That being said, is there any room on this site for archiving / dumping? I have thousands of WW1-WW2 photographs, documents, blueprints, maps (etc.) I would like to share them with people, but I really have no way to do so outside of making relevant threads on specific topics. I suppose such a request is probably unwarranted compared to the current conversation but I figured I would lobby for it--why not. ;)
 
Antonio said:
I’m ready for massive post movings. Trust on me ;)
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A couple of weeks ago, and before all this recent discussion started, I asked Paul if there was any possibility for me to help with reorganizing some topics (renaming, moving, merging, splitting) like I once did a lot on this forum, but WITHOUT reinstating me as a moderator. If he finds the technical solution around that, I'm also more than willing to give a hand!
 
Stargazer said:
I once did a lot on this forum
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You did an outstanding job. I'm so grateful to you.
However I note that index threads you did and I absolutely love, aren't perdurable. The forum nature is dynamic, opposite to a "wikipedia site". Since we continuously need to move, split, or rename threads, the links broke.
Thus, I think to the key is rely on the search tool to allow the closer archive-like experience while actually having a forum.
To enjoy it my recipe is defining a clear structure of threads and being tight with threads names and posting the right place. That's a responsibility for all members with moderator's additional "household" activity.
 

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