A new topic!

[john]

Thanks to Mike Edwardes for suggesting this new topic for discussion. I feel it's well past time we had a topic of this nature. If anyone has any suggestions for other topics, please get in touch with me!

[john]

By the way, if you have suggestions for sub topic names, please reply to this thread with them.

[aaron]

John, maybe you could make a sub topic for pictures, and another one for plant questions...

~Aaron

[john]

Good ideas.

[justin]

hello john i think there should be a topic on diseases and cures most people would find this very helpful

[john]

I'll consider that. I think it's generally accepted that the help areas are for that though.

[ralf]

How about a topic concerning field-herping for caudates. A place to e.g. post reports of trips, info on methods and pics of natural habitats.

Ralf

[jesper]

I think justins idea is a good one, I would like to see all those disease questions in one place. There are too many different topics in the help sections, I find it difficult to get an overview. Subtopics of the help would be great.

[mike]

I really like the new topics, but I do think it would be a mistake to allow them to proliferate too much. I think Diseases & Treatment could be a useful subsection of Help, if that's posssible.

[nate]

I feel both diseases/treatments and field herping are both readily accommodated by the General Discussion, Species/Common Name, and Photo Gallery forums.

If it's a disease, generally it's hitting a specific animal and can be placed in the Species forums or in Newt Help.

If it's field herping, they can be placed in the photo gallery (like the recent trip Isaiah and I posted) or in the individual Species forums.

[justin]

the reason i suggested diseases and treatment is because i have just be looking on the newt help section and alot of the questions being ask about fungus,mouthrot etc have,nt been answered i just though it would help people like that justin

[nate]

That's very true justin. As jesper has pointed out, the experience level of the regular users here tends to be fairly high and some of those questions are going unnoticed/unanswered. I'm not sure what really can be done about that. I don't know much about treatments myself, but I'm not sure that giving them a specific forum is going to lead to the posts getting answered.

[jesper]

I see it like this:
I have found loads of info on treatments in this forum, often in old archives though. Now since help is a pretty broad subject, it has included tank setups, plant questions etc. This means that it is difficult to find these good posts if you are not familiar with the search engine. Now I hope that if diseases and treatments would be a topic of itself these post would be easier to find.

I remember the first time I saw the search engine menu, a lot of people give up at first sight of it I wagerhttp://www.caudata.org/forum/clipart/errr.gifhttp://www.caudata.org/forum/clipart/biggrin.gif
Cheers Jesper

[TJ]

Well, one way to avoid adding a new discussion on diseases/treatments would be to simply change the name of the currently available "Newt and Salamander Help" discussion to "Newt and Salamander Health". "General Discussion and News" seems sufficient to cover requests for help not relating to animal health, like equipment problems, etc., and most requests for help relate to health anyway. Also, there's already a new discussion thread here on plants where people could post their requests for help about plants. One way or another, I'd like to see more discussion here about health issues.

Finally, I'd prefer to see separate sub-topics for Cynops and Paramesotriton under the Fire-bellied Newts discussion, especially considering there are over 700 posts and almost 100 threads in there now, with archives...