I am a new user who has struggled with the logistics of this excellent site. This thread caught my eye so I read all of the comments, and I understand that most replies like things the way they are. As pointed out, I can use the search if I have something specific in mind I want to read about and I think overall that for that purpose it works well, thank you. I also scanned the Discourse guide.
However, I find the forum overall daunting. I like to browse in topics I have not thought about so the search does not work for that approach. I would love to comment more but it is difficult where there are hundreds of posts going back years in a single thread (e.g. How to Reverse Skin Aging). I found one post 40 posts back to which I wanted to relate my own experience. I had to read the replies to that post, and then scan the current 40 posts for any other relevant post not a direct reply, then I scanned back a bit in time. During my perusal I noted posts on SPF which I might have found interesting or even contributed to if I could have read them without skipping all about. Perhaps I could have searched for “SPF”? I’ll try now. Some SPF threads and posts come up, including the entire giant one. The advanced filter gave me one post (maybe I’m doing something wrong). Are search query strings allowed? I tried “SPF in:seen” and I pull up 2 threads only, so I am not sure if it is working or if I really have only looked at 2 threads which contain “SPF”. I see there are tags but I did not find SPF but of course you cannot include everything. I am not requesting an SPF tag, just using as an example.
I don’t have any great suggestions, just a wish list. It would be nice to have a category for specific personal questions so they are not lost in General or Supplements or wedged into some giant impossibly long thread that is only adjacently related to the question. It would be good for tags to be used, perhaps a way to encourage their use could be found, like a tag sidebar. Sadly the Discourse site has few to no customizable tag options. Personally I think long messy threads should be truncated or broken up. The How to Reverse Skin Aging thread, for example, has so many different internal topics it is not possible to assimilate it all in a helpful manner. New agents come along and some are later discarded, but if one did not read the entire thread one might get the wrong impression about something if only going from earlier posts. Maybe you need a moderator to help you parse long threads like that one so that when an internal topic becomes popular you can just make a thread for that topic, like SPF, for example, which is certainly longevity-adjacent.
Perhaps you might consider having more categories too. Longevity can be systematically broken up into general categories. As a first approximation I come up with General Aging, Medications, Supplements, Food, Environment, Personal Questions, and perhaps Technical Research instead of “Doctors”. A category like General Aging might then have threads based on topics such as: Cellular senescence, Epigenetic changes, Fibrosis, Genomic Instability, Inflammation-chronic low-grade, Intercellular communication alterations, Microbiome dysregulation; Mitochondrial dysfunction, Nutrient sensing dysfunction, Progenitor cell exhaustion/dysfunction, Protein homeostasis dysregulation, Telomere changes (again, a first approximation list). And so forth. But that is a lot of work and perhaps it is better to be more informal.
All that being said, I very much appreciate the information and comments on this site and I commend the effort it must take to keep it going in whatever manner you prefer.
