Keep mobile posting quick: could Mumbai threads add a school-catchment field?

A

avery.james

Market analyst
Market Reporter
I’d like school-catchment details on the Mumbai board to be searchable, but not at the cost of making mobile posting tedious. A mandatory entry could also encourage guesses from members who do not know the answer.

Would an optional structured field be a better compromise than free-form tags? It could improve consistency in property comparisons while leaving ordinary posts quick to create. There is also the question of older threads: should they remain unclassified, or could moderators and members add the field gradually when reliable information is available?
 
I’d use an optional structured field that becomes searchable. A required field could slow down posts and force people to enter unreliable information when they do not know the catchment. Free-form tags would be quicker to introduce, but spelling variations and different school names could make the results messy.
 
One missing detail: would members choose a school, type an area served by that school, or simply mark that catchment information is available? Those produce very different searches. Mumbai may also need a different set-up from boards where catchments are commonly described in another way.
 
I’m not convinced catchment should sit at thread level. A market report may cover several neighbourhoods or schools, and boundaries or admissions relevance may not match the area used for the property discussion. A filter could then imply more precision than the post contains. A standard tag plus a prompted line in the posting form might be safer initially.
 
A small trial on the Mumbai board seems sensible: add an optional field hidden under “more details” on mobile, allow moderators to merge duplicate tags, and see whether members actually search it. I would not migrate every old thread. Older posts could remain unlabelled, with tags added only when someone updates a thread or when the catchment is already clear from its content.
 
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