We were having a constructive conversation and someone moved it into the MEGAthread. Which is currently at 91 pages and 2,790 replies. How is anyone supposed to have a conversation in that mess?
Or is that the motive behind the action? Disrupt the complaints. Sweep the verbal issues under the rug, hide them in plain sight?
Is this not a General Discussion forum?
Please can we stop lumping all these threads into one giant mess? Please?
I'm not sure why I'm even typing this, they'll just sweep it into the mess as well.
More specific complaint threads and the like won't be swept up into it. Only threads that are like, "Well, I played 4e for the first time and this is what I think..."
We were just in the process of getting some people together to make our own index and/or collect tables and charts to be organized into appendices.
Thread "Does WotC have EDITORS that worked on 4E PHB?" was moved into the megathread. It was a 2-3 page thread and should NOT have been moved into the megathread.
My first impression of the new D&D 4E is that is a great start to a new game. Now you have my thoughts on the new edition.
On the other hand, my post "4E -- Something New" was not a first impression post. I thought it was a unique approach to the many negative or critical post abouts the new edition. Thoughts that critique the game and smash it have a purpose.
My post was more about how I was going to use those criticisms to improve my game as it evolved. I would respectfully ask that my post be placed back in General Discussion Forum?
Seems there needs to be more rigid guidelines put in place for this sort of thing. How are we to have constructive conversations about 4E when someone is arbitrarily taking what could be over 1,000 different conversations and lumping them into one abomination of a thread.
Why have forums at all? I mean, just pile everyone's comments on an effing guestbook circa 1995 and be done with it.
This disturbs me.
The intent wasn't to keep doing it forever, either, just take care of the initial crush which I suspect we're past.
Can someone fix it?
The megathread is just a big garbage pile, so any thread merged there means that your post is worthless in WotC eyes.
When a forum post is moved, the moderator who moved it should be noted visibly.
Accountability.
Well, that's a wonderful example of why I think the forum leads choices were dubious at best.
Is that directed at me? The forum leads don't determine what gets merged. The VCLs do it in conjunction with Customer Service.
You can educate yourself about the VCL program in [forum=724]these forums[/forum]
Also, the VCLs are not part of Customer Service. It is a program organized by Community Management.
Ok. Normally I lurk and do not post often. But I have to ask what the hell is a VCL?
Volinteer
Comunity
Leader
would be my first guess, but I may be wrong.
Customer service from WotC has always been nearly non-existant so they cannot be acountable for their volinteers actions. And frankly the volinteers are making a mess of things. Which may be the whole point.
I would think that WHOEVER it is that is moving the threads to the mega-thread should be accountable fot it, regardless of their "rank". However once in that refuce pile nothing can be reclaimed, so it becomes a waste of drive space. (Or have I misread somthing?)
As someone who has recommended to the D&D VCL a number of threads to merge, you can find my reasonings for the merges here.
I don't see why we should stop the merging. It works well and threads that have specific and substantive criticisms should not be merged. Thos ethat have been, in my opinion, were done so by mistake not design.
Where by "works well" you mean "obliterates the thread and any useful trace of its passing".
If a thread is redundant, lock the thread and point to another. This preserves the history of the discussion. The whole point of threads is so that we can follow particular discussions rather than a collection of posts with no chronological or conversational connection.
Where by "works well" you mean "obliterates the thread and any useful trace of its passing".
If a thread is redundant, lock the thread and point to another.
Which doesn't solve the problem of these threads taking up space and pushing other threads onto pages where they will be lost.
This is the dilemma. If you lock redundant threads rather than merge them into the megathread, they still cause the problem of pushing other threads off the front pages. If you merge them, the redundant threads disappear into the megathread, but productive threads don't get lost.
In the end, it becomes a question as to which threads you want getting lost more often, the redundant ones or the productive ones.
The real problem is when productive threads get swept into the megathread, which is a problem that can't be entirely avoided, but hopefully can be lessened.
See also Websters follow-up comment here.
But, at its basic, you are correct. If a thread is "Generic 1st impression thread #6530", chances are very good it will get merged eventually. If the thread is about a specific part of 4E, chances are very good it will not get merged.
See also Websters follow-up comment here.
But, at its basic, you are correct. If a thread is "Generic 1st impression thread #6530", chances are very good it will get merged eventually. If the thread is about a specific part of 4E, chances are very good it will not get merged.
Which doesn't solve the problem of these threads taking up space and pushing other threads onto pages where they will be lost.
This is the dilemma. If you lock redundant threads rather than merge them into the megathread, they still cause the problem of pushing other threads off the front pages. If you merge them, the redundant threads disappear into the megathread, but productive threads don't get lost.
Except it doesn't work like that in practice. What you get is a 'moved' link which has exactly the same "occupies space" issue as a locked thread. Except that a locked thread (1) allows you to see the prior discussion if you wanted to and (2) contains a pointer to the correct thread. A "thread moved" link that goes to "where the heck am I?" takes up exactly as much space but has no redeeming features to compensate. It also sends the message that the boards are unnavigable rather than that the mods feel that there is too much spamming of redundant threads.
Also, if the threads are active and contain discussion (and not merely flame-fests), then obviously a sizeable portion of users find them interesting. Moving the thread as a unit to a more appropriate forum is fine. Moving it to a thread in the same forum that is essentially a giant unordered mess simply inspires the people who were actually interested in the specific topic to create a new thread so that they can continue the conversation. Until they eventually in frustration give up trying to use the forums to, you know, communicate, because the mods keep hiding their thread and scattering the posts to the four winds every time they try with no guidance as to where the discussion should occur (and by "where" I mean "forum", not "unstructured mess").
In case you're wondering, my response to having an interesting 15 post thread merged with a several hundred post thread was not "Oh, of course, I should be talking about it in this unordered mess!". It was "What the heck happened to my thread?" followed by "What idiot moderator did this?". I have reason to suspect that my opinion is, shall we say, not unique.
Except it doesn't work like that in practice. What you get is a 'moved' link which has exactly the same "occupies space" issue as a locked thread.
I agree. My impression was that merged threads had no move indicator, which causes confusion for the particpants in the moved thread, but clears out the page for nonmerged threads. Moved threads are different; those are threads moved ot other forums.
Also, if the threads are active and contain discussion (and not merely flame-fests), then obviously a sizeable portion of users find them interesting.
Maybe, though the parenthetical is a key modifier. Moreover, editorial moderation has to be uniform and separate from other CoC violations. If a thread's content belongs in the megathread, it should be moved whether or not a flamefest has erupted, since the goal is not merely to quench flames, but to slow down the scroll-rate fo the forum.
I have reason to suspect that my opinion is, shall we say, not unique.
I am sure that is correct. Again, the choice is who should be favored. The people who create threads that are general comments on 4th edition (I'll call them "generalists") or the people who create specific and focused threads (I'll call them specifists"). You can't help both since there's only 25 threads per page. The decision has been made to favor the latter at the expense of the former. I know that people in the former category will be discouraged.
One of those two camps was going to be discouraged. Before the megathread, people in the latter camp were complaining they had no place to ask specific questions because their question was getting lost in a swarm of "4E sucks!" and "I love 4E!" threads.
It's a Hobson's Choice and you cannot please everyone. If we lock the thread, as you suggest, I think we have the worst of both worlds. The generalists cannot continue their discussions and the specifists' threads are still getting run off the front page.
Sadly, I don't think there's an ideal answer that satisfies everyone's needs.
In an ideal world where pattern recognition exists, people would see that thier first impression threads are going into the first impression threads and STOP POSTING THEM OUTSIDE IT.
Maybe, though the parenthetical is a key modifier. Moreover, editorial moderation has to be uniform and separate from other CoC violations. If a thread's content belongs in the megathread, it should be moved whether or not a flamefest has erupted, since the goal is not merely to quench flames, but to slow down the scroll-rate fo the forum.
In your tallying of the forums activity to note whether a forum should be split then, this seems like one of the reasons to split a forum or create a new one, rather than misgroup threads together. Considering the way the forums software handles merges in a non-contiguous manner, but in chronological order of posts, then it only causes any threads merged to be unreadable, as well as the actual thread they are being merged into because posts become out of order and there is no continuity to the discussion.
Merging threads should then be a last resort since it makes any and all of those threads useless since you are no longer able to follow any discussion going on.
Thus if General Discussion has that many forums daily under the split criteria the forum should be split to allow for those threads to exist within their own forum that seem to be overcrowding other things.
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1034748
Oddly General Discussion is not even present in your records in the Forumwatch thread.
http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=15922497#post15922497
and
http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=15920836#post15920836
- If a forum consistently has an average active thread count of more than 50 per day, we need to create another forum and split out some of the traffic.
Currently the procedure was not followed correctly as rather than splitting out the traffic as agreed upon the traffic was detoured to a one-way street with no outlet.
The megathread is not helpful; all it does is frustrate and confound. I browse the boards for several minutes each day or so, and that's my experience with it.
[Edit]Oops! Forgot to include the post I was replying to. It was first page, third or fourth post ;).
The moved links are on timer and disappear after IIRC a day.
In an ideal world where pattern recognition exists, people would see that thier first impression threads are going into the first impression threads and STOP POSTING THEM OUTSIDE IT.
This goes back to the idea that all forums exist for no reason, and even the Controllers forum should be just a single thread in the whole of a single D&D forum.
This does not work and defeats the purpose of a bulletin board system.
So every existing forum then should be merged into a single thread because the topic of the forums are similar?
Might as well just have a single thread called D&D and let all editions and all topics be posted in it.
Remove Astrid's Parlor because those issues can belong just as well in General Discussion....
Your logic is lacking even though your intent is a good one. (NOTE: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.)
Not only do you have to look at what types of threads are being created, but how the software handles the functions.
It would not be so bad if merged threads were written to the end of file so to speak to keep the existing thread in order, but they are just mixed in by the timestamp and displayed in chronological order when they were posted rather than thread heirarchy.
There are MANY hacks and mods that can be applied to solve that for OTHER forum software that allows merged threas to be inserted after the last post and STILL keep the original post date.
One way it to display posts based on the post # rather than the display date.
thread 12 is displayed:
post 1 is displayed
post 2 is displayed
post 3 is displayed
This is what would allow for proper merging as merged thread would them be...
thread 12 post 4 for the orinigal post of the merged thread
thread 12 post 5 for the first reply to that post
thread 12 post 6 for the 3rd post in the merged thread.
Any new post to the actual post 12 will come AFTER the merged posts have be assigned a new thread number and given a post number within that thread.
That is the major problem with merging the threads other than the fact of how some people feel in general about someone else saying what their posts means, which is very offensive to some.
So you need a dog to help you see? Dogs can't help you read a menu, so you can't come into this restaurant with your dog.
See how telling someone where they belong doesn't always sound so good?
This goes back to the idea that all forums exist for no reason, and even the Controllers forum should be just a single thread in the whole of a single D&D forum.
This does not work and defeats the purpose of a bulletin board system.
So every existing forum then should be merged into a single thread because the topic of the forums are similar?
Might as well just have a single thread called D&D and let all editions and all topics be posted in it.
Your logic is lacking even though your intent is a good one. (NOTE: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.)
sigh
There is a comfortable spot between "only one thread to rule them all" and "a forum for *every* possible topic".
In your tallying of the forums activity to note whether a forum should be split then, this seems like one of the reasons to split a forum or create a new one, rather than misgroup threads together.
But not the exclusive reason. We had a forum for general concerns and criticisms and the Community Management team (for reasons with which I agree) felt that the forum should be shut down because it was not a positive contribution to the community as a whole.
There might be a demand for a whole forum dedicated to people, for instance, converting real-life politicians and celebrities into 4E terms. But if such a board does not positively contribute to the community (for instance if those threads often degenerate into arguments about real-world political issues unrelated to D&D), then the management is acting entirely appropriately in refusing to accede to that demand, even if it would have an appropriately active thread count.
Moreover, each individual who wants a forum for converting real-world personalities into D&D terms may think that they individually have no intention of violating the CoC or engaging in flamefests. And there may be a handful of threads of that category that does not degenerate into flamefests. But people collectively often act differently than they individually intend to act. On the aggregate, if it is observed that such threads tend to reduce the level of discourse, no new forum should be created.
That appears to be the issue here. People want to make general categorizations (positive or negative) about 4E. But the experience on these forums is that, on the aggregate, such topics more often than not, degenerate into inappropriate conversations, and often consume the board in which they are placed.
This is not a unique situation. There have been temporary bans on other topics of conversation. For instance, there was a ban on discussing katanas, because the threads were dominating the boards, offered little substantive and often (but not always) resulted in flame wars. A ban on alignment discussions in Regdar's was for the same reason.
Both were temporary bans. The VCLs have said they hope the megathread will also be a temporary solution.
Oddly General Discussion is not even present in your records in the Forumwatch thread.
Because the General Thread is not a candidate for merger. But it has been part of the discussion for why new boards should be created.
Currently the procedure was not followed correctly as rather than splitting out the traffic as agreed
There was no "agreement". Forum traffic is only one of many criteria Community Management considers and is certainly not the reason the Concerns & Criticisms Forum was closed and is certainly not the reason the megathread is not being split off into its own forum.
There was no "agreement". Forum traffic is only one of many criteria Community Management considers and is certainly not the reason the Concerns & Criticisms Forum was closed and is certainly not the reason the megathread is not being split off into its own forum.
To piggyback on this - For there to be a successful forum split, there needs to be a clear deliniation of topics that can be used to split the forum into two or more.
FOr example, take a look at the discussions for the FR forum split. They are getting split along Fluff/Crunch lines. How will you divide the General Discussion forum? By its very nature, GD is a catch basin for all the topics that don't fit in any other D&D forum, but are still talking about D&D. There is really no way to split it that would make sense.
The megathread has threads merged to it that was discussing classes, and rather than being moved to the Hybrid forum it was merged into "first impressions", and there were thread about magic items.
The threads that were merged were done indiscriminately of content and context. Someone just went through with bias and merged them based on misinterpretation of the threads intent.
Don't blame a threads creator for the misbehaving of other people that come into a thread and destroy it or derail it!
Manage the forums correctly rather than doing a hack job of it.
Edit: Believe it or not, I agree with hellmute. I do think a Product Review section would be useful and would lessen traffic in General Discussions.
Concur. It would also be a useful forum on its own, offering forum-goers a place to go to read about each new release, so they can make informed decisions about whether or not to purchase.
Edit: There is no sarcasm in this post.
Exactly. Though I could live with it if were right below future releases instead. ;)
I would agree it belongs in the HQ section somewhere, and may need to include past edition reviews in the future.
This would make SURE that the forum gets enough traffic to show it is needed.
People could review a specific D&D adventure/module form ANY edition meaning that there would always be traffic tot he forum.
I could live with just existing edition reviews, but forsee people may want to include older products and even OGL/GSL products. As the current sticky in the GSL forum could be moved to a review forum to help people note that these companies have adopted the GSL and to be on the look out for reviews and the products themselves.
Really, Previous Edition General needs the traffic. In a few months, if current trends continue, the Previous Edition forums are probably going to be considered for further consolidation. I personally was hoping 3E boards would be able to for a year or more.
The problem is that it threw EVERYTHING the forums were prior to 4th into that one forum. People that didn't like 3rd got shoved 3rd down there throat and probably left, or the fact that the way topics are labeled doesn't tell you anything about the edition, so nobody cares to visit the shambles that is those forums.
There is too much stuff for those forums to handle, so people probably left.
They should have just made a 3rd edition forum and left the other previous edition forum intact, but again needless merging due to not understanding what is being done at the time of the merge, because it looked good on paper.
I agree there's been a diminishment in the "Other Worlds" board, of proabably half its regulars, which may be about 10-15 people. But that's a different board.
At such time that WotC kills the previous edition forums then all hell will break lose as people that say WotC throws out the old editions will feel empowered and may return to flood the 4th edition forums. Even moving them out of the D&DE forums to some gleemax RPG section would **** people off.
WotC is already on thin ice in many people's mind about how they treat older editions.
I do agree that a lot of people have left for other locations for various reasons. I'm just not convinced WotC is being evil, mean, bullies by relegating past edition traffic to six forums.
At such time that WotC kills the previous edition forums
That won't happen. Chances are, eventually, all Previous Editions forums will get merged into Previous Editions General, but it won't go away entirely.
WotC is already on thin ice in many people's mind about how they treat older editions.
How is it different from any other company? On White Wolf, they merged all the Old World of Darkness forums into one megaboard, and doesn't even have forums for discontinued games that weren't part of the WoD. Same for Palladium. GURPS is fairly backwards compatible (though only one edition back) and has lumped all of its non-GURPS games (other than In Nomine) into a single forum.
If there a role-playing game publisher that has more than six forums for their out-of-print editions? I'm not aware of any.
Never a very home-y feel to the "Home for gamers online" that gleemax tries to be huh?
[forum=672]Gleemax[/forum] is not the Wizards.COMmunity. There are boards in Gleemax where you can discuss any game. They're just divided by genre or system (for d20), not by specific game.
Meaning too many topics in once place. Someone in CM doesn't like subforums, but they are an excellent tool and part of the BBS software. That person needs to get over their problem and use the forums to their advantages.
There is nothing that having new forums would do other than organize things better.
They want to guide traffic to forums, but again I ask....does it matter? Does having a slow forum exist take up any more space that if the 2-3 active threads in it were in another forum?
It only takes up space in the list of subforums that is a major issue because it makes long lists.
The people in charge of the forums don't understand them, otherwise They would create a few hundred forums and jsut let them fill up and leave them alone. It doesn't matter wheere something is when a report is filled, the report will be handled no matter which forum it is in.
While WotC forums even under the disguise of the Gleemax domain name may not sit well having other companies IP including specific games in named forums, they could do more to provide more forums.
"If you build it they will come." ;)
I really don't understand the fear of having a few more forums that don't really get 100 post per day or whatever. It seems like the peson who doesn't want to be prepared so didn't bring an umbrella to work to get caught in a downpour and get sick and mis work lossing money because they just didn't feel like taking that extra 2 seconds to grab it and carry the extra pound in and out of the building.
An ounce of prevention vs an ounce of pain.
I really don't understand the fear of having a few more forums that don't really get 100 post per day or whatever.
I think this is the crux of your continuing disappointment with CM (with respect to forum organization). You don't agree with the idea of having an active thread goal at all. I don't know that anything can be said to get you to agree. And I'm fairly certain there's nothing you could say to CM to make them agree with you on that score.
I think this is the crux of your continuing disappointment with CM (with respect to forum organization). You don't agree with the idea of having an active thread goal at all. I don't know that anything can be said to get you to agree. And I'm fairly certain there's nothing you could say to CM to make them agree with you on that score.
To me the issue is a simple one. In order to necessitate having forums they need to have traffic to them. That is it. It doesn't matter which specific forum has traffic unless you are using this traffic data as some sort of reference for product feedback, then as many state the online community it not a valid sample of the consumer based to get a picture of how a forum relates to the global view of the consumer base on a given topic.
The only place this comes into play is with online only components such as DDI.
For the rest of the forums they just need to create a forum and not worry about it. It doesn't matter how much traffic a single forum gets. It doesn't hurt anything to exist. I for one would rather view older threads inline rather than the stupid archived method where links are truncated to just URLs, and images are turned into URLs like some ultra-low bandwidth page for people on a 100-baud connection. Which doesn't exist anymore. So since the archives are in HTML anyway at least put the proper tags in place to denote the archives as replies and quotes including a horizontal rule, and add the anchor and image tags to allow for links and images to appear correctly in minimal w3c functionality.
But the archives are a total aside, but just illustrate how a dead forum could be useful as-is for archival purposes. Not to mention you don't have to change all the links in some nightly maintenance from EVERY post that links to another thread or post. The time it takes to archive is more than the SQL query to just view it inline, meaning less hardware lifetime for one. SQL is much quicker than HTTP protocol and file access.
I just really don't understand it at all. The world largest online forums leave threads in existence, are free to its million+ users, and run by only a handful of people. They don't have some nightly archiving, and don't jsut delete forums because of low activity. They actually encourage growth by adding new forums to draw in more people rather than remove forums to turn people away.
Online is the only place I see bigger = better, when you can make more room without taking up any more space.
The forums take one row of the database for each one.
Threads don't exist but a single row as well.
EVERY post has its own row that gives it all the other information.
Is the single row for a new forum really taking up that much space in the database? If so them there needs to be something done to fix the database with a new engine or something to make it function better.
As has been said vBullettin doesn't have these kinds of problems as elsewhere does so having a forum for Product Reviews (as we all seem to agree may be warranted) or anything else doesn't take up that much space. It just seems the people making decisions about the forums don't even understand the basic nature of how they function and how much actual database space they take up. Unless vBulletin has had drastic changes to the newest few revisions. Which probably made the whole system even MORE efficient to reduce the overhead of the processor and databases.
That is what I will never understand in that people making the decisions probably don't even understand the way the software works and refuse to try to.
The landscaping or real-estate space on the output page is taken care of by the use of subforums in the forum hierarchy.
Just as you click on the image for the D&D forums on http://forums.gleemax.com (if that ever stabilizes between one of the two pairs of on/off images) it takes you to a forum, then so does every other forum.
693 is the D&D forums
694 is the forum for D&D HQ
46 is the subforum we are now in for Community Business.
You cannot escape creating subforums, so use them to your advantage. These are all forums or subforums depending how you look at them. The only difference is how they are organized in the final output list so that 694 shows as a category under 693 and within that category exists 46.
Or when viewing just 694 you see 46, GSL, Future Releasesand the redirect to Staff blogs.
You can save a LOT of real-estate by utilizing the subforum and category capabilities of vBulletin better and allow for more forums to exist in a more reader friendly manner and not take up as much real-estate. It takes a few more clicks to go deeper levels into the forums hierarchy, but doesn't D&D already have you going deeper into the levels of dungeons? ;)
Let the D&D forum experience feel the same way. :P
I don't want to respond to your wall of text. I'm just repeating myself. Nothing you wrote is going to convince CM to abandon their active threadcount criteria. Nothing they can say is going to convince you that the active threadcount criteria is something of value.
I know you know it has nothing to do with server space, so I'm not sure why you're bring that up. It has nothing to do with the programming capacity of the vbulletin program.
You think it's better to have a lot of forums even if they have almost no traffic. Community Management disagrees with that assessment. At its heart, this is a dispute that depends on a lot of unprovable assumptions. Nobody is ever going to convince the other. Sorry.
:P
How many previous edition threads do you participate in daily? Weekly? How many 4e threads do you participate in daily? Weekly? Estimate if necessary.
I ask because a casual glance over the 6 previous edition forums we do have shows none whose entire first page has activity today. In other words, the idea that one previous edition dominates those forums isn't supportable. Even if all the threads that got bumped today are 3e, there is still plenty of first-page room for AD&D threads. Anyone who wants to talk about AD&D topics has plenty of room in which to do so.
Do people want additional forums on principle rather than for reasons of utility?
Likewise I would be less inclined to participate in a forum with heavy Eberron influences as I do not like that setting so do not visit that forum either.
So for me to participate more in the older editions forum, Would require a restructuring that provides me with a buffer from 3rd edition. I was not around much prior to 4th and was interested in it, so never really got to visit the forums prior to the addition of 3rd edition to the previous edition forums to know what was there at the time.