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Total Members Voted: 89

[TA]

Again, big thing worth pointing out here is that Catch-all threads exist, and as said before - with active moderation, we've seen branches of thought and interest spawn into their own threads. 

I'm For the motion myself.  One possible reason for us not making too many threads on a zillion concepts is that we're all introverted as all heck and really don't want to be the guy whose made all those threads that barely even get the lookover.

And there's the problem.  I'm strongly in favor of catch-all threads for exactly the reasons you say, because with active moderation I think it produces the best discussion environment, but the whole thing relies on the mods not being lazy, and being willing to put in the effort of threadsplitting when it's appropriate.  Which might be why it's always Kazz that shuts them down.

[Detonator]

I think the compromise will be to make an "old games" topic for babbling, with the agreement that new, relevant games will always get a new topic for discussion.  My main annoyance was having to split topics out for brand new titles which obviously would deserve their own topic.

[Disposable Ninja]

Did we ever actually do that? Maybe for a couple of games that were more popular than the poster may have imagined. I for one never heard of Borderlands until it was the greatest game of 2009.

[R^2]

Jesus people make a "late to the party" topic it's not hard.

[SCD]

Det:  May I suggest for the re-en statement of those quiet moderators who got that job done?  My memory may be off, but for example when Mongrel had his reigns of RW, he did a fine job of using his companies time for throwing in the axe and wedge as required..  of course that could've just as well been Thad..

[Shinra]

If you want to talk about a game that you know will not facilitate discussion, why bother?  This isn't your personal blog.  If you're entertaining enough to make people want to read your complaints about old video games, people will follow your blog.

Because every conversation we have on these boards could be had in IRC, over AIM, or on our personal blog. The only posts that really have any necessity to be here are posts announcing meetups (D&D, co-op online games, etc) and events like pyocon and dirty santa that necessitate a constantly accessible conversation and information thread.

Realistically speaking, if we use the logic of 'just post that shit in your blog/on irc/over aim' most of the threads and posts on these boards shouldn't exist.

I prefer the format of a BBS to a blog or IRC for conversatin'. Am I the only one?

[François]

I prefer the format of a BBS to a blog or IRC for conversatin'. Am I the only one?

No, I agree. At its best, a forum is way more literate than IRC. It's like a series of miniature epistles, a back-and-forth of complete ideas instead of real-time snippets of thought. IRC has its merits but forums are another animal entirely.

And a blog doesn't have a sense of community to it; there's a performer and an audience, and on top of that you tend to attract people who either mostly have the same mindset as you or people who disagree with you so much that they follow you anyway just to have someone to bitch at. It's not strictly one-way, but it has one-way elements. In a forum, all ideas are born equal, then live and die according to their merit or interest value; no post starts higher than the ones who answer to it. It's richer soil for conversation, I think.

Plus for me it'd be pointless to have a blog because I want to write three paragraphs about an old game twice a year. I might as well put it on paper and bury it in the yard.

[yyler]

I feel like you've taken Det's argument/reasoning to a logical but extreme end.

Anyway, I dislike dump threads--there's no organization. And if two people are like, "Dang, I love this new game!" and then someone picks it up for $20 in three months the third person's post is completely disconnected from that original conversation. Plus it is hard to have a conversation in a thread when five other guys are having another one, you know?

[Shinra]

I feel like you've taken Det's argument/reasoning to a logical but extreme end.

Anyway, I dislike dump threads--there's no organization. And if two people are like, "Dang, I love this new game!" and then someone picks it up for $20 in three months the third person's post is completely disconnected from that original conversation. Plus it is hard to have a conversation in a thread when five other guys are having another one, you know?

the point is that that other conversation, when it develops from the one or two posts that started it, can get split off into it's own thread rather than cluttering up the topic list with a single post thread and languishing and dying quickly.

[Thad]

I think the idea was supposed to be that we'd have dump threads with admins actively splitting off conversations that grew big enough to support their own threads.

Granted, locking a thread is much easier, and I don't really have the time to monitor and split everything myself.  DO we need more board mods?

I'd say the situation is complicated by the fact that some admins/mods don't want dump threads at all, while others have been known to actually DELETE new threads that are just single-sentence comments of the sort that would otherwise go in dump threads.  I respect that the entire POINT of having an admin team is that we don't all think the same way (and also Arc has a tendency to up and disappear for years at a time), but might want to get on the same page on stuff like this.



(I'd point out the irony of the guy who likes to spend six pages bitching about me in unrelated threads turning around and complaining about disorganized threads, but he might de-karma me.)

[yyler]

yeah, but only if people keep having both conversations. for one thing people hate necroposting, so they sure aren't ever going to go back in a thread ten pages and respond to two single posts. likewise people won't comment on something if the thread turns into something else. and finally, if a post gets a lot of replies, people may only click the last page and miss what they care about entirely. single threads are more organized and efficient and even if no one replies at least you know people can find the thread.

i'd say that if anything starting a lot of topics would encourage conversation--if ten people get a game a week apart and post once each about it in a dump thread, no one will likely notice there are ten posts about it. but if someone starts a thread and every week there is at least one post, a real conversation is more likely to arise.

[James Edward Smith]

I'd say the situation is complicated by the fact that some admins/mods don't want dump threads at all, while others have been known to actually DELETE new threads that are just single-sentence comments of the sort that would otherwise go in dump threads.  I respect that the entire POINT of having an admin team is that we don't all think the same way (and also Arc has a tendency to up and disappear for years at a time), but might want to get on the same page on stuff like this.

I don't really understand posts like this one and the one where Shinra was asking why we can't have catch all threads just because ONE admin doesn't like them. I mean when Shinra puts it like that, it sounds like a reasonable question, why can't we have catch all threads just because ONE tyranical admin doesn't like them?

Well the problem is reality, and in reality we only actually have TWO fucking admins, three tops.

ARC doesn't live here anymore, ARC go away, ARC gone now.

Thad, rarely does anything as far as I can see but perhaps is actually somewhat administering things, so that's why I said three tops and not just definitively TWO.

Kabbage is not supposed to do anything non graphical in nature.

That leaves our two actual admins, Kazz and Detonator. Now if you include Thad as a third then Shinra's point still seems to hold water except wait, Kazz AND Det both hate catch all threads making the majority of the active admin team against them.

For the record, I hate them too but I am not an admin, I am just a lowly global moderator who rarely does any moderating anyway.

[Brentai]

I would point you towards a forum where only the administrators' opinions mattered, but it was taken down because the administrator didn't like it any more.

[Detonator]

Well, I already submitted forth a compromise, I'm just waiting for Kazz to wake up and completely overreact to everything.

[Thad]

I would point you towards a forum where only the administrators' opinions mattered, but it was taken down because the administrator didn't like it any more.

After all the users left because they didn't like the way it was being run.

[jsnlxndrlv]

Detonator's argument above ("This isn't your personal blog," etc.) implies that most of the problem with megathreads is that the people posting in them are either too vain or too terrible to write in a way that facilitates discussion, and suggests that if you want to write that way, you should post that shit on your blog.

Similarly:

It feels kind of silly to start a new thread just because I wanted to post two images and two sentences in the hope that somebody else is playing or wants to talk about it, but Kazz closed the "babble about a game you're [about to start] playing" thread, so this sort of exploratory poking doesn't really have anywhere else to go.

This makes me feel 1000% good about Kazz closing the thread because I know I would have to be digging through that awful thread for a messy threadsplit in a few days if you had put it there.

People should not ever feel silly about posting a new thread about a brand new game.

I appreciate that you think I should feel other than the way that I do, but that doesn't actually change how I feel. I look at topics like these and it makes me hate making new threads. I do anyway, and the results are kind of pathetic, because even if you put a lot of effort into making an engaging, discussion-provoking post, it's not obvious what's going to spark a big discussion and what isn't.

I'm not opposed to this policy because it makes me feel like a terrible poster, though: I'm opposed to it because I actually like reading big dumb dump threads. I like not knowing what I'm going to be reading about, I like reading opinions people are voicing without worrying whether they're inviting a response by voicing them, and I don't want to have to read a dozen different topics (much less a dozen different blogs) in order to get the same content. There are a lot of games and topics I wouldn't bother reading about if they weren't presented as part of a catch-all topic.

Yyler's point about this being "less organized" and "discouraging" is kind of like complaining that zebra-print pants are somehow tacky and cheap by comparison to a tiger-striped jacket: it's one kind of chaos or discouragement for another. This criterion strikes me as really arbitrary.

AAAAND THREE NEW REPLIES show that I'm reiterating Shinra's point above for no reason. Whatever.

[Thad]

Detonator's argument above ("This isn't your personal blog," etc.) implies that most of the problem with megathreads is that the people posting in them are either too vain or too terrible to write in a way that facilitates discussion, and suggests that if you want to write that way, you should post that shit on your blog.

I think people just want me to update my blog more.

I've got a thing about the Kirby heirs coming, guys, but I'm waiting for some comic book guys to give me feedback.

This makes me feel 1000% good about Kazz closing the thread because I know I would have to be digging through that awful thread for a messy threadsplit in a few days if you had put it there.

This is actually a good point in the "for" column -- threadsplits are often messy, because people pretty frequently write about more than one thing in the same post.  If the conversation then goes in two different directions, you're hard-pressed to split -- if you split one topic of conversation, you're going to end up with a hole in the other.

I've taken to double-posting when I think I've come up with good fodder for a split, to avoid that problem.  Yyler actually did a great job of that a bit ago with the post that I split into the GRRR KARMA thread -- the part that was good fodder for a split got split, the part that continued the conversation in this thread stayed in this thread.

[jsnlxndrlv]

Yeah, but the flipside of that is that not every topic deserves a threadsplit. From the amount (and the kind) of discussion that the Miles Edgeworth thread had, it really didn't need a thread split: there weren't more than 5 or 6 posts actually about the game in question; much of the rest was concerned with the merits of Phoenix Wright as a franchise—which is exactly the sort of discussion I want to read about other franchises, but am likely to overlook under the current system.

[Detonator]

I already submitted forth a compromise, I'm just waiting for Kazz to wake up and completely overreact to everything.

[Mongrel]

I think far too many folks are belabouring a largely irrelevant question. Single thread? Catch-all thread? Does this really actually matter to people here? Is forum thread housekeeping that gripping a topic?

Det:  May I suggest for the re-en statement of those quiet moderators who got that job done?  My memory may be off, but for example when Mongrel had his reigns of RW, he did a fine job of using his companies time for throwing in the axe and wedge as required..  of course that could've just as well been Thad..

Well, almost nobody posts there anymore, so it's kind of moot. :/