Forum Organization

Two, maybe three people discussing something for several days or weeks, one or two people randomly entering the thread on occasion to loudly/forcefully voice their opinion and never entering said thread ever again, another 1-2 people entering on occasion to play Ric Olie and state something that did not need to be said, and once in a while someone posting something that actually has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation but everyone else is too polite to point that out? Oh, and on occasion a requisite Grimby post.

Cough.

 

I said "organizational issues", not "everything is working as always". Sheesh.

 

Dingo, I agree with your post, but the problem is that what you said is pretty much relying on an ideal situation. And on the JC, ideal is never reality. You're assuming that users are going to behave and moderators are going to moderate. Neither of these things currently happen in the existing YJCC-amph-games-senate section (no offense to the 2 mods that are doing stuff) The crossing over of posts and sections is great to an extent, but it's also really detracting from the existing "cultures" of each forum. I may hate the senate, but that doesn't mean that I want the nonseriousness of YJCC to destroy their conversations. Same with Amph. There's a difference between having a casual conversation about a movie and the discussions that used to be in Amph. Amph used to have encyclopedia long posts of super seriousness going into way too much details on films etc. Now in the main forum it's all watered down. Even though I want to see amph stay with YJCC, that in addition to the senate and games - it's too much combined. YJCC is way too overpowering, and that combined with Games is creating an unstoppable monster of stupidness that spreading to the other forums. There has to be some way to divide the forums but not overdivide them so that you can segregate the stupidity but still keep a bit of clashing cultures.

 

Just as well-- he was a spammer who contributed almost nothing of substance to the boards.

 

I'll never forget the time someone posted a personal advice thread in Amph and he told me to "shut up" when I said the thread didn't belong there.

 

I respect that people had their own issues with him (probably a fair amount justified) but to say he contributed almost nothing of substance is just foolishness. I enjoyed many of his posts and discussions (even was able to have a good humoured laugh at his GoT 'review' thread). If you had problems with him that's fine but such pettiness doesn't exactly stand you in good stead either.

(sorry Grimby I know what you said but I couldn't stand to let such a petty comment go unanswered - I'll go sit in the naught corner now )

 

It's not petty, and if we were really discussing the issue, I could go into far more detail. I won't, but I meant what I said.

I don't really care about being in "good stead." I know what I saw over the years and I made a well grounded observation about it.

 

I disagree, and I still stand that it's a foolish statement by yourself. Obviously we'll have to simply agree to disagree but I didn't want such a silly comment to be left standing unanswered.

(again, sorry Grimby)

 

Drop it.

 

I must be the only one who enjoyed the structure of the Temp boards

or am I?

 

What, the strange bedfellow system?

Oh now there's an idea. Revert the system back to its early Temp Board configuration for April Fools.

 

well I liked it

felt more like a community and not sectioned off for "cliques" *shrugs*

but I never was one for following the crowd.

 

Nice link

 

SLG, so what you're saying is that we should let the inmates run the asylum? Just because the 'general'* forum population cannot separate out where and when to act like juveniles and people are too afraid to upset the apple cart by enforcing rules then that should be catered to? A clearly defined, visible set of rules on how to participate in certain thread types that has been distilled down into as simple a form possible (that is, as few variations as able, not a different set for every single tag type) and some simple enforcement of them and things will be fine. The "JCC" isn't a complete bunch of uncouth savages (despite how many times I might say that) and are able to adjust to simple sets of rules for the forum. It's been done in the past.

The reason it isn't working now is because the forum has 5 different sets of rules governing how threads should go. There's the 'Senate' rules, where a high standard of conversation is required and are enforced with a heavy hand. There's the 'Arena' rules that allow for some light-heartedness but still require staying on a narrow thread focus. There's the 'Games' rules that govern the leeway in which the hosts can control the game. There's the 'Amph' rules for discussion, which want a higher standard for topic discussion. And there's the 'JCC' rules that allow almost everything but murder. And then you have that of the nine listed moderators for the "Community" forum, they really only moderate one of those sets of rules in threads with those tags (and anything with an 'Amph' tag is getting moderated more by 'JCC' rules since there's been a bleed over in subject matter). Of course it isn't going to work because there is no common standard across all threads in a single forum, and no expectation that all moderators for a forum are going to be applying the exact same rules and moderating all threads in said forum.

Analogously, it's like this. Currently the "Community" forum is like the members of a share house hosting a party, but saying that the hosts are only responsible for dealing with and mingling with the people they invited and/or are in their room, instead of all the hosts dealing with all persons at the party in all rooms.

All I am saying is that the mods should be hosting the party (the Community forum) across the board with everyone knowing that if there are people sitting in the lounge room discussing politics (or the people in the kitchen discussing the NFL draft, or those around the pool are dissecting the themes of Man of Steel), then coming in and making fart jokes or trying to hijack the conversation into another direction is not acceptable. Conversely if everyone out on the balcony is joking about what type of condoms are the best to use and providing crass reasons as to why, then who cares as long as they aren't demonstrating anything and don't then drag that conversation into other areas of the house. And it also doesn't matter if somehow that conversation turns into people arguing over what their favourite breakfast food is. Meanwhile those who are in the rumpus room playing Risk aren't bombarded with people coming in and knocking the board over just for the fun of it.

It's not something that is going to be able to go into place and work like magic tomorrow. But that is frankly better than splitting things up again purely because people don't like being around each other.



Oh, and on the subject of "drowning out" here are the number of threads on the first page with each tag type:

JCC - 9
Senate - 2
Amph - 7
Arena - 3
Games - 4
Census - 0

That's actually almost the kind of portions you would expect from the traffic prior to combining the forums when you factor some of the Amph threads are the same as what would also have been JCC threads. If you keep going back the ratios are mostly the same, with Games threads decreasing since they are mainly either active or not, and more Amph threads than JCC threads. Subject matter isn't being overpowered, all that is happening is that there is no actual overall strategy for the forum and therefore no united fashion in which all threads are being moderated.


* General meaning a small subsection of the former JCC forum regulars who push the boundaries until they slam into a brick wall, which isn't happening with the current moderating standard.

 

Nope, that's extreme and I feel like that's going to sidetrack too. As awesome of a troll as I am, I'm not going to lie about the amount of bullying/baiting/blatant trolling that gets to happen in the JCC and the amount of rules that aren't enforced. Currently you can do just about anything except drop a few word bombs. So nooooo that's not at all what I'm saying. It's pretty much the problem that was just addressed by the Senate split - rules that are too extreme. The JCC rules are getting more lenient, the Senate rules are still strict, etc. I think there's enough people raging about that stuff right now that I don't need to go into it.

Pretty much yeah. In which case either you divide forums into 2 sections I'd say, strict + relaxed rules, or you come up with a set of rules that will fit all the forums. IMO which is pretty useless, I'd suggest making YJCC a bit stricter and Amph + Arena just a little bit more relaxed. That's realistically never going to go over well though, but it would probably solve that problem.

 

I know the real debate in this thread is about the Community forums, but FYI, and rather than starting a new thread in Comms (given the title of this thread), I've created a subcategory in the Star Wars Saga In-Depth forum for Behind the Scenes discussion:

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/new-behind-the-scenes-thread-prefix.50013959/