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Forum Organization Suggestions

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KnightDisciple said:
Well, if Murazor migrates here, or someone else volunteers to keep up some sort of mega-thread full of recommendations, I'd be okay with that, too.

My point is that it would be nice to have someplace to go, that is updated, that has a list of nothing but recommendations.
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I can agree with the sentiment. But waiting for Murazor of for a volunteer requires either Murazor being willing to stop doing it on SB, doing it here and SV, or hoping someone else to do it. I've willingly volunteered in the past to say make Indexes for people's stories at the beginning of the rise of the SI fic on SB.

In the beginning it's fun, you feel a warm fuzzy feeling at how people respect you for that choice. You get actual likes which encourage you to continue. But that's only the real reward, people get used to you doing it and slowly but surely it becomes a chore. Every now and again you get a like for you work, but it becomes a job.

And if you don't do the job people get annoyed with you. I was at most indexing three threads at a time. I lasted a few months at most before those threads ended or died and then I stopped. As the reasons you started with become worth less and less, while the people who index dozens of threads like kclcmdr become your hero and god like to you as they do but for years on a massive scale.

Murazor, kclcmdr and others like them are the mostly unsung heroes people occasionally compliment. So asking them to be on two different forums doubles there work and isn't fair to them. Asking volunteers to do it means you are waiting for one of those rare people who are willing to do it.

So if you want it then it will likely either be some time or we need multiple people from each thread to do it. Or you can try and do it yourself and probably burnout a few months later wondering why the hell you ever tried.

So speaking for experience the current set up while not perfect is what we are likely going to get. And if Murazor, kclcmdr, anyone else who does work similar to them with fiction or any future person who does it and reads this I take my hat off to you. As you are heroes. As do the mods who do similar work that is an even bigger challenge. You are all my heroes for what you do.
 
BobTheNinja said:
What IS the difference between a BROB and an SD? Because the only difference I've noticed is the level of quality and detail is usually higher for SDs. Otherwise they both appear to be standard play-by-post games.
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Evillevi said:
Functionally there isn't that big a difference. SD's and PbP's(BROB's aren't the accurate description) have the problem of intending diffenrent styles of game but with the catch that Players' skill or lack thereof may force the game into more middle ground approach to compensate for the unequal skill distribution.
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PbP has the players write what happens while the GM does little but correct mistakes and watch over interactions with other players.

BROBs have the players say what they want to do, and the GM says what happens.

SDs are big, long, PbPs.

Not the same.
 
I'm pretty sure that PbP games are still PbP games regardless of how big a role the GM plays in managing the player actions and plot results.
 
BobTheNinja said:
I'm pretty sure that PbP games are still PbP games regardless of how big a role the GM plays in managing the player actions and plot results.
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foamy said:
Precisely. If you're playing by hitting Reply it's a play by post game. SB's names and subcategories were stupid and there's no reason to duplicate them here.
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Well, regardless if you want to call them the same thing or not, they've very different types of games, and they deserve to be separated rather than both being lumped together as PbP.
 
Regarding games ran on the board, the problem is the terminology can get a bit...fuzzy.

Here's one idea I had.

-Play-by-Post Gaming (This is the "overforum", where it's OOC, discussion, ideas, planning, recruitment, etc. It is so called because each and every type of game underneath it is, in fact, some sort of play-by-post game.)
--Roleplaying Games (These can be tagged for things like "Story Debate", "Freeform", "Rules", whatever. These are the "one player controls 1 character in a group of characters under a GM, or telling a coperative story", that sort of thing.)
--Quests (Pretty obvious)
--Council/Empire Games (Again, I think these are different enough, especially considering the range of ways they're played, that having them in their own forum is worthwhile.)

I recognize that people like distinguishing "Story Debate" type games, but I'm still not sure they truly need an entire sub-forum. I think tagging is more appropriate there.

These 3 subforums are based on the basic format/structure of the games in question.
 
Kerrus said:
Not sure we need two fanfic discussion forums. The index already serves that role on SB, we wouldn't really need a second one under general discussion.
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BobTheNinja said:
Okay, new suggestion for the Creative Writing section to clarify things:

Creative & Roleplaying Forums
- User Fiction Works List
- Story Discussion
- The Idea Laboratory
- Recommendations Index
​
The "Story Discussion" subforum would basically replace the "Fan Works & Original Fiction" section in the Discussion Forums.
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Kerrus said:
On SB, the CrW works like this:

The main forum posts story threads. Every thread in the main forum is created by an author to showcase their work. They post that work to the thread in question, and users can reply and comment on that work in that thread.

The archive is for story only posts-only. Only the thread OP has permission to reply to a thread they make in the archive. This allows people who aren't interested in the discussion stuff to just read the straight up story.

The Index is for everything else. Reviews, ideas, snippets, indexes of stories- that sort of thing. It exists to keep all that constantly posting of shorter threads out of the main forum, so that people who come to read fics only see the threads that are for fics in the main forum- all the extraneous stuff is stuffed into the index.

It's a fairly solid and eloquent system, and one that I think we should replicate here because it works.
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No, having The Index as a badly-defined hodge-podge of everything is a bad idea. It was going at hyperspeed because it was doing several different forums' worth of work (as I noted), a couple of which were inherently not creative in the first place (I didn't find out about all the discussions in The Index for literally years because it wasn't in the discussion section). It ended up being "the place where CrWers discuss things, even if those things by all rights belong in other forums" - in effect, a ghetto.

Splitting it up removes the hyperspeed problem, and putting its parts in the proper places will help to avoid that deep division of the userbase.
 
magic9mushroom said:
No, having The Index as a badly-defined hodge-podge of everything is a bad idea. It was going at hyperspeed because it was doing several different forums' worth of work (as I noted), a couple of which were inherently not creative in the first place (I didn't find out about all the discussions in The Index for literally years because it wasn't in the discussion section). It ended up being "the place where CrWers discuss things, even if those things by all rights belong in other forums" - in effect, a ghetto.

Splitting it up removes the hyperspeed problem, and putting its parts in the proper places will help to avoid that deep division of the userbase.
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Just to be clear, do you think that actual discussion about fanfiction and user stories should have a section in the actual Discussions Forum, rather than Creative Writing having it's own discussion subforum?
 
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Deffinitly going to say that if there is an Anime/Manga subforum it needs to be separate from the main media forum. Also, the Vs forum needs a Technical subforum.
 
BobTheNinja said:
Why not have Technical Debates just be its own section in the Debate Forums?
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Mostly because they're more like references for the SF Vs Debate Forum. It makes more sense to have them as a sub-forum so that the reference threads aren't buried by the endless shitstorm of updates that will be the Vs Debate forum.
 
BobTheNinja said:
Just to be clear think that actual discussion about fanfiction and user stories should have a section in the actual Discussions Forum, rather than Creative Writing having it's own discussion subforum?
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No, because it comes down to a matter of extra work involved. Because then what, people read fics in CrW. They discuss ideas in the idea forum. Then they have to go back to the root, and go to the disucssion thread in the discussion section to discuss fanfic rather than discussing it in the fic thread where the author hangs out. It just seems needlessly complicated to have a separate separate discussion forum in an entirely different section.
 
Shgon Dunstan said:
Mainly as a large part of Technical Debates are Vs threads in all but name... If they even bother to forget the name...
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Number3124 said:
Mostly because they're more like references for the SF Vs Debate Forum. It makes more sense to have them as a sub-forum so that the reference threads aren't buried by the endless shitstorm of updates that will be the Vs Debate forum.
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I guess that makes sense.

Kerrus said:
No, because it comes down to a matter of extra work involved. Because then what, people read fics in CrW. They discuss ideas in the idea forum. Then they have to go back to the root, and go to the disucssion thread in the discussion section to discuss fanfic rather than discussing it in the fic thread where the author hangs out. It just seems needlessly complicated to have a separate separate discussion forum in an entirely different section.
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That does sound like a lot of unneeded effort.

Also, I'm thinking we might want to just have the Roleplaying subforums just be their own sections under Creative & Roleplaying Forums, the reason being that I think having only OOC and idea/suggestion/interest threads in the main Roleplaying forum is a bit misleading.


Forum Administration
- Suggestions, Technical Support, Etc.
- Administrative Tribunal​

Discussion Forums
- General Fiction Discussion
- Gaming
- Movies & TV Shows
- Anime & Manga
- Comics & Literature
- Non-Fiction News & Discussion​

Debate Forums
- VS Debates - Characters & Factions
- Technical Debates - Powers & Technology​
- The War Room - Non-Fiction Military
- Whitehall - Politics & Economics
​
Creative & Roleplaying Forums (tags for all Roleplaying sections designated IC, OOC, and Idea)
- Play-by-Post RPs
- The Slow Boat - High Quality RPs​
- Quests
- Council RPs
- Creative Writing Works List
- Story Archive
- Ideas, Reviews, and General Discussion
- Recommendations Index​
- Art & Animation​
 
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BobTheNinja said:
Just to be clear, do you think that actual discussion about fanfiction and user stories should have a section in the actual Discussions Forum, rather than Creative Writing having it's own discussion subforum?
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Yes. To use your most recent proposal as a base, Story Archive should be User Fiction main, and the Ideas/reviews/discussion forum should be pruned of "reviews" and "discussion", with those being put into a "fanwork discussion" forum under Discussion Forums, or into the relevant forum for original works (Worm and Saga of Soul, for instance, would fall under Comics and Literature).

(I'm not sure that splitting the discussion forums up that finely by medium is worth it, or whether your division of the rest of Creative is the best one, but those are separate issues.)

Kerrus said:
No, because it comes down to a matter of extra work involved. Because then what, people read fics in CrW. They discuss ideas in the idea forum. Then they have to go back to the root, and go to the disucssion thread in the discussion section to discuss fanfic rather than discussing it in the fic thread where the author hangs out. It just seems needlessly complicated to have a separate separate discussion forum in an entirely different section.
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It seems needlessly complicated to you because you're used to the old system.

I could, for instance, counterclaim that it's needlessly complicated for someone reading a story to sift through pages of "this is good" and discussion in the story's thread instead of just reading the whole thing as a work (roleplay threads are a different matter because every poster is at least potentially a contributor). Or for someone wanting to talk about fanfic ideas to sift through pages of discussion of the source material (to give an example I was personally involved in, basically all the discussion of PMMM Rebellion when it came out was done in the Index thread rather than in the Anime Forum where it belonged) and recs of existing fics.

There is no real reason for discussion of existing fanfiction to be done in Creative Writing. All the arguments for doing so that I've seen so far boil down to "it's always been done this way" (which is negated by the creation of SV), and "CrWers hang out in CrW" (which is inherently silly since the forum is divided by topic and not by userbase; such a compartmentalisation would only be good if you WANT a forum bitterly divided between CrWers who never go outside CrW and the rest of the people who never touch it).
 
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BobTheNinja said:
Forum Administration
- Suggestions, Technical Support, Etc.
- Administrative Tribunal​

Discussion Forums
- General Fiction Discussion
- Gaming
- Movies & TV Shows
- Anime & Manga
- Comics & Literature
- Non-Fiction News & Discussion​

Debate Forums
- VS Debates - Characters & Factions
- Technical Debates - Powers & Technology​
- The War Room - Non-Fiction Military
- Whitehall - Politics & Economics​
Creative & Roleplaying Forums (tags for all Roleplaying sections designated IC, OOC, and Idea)
- Play-by-Post RPs
- The Slow Boat - High Quality RPs​
- Quests
- Council RPs
- Creative Writing Works List
- Story Archive
- Ideas, Reviews, and General Discussion
- Recommendations Index​
- Art & Animation​
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I quite like this for the most part, although, I might suggest, from my time roleplaying on NationStates, that it would be helpful for each of the roleplaying forums to have a sub-forum for each for OOC threads. I can't tell you how annoying it is to have to worry about your thread being archived or deleted due to a little inactivity just because the ICs were running so much faster.
 
Oh gods, design by committee. :(

Look, people, create meaningful separations. Less forums and sub-forums is better since it delays the divergence of board culture and ghetto-isation. It's easier to split later than it is to merge. Can something be better done by tagging threads than by putting them in separate forums? Is there sufficient traffic for a category to separated into a specific forum?
 
magic9mushroom said:
There is no real reason for discussion of existing fanfiction to be done in Creative Writing. All the arguments for doing so that I've seen so far boil down to "it's always been done this way" (which is negated by the creation of SV), and "CrWers hang out in CrW" (which is inherently silly since the forum is divided by topic and not by userbase; such a compartmentalisation would only be good if you WANT a forum bitterly divided between CrWers who never go outside CrW and the rest of the people who never touch it).
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As an author, I would much rather that people discuss anything I write in the thread I post it in, as opposed to having to keep track of two or three different sections to locate commentary. If your entire argument boils down to 'we need a place for people to read fics without interruptions'- that's why we're making a place for that. But trying to shoehorn that in as the main functionality is really just eh.
 
Hi, I want to suggest the creation of a general Tech/Hardware/Software discussion and support forum.

Why?
As we saw on SB, people like to talk about general technology, and consult other spacebattlers on fixing and buying stuffs, because we were comfortable there. And in my experience, sections like this is mostly beneficial to the wider forum, due to stockpiling of infos related to our needs and usage.
And it's needed, just see the IRC thread here already.

Disadvantages?
Yeah, drama can happen quite a bit in an active technology discussion thread, but it will be lower than NSFW or Fiction/roleplaying dramas anyway, IMO.

My Rp. 500!
 
inawarminister said:
Hi, I want to suggest the creation of a general Tech/Hardware/Software discussion and support forum.

Why?
As we saw on SB, people like to talk about general technology, and consult other spacebattlers on fixing and buying stuffs, because we were comfortable there. And in my experience, sections like this is mostly beneficial to the wider forum, due to stockpiling of infos related to our needs and usage.
And it's needed, just see the IRC thread here already.

Disadvantages?
Yeah, drama can happen quite a bit in an active technology discussion thread, but it will be lower than NSFW or Fiction/roleplaying dramas anyway, IMO.

My Rp. 500!
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Maybe we could include that as a subforum under Non-Fiction News & Discussion? Or even as its own section under the Discussion Forums.
 
BobTheNinja said:
Just to be clear, do you think that actual discussion about fanfiction and user stories should have a section in the actual Discussions Forum, rather than Creative Writing having it's own discussion subforum?
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I think it would be practical to keep any discussion only threads on fanfiction/creative writing tied into the same section, at least for right now, if only to keep from getting too cluttered, and to keep the staff from having to move threads from one section to the other so much.
 
Creative & Roleplaying Forums (tags for all Roleplaying sections designated IC, OOC, and Idea)
  • - Behind the Curtain- RP discusiions, idea generation, OOC Thread, and so on
    • The Slow Boat - High Quality or long RPs
    • The Theater - Normal PbPs,BROBs, RP's, and everything else
    • Democracy - Quests
    • Armchair Generals - Council Games (Which are almost all about civilization and Military stuff in SB/SV, can be renamed if it doesn't fits)
===========================
Would something like this work
 
Evillevi said:
Creative & Roleplaying Forums (tags for all Roleplaying sections designated IC, OOC, and Idea)
  • - Behind the Curtain- RP discusiions, idea generation, OOC Thread, and so on
    • The Slow Boat - High Quality or long RPs
    • The Theater - Normal PbPs,BROBs, RP's, and everything else
    • Democracy - Quests
    • Armchair Generals - Council Games (Which are almost all about civilization and Military stuff in SB/SV, can be renamed if it doesn't fits)
===========================
Would something like this work
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Honestly, I think having a "Behind the Curtain" superforum kinda defeats the point of having IC, OOC, and Idea tags. It'd be better to let each RP game type section have OOC and Idea threads, which can be sorted out with the prefix system.
 
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