this is jem's dad
he was hit by a gas attack via the atmosphere on the way home and has been condemned to a wheelchair for the rest of his life
rip
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this is jem's dad
he was hit by a gas attack via the atmosphere on the way home and has been condemned to a wheelchair for the rest of his life
rip
I don't support making a new AI subforum. Before you jump down my throat, consider the idea that perhaps we'd like to grow the forum a little bit. I'm not talking about wristband gimmicks or emo subforums or trying to play the odds on the newest SEO trend. Tengu is not TGO and this isn't a business, but more traffic wouldn't be a bad thing. Getting new members could be great for CD. But simply having an AI subforum wouldn't do that, because right now we just don't have enough traffic to do it.
Making subforums like The Great Outdoors isn't really a problem because it doesn't remove traffic from one area of the site and put it into another one (presumably to be hidden away under Nerdcore, anyway). Many threads in CI are threads that could be put into an AI forum (assuming you say that posting standards won't change in the new AI), but that means they wouldn't be in CI. CI is our General Discussion forum, and the General Discussion forum needs to have enough traffic to make random users who browse by want to stick around. A GD is a vital area of a forum, which is why TGO was always trying to find new shit to make LWS' GD stand out (those failed, but the effort was for the right reasons).
I propose a compromise. No AI just yet, because if the post standards aren't increased, there isn't any reason to confine threads into one spot; in fact, if we did want to increase standards, we'd need greater numbers of more thoughtful and intelligent posters or the forum would be dead anyway. However, we can have more moderation in CI threads. Derailment isn't a huge problem when it's intelligent derailment - threads can always be split by a moderator with good judgment. Random, flames-esque comments in CI threads don't honestly seem to be so pervasive as to actually impede discussion, but if you guys want us to, we can start moderating that, too.
I want to make sure this place keeps its spirit of being a community first, and not a business. But if we don't try to make sure we're at least marginally attractive to new users, we'll end up stagnant. We just don't have the forum postcount yet to be dividing discussion further.
i have yielded to chrissy's having thought about this rather than following my impulsiveness and unthinking slavery to atmosfear's will. no AI for now.
Depending on which way you see things, there are two issues with that, sole:
First, if you think the site as a whole would suffer because AI would simply divert GD traffic into a tucked-away subforum, then you're making an argument for a new main forum, or possibly a subforum of GD (which I would be completely okay with.) If this traffic diversion is so significant, it should be pushed to the forefront of visibility because, at the moment, there are a number of main page forums that site there not due to traffic but due to tradition.
Second, if you're advocating more moderation of GD (something I also support), then you're undermining the vote we all took regarding infractions, increased moderation, and improved posting standards. To me, if GD is your premiere forum, then its posting standards should be upheld in every forum (except, obviously, Flames; it's lack of posting standards is its purpose), which would mean we need to revisit the vote we took (or we could get rid of the democratic process entirely, which I'll also support.)
It seems fundamentally silly to me to now expect moderators to break threads apart within GD, link threads to their derailments, etc. when the real, underlying problem with it is the posting standard being too lax (off-topic posts should eb disallowed, not to mention multiple tl;drs on a tangential discussion and now you can't find the main subject... we could just prevent the tl;drs which is not only easier for moderators, less subjective, and easily applied to all forums, troll removal is more attractive to new users anyways.)
We have identical goals, I just don't think your methods advance us in either the democratically (stupidly) preferred direction or the direction of our goals, because the two might as well be mutually exclusive.
No, I'm not making that argument at all. I'm not necessarily saying the site would suffer, first of all - I'm saying that it would deter new growth. But beyond that point, you're drawing conclusions out of what I've said that genuinely don't make sense to me. I'm not making an argument for a new main forum because a new main forum drags numbers down. Let me explain how this works. When you create a forum on the Internet, your forum's activity is the most important advertisement that you make to guests. There are a few numbers that are of vital importance on your index page: Threads: X, Posts: Y, Members: Z. Those are arguably the most important numbers to focus on when your forum is new. But they aren't the only numbers to focus on - the other ones are seen in the columns to the right of every forum - the specific forums' threadcounts and postcounts. These indicate how much activity your forums are getting as individual areas of the site. Even if your total number of forum posts is high, low specific forum activity will make your forum look inactive. Right now, if you browse to CD, it looks like a wasteland. Flames is the largest number-padder we have at CD, so our total forum thread/postcount isn't too bad, but our individual forum counts are fucking abysmal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
Making a new subforum of CI for AI would be just about the only way to combat that issue, but I'm still supporting an effort to try being as active as possible in the forums we already have. You don't need a specific AI forum to have intelligent conversations - as many people have pointed out, AI's previous incarnations weren't ever very impressive in the first place.
I'm not saying we should never have a debate forum. I think we should. The problem is that this is a tiny website with a small following and a debate forum would literally serve us in no way unless we just don't give a shit either way whether anyone signs up for a new account.
Right. I've been very lenient about letting new forums sit with less than stellar activity, but there is a method to my madness. You have to achieve a balance - too many forums on a site with no posts in them is a bad thing because it makes your forum look less active than it really is. Huge numbers of forums, even when they're active, can make a site too overwhelming to new members. But CD isn't huge and it doesn't have a very significant amount of forums. If you have too few forums, and you just have four forums with all of your traffic divided between them, your site looks too disorganized and it will be a headache to read threads posted in those four forums. The Great Outdoors wasn't taking away traffic from any other part of the site and hiding it. It was just providing people a place to make threads they literally would not have made anywhere else. Even if the traffic in that subforum is low, its location makes it plump up Sports' postcount on the index a little, and that's great. If a ton of people in Sports had been posting about things that belonged in The Great Outdoors, though, it would have been a different story this early on. I'm not going to explain every hypothetical situation here, but there is a logic behind the decision process when it comes to making new forums.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
I guess what I'm really saying is that I understand why you want AI, but I would like it if you trusted me on why it's better not to bring it back just yet. I am explaining my reasoning the best I know how, and I'm not cockblocking in any way - I think a debate forum is a good thing to have on site like this, but I just don't feel that we have enough traffic yet to warrant it - instead of cleanly dividing up threads due to overflow, it would just take away a bunch of them from CI. Even as a subforum of CI.
No, I'm not undermining anything. You'll notice that when I proposed this compromise, it was a proposal instead of a mandate. I never said, "now we're going to be a lot more strict in CI." My whole point was that we can have a little more moderation in GD if that's what people want to see.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
I'm not getting rid of the democratic process. This community is small enough that votes on certain things actually count for something. At LWS, any attempt at democratic methods was a nightmare because there were too many people who were far too ignorant on the whole about forums and how to run them, so giving them choices about how to proceed would have only tied our hands in unpleasant ways. CD, on the other hand, is made up of LWS veterans who are smart enough to know what kind of community they want to build. You may want things to be run a certain way, Atmosfear, and that's understandable. I wish people would have voted for a little more moderation in that previous thread, but I don't want it to be up to me. I want it to be up to everyone else. This doesn't mean I think everything ought to be a vote - certain things like forum creation really should be left in the hands of people who have run forums before (with considered input from others). But I'm not going to just decide that we need stricter moderation and then enforce that upon everyone else, even if the majority of the site would prefer we kept things lax.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
If the members of this site want to be able to make some silly posts outside of Flames, then that's how it will be. I don't see it dragging down the overall quality of the site right now. LWS had to have strict posting standards because we had over 80k members. CD is made up of the people who were around at LWS the longest and (for the most part) were the top-tier posters. We don't need to police them heavily, because they know how to post.Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmosfear
If you think it's stupid or silly to split threads (which is very easy to do), then don't split threads. Let other mods do it.
If you make a poll, I will vote yes...probably.
Sole: could the direction of this shift into a subforum of CI that is either a debate forum (the one in AI back in LWS had pretty good activity, IIRC), or perhaps an archive of the threads that have solid, quality content? Not so much a BOTB, but threads like this genetic disposition one going on in CI are ones with some real value to them. So let the inane, banal threads melt away and die, and cull from them the threads that contain valuable content?
With it as a subforum of CI, the postcount won't change, and the quality that CI can produce is readily accessible, even and especially to potential new posters.
edit: I don't know too much about forum growth or maintenance, but I still think it makes sense to divide above-average threads from the rest, and plant them obviously in the flagship forum.
Yes, it makes sense to divide them and display them, but only after there is enough content to keep that divide from doing more harm than good.Quote:
Originally Posted by coqauvin
You're basically right about the subforum idea. The thing is, right now CI needs to be moving faster. Making a subforum in CI will not detrimentally affect the thread/postcount numbers on the index of the site, but it will affect the way threads move in CI.
I'm totally open to making a debate subforum in CI when there is more activity going on there. Let's just give it a few weeks and see how it goes. When there are more threads, there is more of a reason to separate them. Right now, we do have a thread rating system that can easily show people which threads are considered by the community to be of good quality.