Consolidating the five gaming forums into one has other benefits as well:
- Topics posted in the quieter forums like PC discussion are more likely to be seen and thus discussed.
- There is a decreased likelihood of duplicate threads being made in multiple forums.
- There is a decreased likelihood of a thread being made in the wrong forum.
Of course, we'd need the forum search function back to prevent duplicates of threads that may have fallen off the first page, and we'd probably want to heavily stress that users should be making use of said function before creating a topic. We also may want to decrease the size of the text of thread titles in each forum, so that more thread titles can be seen on your screen at one time. I find many users don't even make it to the bottom of the first page when checking to see if a thread has already been made, let alone going on to the second! Apparently scrolling can be a bit troublesome for some people lol.
Combining the forums does have some negatives as well, like we'd be faced with a plethora of stickies. Of course, we should probably cut down on the general number of stickies as is. I find most people overlook them anyway, instead jumping straight to the new threads below them, and I've had threads actually suffer in views/posts after being sticky'd. xD
To help with the number of stickies, we should probably institute some rule about official game threads, so we don't have an official thread pop up months before a game is even close to releasing, all the while new threads are still being made for any new information that surfaces. It seems very redundant, and the official threads should probably be used to house discussion of a game around and post-release, once we've stopped getting a deluge of new info about the game and instead are simply playing it. At the least we shouldn't allow them to take up space at the top of each forum until closer to release. But that's more a topic unto itself, one I'll probably discuss it with Machina later.
ioi said:
It's a tough balance because the other train of thought is what about someone who creates a thread about a weapons list in some obscure fps? It is likely to just get lost under a stampede of other threads unless it has somewhere to reside, a sub forum where you can actually filter down and go to find threads about a specific topic.
I agree that in some ways one global forum is best but I can also see the calls for more and more sub-forums to direct discussion in certain directions and give users different "homes". The same can be said for the idea of creating groups, possibly each with seperate discussion functionality...
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On the other side of the coin, if a certain sub forum isn't very popular, any threads posted therein, no matter how interesting, will be affected by the lack of traffic to that forum. We already have this issue with the PC forum. The forum is generally dead, so much so that even the PC gamers on this site (like me) rarely check it. Because of this, the occasional topic that is posted there only survives as long as it remains in Hot Topics, and the people that check their preferred forums individually usually don't even see it.
Slimebeast said:
I liked Makingmusic's argument to merge Sony - MS - Nintend to suppress fanboyism, but.. I really need those subforums. I can't judge from the thread title if it's a Sony or Nintendo game or product they're talking about (im talking from a Xbox and multiplatform perspective here), so I'd be clickin on many threads Im not interested in. I prefer to willingly go into the Nintendo or Sony subforums and be prepared that there's sort of "inside" discussion about games or brand related things going on there.
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That's really only an issue with thread titles, and quickly browsing the various sections of each forum, I don't see many threads that don't make it fairly obvious whether it's discussing something pertaining to one company or another. I guess threads like the one about Infamous 2 could be a bit confusing if, say, you didn't know the game was published by Sony and thus didn't know it was ps3 exclusive, but at this point I'd assume most people do.
At worst us mods would have to start cracking down on uninformative and/or misleading thread titles, something we technically should be doing already.
SamuelRSmith said:
I personally think that there should be 4 categories: Gaming, Sales, Site, and Off-Topic. Then, with tag clouds within each category, and some kind of live web 2.0 filtering system for the tags.
So, I would click on off-topic, and type in the bar at the top "politics", and it would filter out all of the active threads (posted in within the last 7 days, or something) that have been tagged "politics", or, if I want to see threads that have had the involvement of a certain user, I can click on off-topic, type "Machina" and see all of the threads that Machina has recently posted on in off-topic.
I don't know, it just seems to be a different way of doing forums, embracing the whole idea of community-based filtering and such, and I think it could be a success. It could also fix the issue of people making shit thread titles, or if the conversation diverts away from the original post, as the tags would reflect this.
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That sounds interesting, and it could work quite well. Are there any examples of this already in the wild? I'd like to give it a try.
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On a side note, giving us mods the ability to edit thread titles and merge threads would help in dealing with both misleading thread titles (or thread titles that contain a mistake) and duplicate threads. It would be silly to lock an active thread because of a slightly inaccurate thread title, and thus we rarely do it, but a quick title change would put all issues to rest. We could also then keep thread titles up-to-date as new information unfolds. Like if the source of a thread turns out to be inaccurate, for example.
