Be Excellent To Each Other

Don't feel bad - it's an Edge Predictable/10 which is a higher rating than at most other places.

Hahaha! I like Halo a lot

I'd be surprised if that's the case with software as powerful as PHPBB. I've just whopped a Vanilla Forum install on a client site, and that's how that works: by default, you see all the threads, but you can also visit and bookmark the individual category threads. However, if de-facto categories ever happen here (like, say, Retro Gamer), that'll pretty much be the point when the bookmark gets deleted.

As for signal/noise, I'm feeling uncomfortable with that, too, which is probably why I'm not posting here as much as I did on WoS. It's a bit strange when you come back after half a day and find two new pages of threads, especially when you don't have time to trawl through them.

I may, or may not, post on there.

And be a member of their official football team.

I solve this problem by skimming the thread titles and clicking the 'mark all as read' button frequently.

Go with Comical, he's a wise man..... this time.

Members of new forum finding it slightly different, with stuff to discuss shocker.

Also: as previously noted, people are still going 'Crikey! Eh?' about this whole affair, and running on adrenaline. If you are a proper poster who writes proper posts about proper stuff - don't think "Why, the vulgarians have taken over, Martha!" and don't post. That's like treating an infected wound with apathy, and you're helping nobody. Don't just say here "Why, I think that certain elements have made it a tad rambunctious, don'tcha know." PM a Mod if you have a specific complaint, or reply in the thread in relation to it.

Just don't say "I say, it's a bit... well..you know...", or make use of this hideously insulting "signal-to-noise ratio", if you're not going to do anything about it. This is YOUR forum. Not mine. Take pride in it, take part in it. I can't do that for you.

What is there to be done about it? If the forum settles down, it'll be great for me. If not, I doubt it'll miss a few posters like me if we're only being grumpy anyway. Clearly, plenty of people think it's great as it is, and so I don't really think it'd be wise for anyone to stamp their feet too hard and go "it should be like this!"—if the majority are happy with the way things are, that's the way they should be.

And, for what it's worth, I'm not aiming to insult people here either with anything I've written.

I don't know what everyone's complaining about, I haven't enjoyed being on a forum this much for years.

I will

Please, don't create sub-forums. That's one of the reasons WoS was so good. If I want sub-forums, I'll go to one of the many other forums on the net with its own sets of people only posting in one particular sub-forum and ignoring all the rest. Keep it how it is.

Yeah, apart from football.

See, this is why my idea is great, if it's technically possible. By allowing people to dynamically create their own subfora, you have the best of all possible worlds.

It's technically possible, all right, but it would mean people would have to tag forums upon creation (or after), right? Or would it work on keywords?
Or have I got the wrong idea?

Not necessarily. People will see it as an excuse to just post shit threads because so long as they categorise them - it'll be alright, but the main un-filtered general forum would be full of shit.

One big main forum. Each thread can be tagged.

When you load up the main page, each different tag you assign gets its own subforum, and those threads are in it. All untagged threads are in the main forum.

Example. I load up this page, it's all one forum. I tag three threads with "Sport", and nine threads with "Music", because they're the one's I'm less interested in. When I reload the page, there are now two subfora at the top, Sport and Music, with the threads I've tagged inside them. Those threads now no longer appear on the main page.

Me too!

We're still Pokévolving at the moment, things will settle.

There's a lot of ideas floating around at the moment (which are great) but this is OUR forum and it it will morph to our will in time. We should be positive and pro-active people, if something is of great interest and/or importance to you start a thread or join in on what's going on (My Shmup thread is both highly awesome and very on-topic and informative at the moment *STAR JUMP*). This isn't aimed at anyone btw, and any lurkers out there please de-cloak and beam yourselves down.

I'm going for lunch now, I think I've overdone it.

Nor me, mate/sir/fellow. I wasn't responding to you directly, more a general sort of 'There's been a lot of talk about...' soapbox missive.

All I'm saying is that everyone has an opinion, but there is only so much us mods can do if people just say "Can we have it better and more like WoS and with a better signal-to-noise ratio". Especially since the obvious solution to that would be "Fine, only appointed forumites can create threads, and anything off-topic is deleted immediately - NO JOKES - and in fact, it's just WoS again except without a subscription fee."

That isn't happening, by the way.


This. Exactly. We're still in the 'throwing shit to see what sticks' phase. I think it can be intelligently observed that the very reason this forum is currently in flux, still evolving, is because it is full of enthusiastic people communicating excitedly. This is EXCELLENT NEWS, it means that people are actually happy to be here, and wondering what they can now 'do'. This should be encouraged now, during this first FORTNIGHT of this forum being open. It did take Stu more than a fortnight to get his own forum shipworthy, of course.

If busy forumites are not communicating about what you want them to, then do something about it i.e. bump up that thread. But I'll say this now: just because someone posts some one-line joke, or picture, it doesn't make them 'less good' than someone who posts at great length, with thoughtful verbosity. Or this would be World of Titler.

I like the forums as is, with one possible exception.

The Recommendations one.

This has left me confused. Several RMDs have been created in the main forum, and not so many in the Recs forum. As such, I am confused as to which to be used. In fact, toay I am going to create an RMD as I need advice on something, and despite the best intentions of putting things in the right place, the main forum has the traffic and would be more helpful to me.

Can I make a suggestion that the Guides/Recs forum is used as an archive for useful RMD type topics, and not the place to start them? So if I want a digital camera advice I can go to the guides section as the old topic will now live there. However, since there have been no headphone discussions on the forum, I would create a new one in the main forum.

Or is that less useful now that we have a working search function?

Just bouncing an idea around. I worry about starting threads in the wrong places...

Well, if we wanted to be really accurate...

That is the idea of the recommendations forum. A library of good advice, just like on WoS.

Sounds good to me too.

With 'Check the ruddy RMD forum first!' rule probably being needed, if the bi-monthly 'Hey, how do I 'do' my PSP firmware?' threads on WoS being any indicator.

Hmm. You know, these "View New Posts", and "View Active Topics" buttons are ever so useful. They show you what threads you haven't finished reading yet, regardless of what sub-forum they're in, all on one handy convenient page, as simple as that.

Some folks here might well want to investigate if they've not already. They're super useful.

The only problem there is that thread titles don't always give much of a clue what they're really about.

It would be nice if some clever person could add the ability to hover the cursor over the first post so you can read the first sentence without having to actually open it. This is very useful when skimming threads with vague/ambiguous/jokey titles.

Sub-forums are only essential, IMO, on *really* busy forums like Digital Spy, where it would take you all day just to scan the results of 'view new posts'.

The easiest way to navigate a forum of this size,IME, is to simply click on 'view new posts'.

Subforums do of course make it easier to search old topics, but I don't think that's too much of a problem just yet.

I'll have a go.

Er, so how were you coping on WoS with this ambiguous thread title problem? Bearing in mind that the first sentence of a thread might well be "Linky here: link" or "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2345324235324234324" or "[img] HAHAHAHA".

With difficulty - I ended up skipping most threads.

Hey I'm not moaning, just throwing out ideas.
I'm more of a lurker than anything and I wouldn't dream of complaining or making demands on a free forum that's clearly a labour of love.

I think you should ditch all sub forums apart from the reviews forum (which is for reviews that get submitted to be uploaded on the main site when ready) and then look into some kind of topic tagging system, so when a topic is created you have to give it a tag like "football", or "gaming". Maybe sub tags, like "gaming, xbox" etc. Then people can turn off certain tags from view when they visit the main forum, so anything about football and xboxes gets hidden if they aren't interested, and then they can only see what interests them. For example, see practically any torrent upload site like demonoid or piratebay. Of course, only if this is possible via some code tweak/plugin or something.

As far as RMD threads, ditch the RMD sub forum and then people here should get used to using the search button, since we are all probably used to its utter non functionality at WoS. When it works (like it does here) it works great! And of course, having a topic tag as "RMD" would help this in the search criteria too. I don't like Sub forums in community forums like this, it ghetto-izes the population instead of having it as one big interacting community. But, be vigilant about people using the search function, its always annoying when you get a new topic every week with people asking about the same thing.

Overall, I think if it ain't broke in the front end, then don't fuck with it. But in the background, make it so that its very usable and searchable so its as easy as possible to find things when you want to.

Things will calm down and get more sensible here over time, everything is new and shiny and we're all a little giddy and excited, but that's fun for a while and let's enjoy the new forum smell while it lasts

on tagged forums v subforums, do people know the way of the rodent one, that seems to be doing that rather nicely
http://forum.stillwater-rock.com/
(it seems to be vanilla)

For not only liking metul, but also for his above excellent idea, Mr Pupil should be praised with great praise.

Another for eg, I how the UKNova RSS feeds system works. If that concept could be used for the main forum display system, it would be ly

Thanks, although I'm not going anywhere at the mo'—well, unless you suddenly create a bunch of sub-forums, obv.

Yes, though I largely hate Metul, I praise Pupil with great praise. ~ PRAISE

Don't worry kids, it doesn't mean I'm a biased music librarian - just that I'll have to rely on you lot now and again for suggestions as to latest metul albums we should get in.

Ugh.

We'll learn ya Pete, don't worry. You'll be a die hard Slayer fan by Xmas, I promise!

One of the more baffling moments of my life was when I was eleven and my dad went down to London (from Huddersfield) for a rare accountancy business thing. Despite being incredibly competent and ace my dad never got to do things like this, and was kept at a low paid level for ages in his firm - much to his quiet distress - so this was seen by all as a good exciting thing*. He returned with gifts for all, and mine was a Slayer t-shirt with a guitar and their name hit by lightning or something.

Up to this point I had never expressed the slightest interest in Slayer, nor in the genre of metal - and nor had my dad. Years later I confronted him with the question as to why he bought it me, but he couldn't remember ever making such a purchase. As my dad is usually concientious in prezzie-buying, it's a strange mystery that haunts me to this day.

*Happily six years later he quit the firm and we moved to Batley, where he got a lower paid job but one that was five minutes away, and working for a boss who wasn't a complete idiot. Time passed, he rose up the ranks of the little firm and now he's the boss. Hurrah.

But now you get S-Club t-shirts.

Tweak? It's a lovely idea, but it would be a fair bit of work. It's the sort of idea that (IMO) you'd create a forum around.
The problem with changing a mass-produced forum (like this one) is that when it is updated, you either don't update or you lose all your features.


I am in agreement here.

That's totally fair, it would be lovely if possible, but I don''t know how customisable the forum code is via plugins and things, so how plausible this idea would be. Just an idea though.

Did they have those in Biblical times, then?

I thought a few days ago (but can't remember if I posted or not, and if so, where I posted it) but creating lots of sub-forums tends to break a board up - people stick to one or two different sib-forums and tend to stop reading all of the different areas, which would probably lead to a general drop in the level of interesting discussion as if people read only what they think will appeal t them you tend to get people that are all of a certain mindset posting with no alternative point of view.

'Interesting points rasied there, Miss Mimi, indeed" *twitchy moustache*

9.972/10

How about 4-5 chit-chat threads stickyed at the top for general chatter on say: News, Games, Sport, Music and General. People don't have to post in them but if it's just a short off-hand comment on something they don't have to make a new thread.

That's a terrible name.

Just to make it clear, as I kinda started this, I think sub-forums are really a last ditch solution to be avoided at all costs. They will suck the life from the place.

We are already starting to calm down a little.

*Chuckle*

The bible is full of consumer advice and product reviews, they just usually cut those bits out because its difficult to start wars over the demerits of a twin-speed blender.

Thanks for the first ever appreciation of a sig of mine, anywhere, by the way.

Has the 2 quid a month been worth it so far, in terms of "stuff"?

To be fair, it's tough to say, it's not been a full month yet.

Not for me. *goes to PayPal to finally cancel it*