Pretty much what it said in the title:
I guess people really didn’t like the GAME markers.
Read this mess. A modest proposal for a sub-forum or two in The Game Room was predictably nixed as not needed, too time-consuming, too difficult, not unanimously cheered by all mods, ain’t gonna happen, thread closed.
In the absence of a separate forum for thread games, some people suggested that tagging thread titles with “GAME:” (or similar) at the start might help those who were not interested to weed through them. It looks to me like Dex took it upon himself to do this for all the relevant thread titles, because they were all like that when I browsed The Game Room yesterday. Today, they were gone again, so I can only surmise that the other mods piled on Dex for interfering in a forum where he is not a regular mod (this may be overstating it a bit, but you get the gist), so he reversed the change and then felt compelled to post about it.
FWIW, in the short time the experiment was tried, personally I found the thread titles with “GAME:” in them made them seem even more intrusive than before, although it did help a little bit. So while I’m grateful to Dex for spending the time and effort giving it a go, I’m not too sorry it was discontinued.
Seems to me the GAME markers were OK and somewhat helpful. I can’t see why anyone should have gotten concerned about them one way or the other.
There was, in fact, a sticky thread in The Game Room that explained what Dex was doing and inviting feedback. I would link to it, but it has disappeared like the GAME tags themselves.
It’s a shame. I was, in fact, training myself to ignore anything that started with “GAME”. If anything, it showed to anyone with half-a-brain just how many of those game threads there were, and just how they had permanently pinned themselves to the top of the forum. But, no, they’re not a problem. No, siree. Absolutely not. Game threads are not a problem at all.
I never got involved with the game forum stuff but I want to say I appreciate Dex taking the effort to try to make the board a better place in his eyes.
His and a few others. I love sports but going through all the various game threads has kept me out of that department. Had his idea stuck ----------
Yeah, why it was removed puzzled me. It wasn’t a new rule. It was completely voluntary. No one was going to get mod noted or warned for not doing it. No flurry of reports, no pressure, just an act of self-regulating as a way to address the situation.
Why it needed to be undone is beyond me. If it wasn’t helpful the users themselves would have just stopped doing it.
Good on Dex, and bad on those who reversed it.
Yeah. Game threads make it really difficult to navigate that forum, looking for stuff that is not a thread game. I really think we ought to move all the sports and video game discussions to Cafe Society, under ‘entertainment’
This subject has been under discussion in the mod loop.
On rare occasions we think we have consensus and there’s misunderstanding and it all goes pear-shaped. We’re still sorting things out and we’ll get back to you when we do.
No harm, no foul. Consider this a false start, we’re working it out. No bad guys in this.
“Square cut or pear-shaped
These rocks won’t lose their shape
Game Room is a girl’s best friend”
Hey, at lesat he gave it a shot.
I didn’t realize it was such a hotly debated problem. Kind of helped a problem for a minority that browsed by board and shifted the bothered to those who browse by New Posts, or didn’t care. It did start me thinking.
What you want to do is this:
Install a tag cloud plugin.
Give every game thread a distinctive tag, like “game”
Use a plugin that allows users to put certain tags into an ignore list that makes threads that use them invisible or greys them out. (also it would be good for highlighting tagged threads) I doubt such a plugin exists and you will have to invent it yourself or put in a request and it should be ready in a few years if it isn’t impossible. (This actually sounds like a good plugin now that I write it out.)
See, it’s as simple as reinventing the wheel.
Lololol
FYI, if you can get a few minutes of Jerry’s time, you can tweak the Game Room so that the labeling Dex was doing manually happens whenever someone starts a thread, using Thread Prefixes. Once configured, what would happen is every time someone starts a thread in the Game Room, there would be an additional pulldown menu next to the title field. They’d select one of the categories you’d set up (sports, forum games, other) and the thread title would have some labeling text in front of it, e.g. [GAME], [SPORTS]). You could even set up custom search links to show only the threads with those prefixes, or people could manually search – the search function would have an additional thread prefix option. (One possible downside is that this option would show for all searches, even though it would only be relevant for the Game Room.)
Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll post a detailed walkthrough of how to set up the prefixes and modify the forum permissions so you don’t have to waste time reading documentation.
That’ll happen when Dennis DeYoung and Styx get back together.
That actually sounds practical. Except [GAME] tags didn’t go over well at all.
How would **post icons **work?
Of course we would need Straight Dope friendly post icons. No bigger then 12x12. All the same shape and nearly the same color (as long as it’s a shade of grey) and few options to choose from.
But still, talking about using images is more heretical them my first suggestion.
No bad guys, just a hissy fit that would have embarrassed my five year old niece.
Yes, I should have prefaced my post by saying that if the mod consensus was to try to do the [GAME] and [SPORTS] labels, there existed an easy way to make it automatic and consistent that they may not have been aware of.
Post icons would be awful, IMO. For one thing, they’re intended to be used on a post by post basis, not as a single thread label. For another thing, they make the main forum display hideous.