Okay, so we’ve got this post, posted just now:
A few days ago, we had something that helped. Labelling ONLY THREAD GAMES as thread games, so that they could safely be ignored by people skimming the game room forum page. It made it very easy to simply see “game” and not read the rest of the title.
However, apparently, the new solution is to label every thread. And not only that, but the only difference between game threads, and game discussions, is that one will be in brackets. Which is an extremely subtle and nearly pointless difference when the entire point of labeling threads is so that you can quickly distinguish certain ones at a glance and ignore them.
So we had a solution that was:
relatively easy to implement (we only had to mark game threads)
moderately useful (you could just mentally skip over any time it said GAME
fairly likely to see compliance. Only those few people who started game threads would have to volunteer to mark their threads, or a moderator would have a relatively easy time marking only game threads.
And in instead we exchanged it for a solution that’s:
Harder to implement (now all threads, not just game threads, need to be labeled appropriately)
Far less useful (you can’t simply mentally skip over GAME because it might be a game discussion, so now you’ve got to read every thread title anyway
Less likely to be complied with, since people aren’t going to voluntarily do something as nearly pointless as this
I honestly wonder if this new strategy is deliberately sabotage. It could be for two reasons:
One, just labeling game threads in the game room showed people just how choked that forum was with game thread spam. You realize “oh, look, 90% of the threads here are people furiously padding their post counts” when you look at the labels
And two, there’s clearly a lot of mod resentment towards those of us who have the audacity to try to improve the boards by calmly and in a civil tone suggest changes to the board for the betterment of everyone, and so I suspect there could be a childish “OH FINE HERE, YOU WANT A SOLUTION? TAKE YOUR SOLUTION”, giving us a crappy solution, and then when we point out how crappy this solution is, we get “OH WE TRY TO HELP YOU AND YOU COMPLAIN, YOU’RE ALL JUST A BUNCH OF WHINERS”
I have been very civil and quite detailed in my proposals to try to help better the board so far, but at this point I don’t trust that everyone on the other side is acting in good faith on this one. There is clearly contempt by at least some of the administration for those of us who are doing our best to politely improve this board.