I actually think that some sort of testing is going on. I’m certain that one thread I posted in(about Nvidia’s graphics cards) was earlier labelled GAMING, and is now labelled GAME.
In fact, it appears that the GAMING tag has disappeared altogether, and been replaced by GAME. I hope they reconsider that.
Okay, guys, someone is seriously misunderstanding the problem here.
The problem in the game room forum is not that people have a hard time distinguishing between discussions about games, and discussions about sports. Those operate the same way the rest of the board does - the title indicates what it’s about, and when people have something to say to other members, or to discuss points already raised, they compose a post with some communication, response, and insight, and submit it. The fact that games are grouped in with sports is fine, just like in café society threads on food, movies, and music are all grouped in together with no problem distinguishing them.
The problem is that thread games are not discussion, like the rest of the message board. They are, themselves, games that you play by posting. By their nature, they tend to accumulate a lot of low content, rapid posting. Which upsets the balance of the message board, because the top of the forum list is not dominated by which topics are generating the most discussion because they’re interesting or topical or otherwise very active discussions. They dominate the forum list because they encourage frequent posting.
So the key point is this:
Threads in which you play games, and threads in which you discuss topics, including video/board/etc games are not merely a difference of subject, but a difference of type.
The problem in the game room is not “I can’t find my sports threads with all this discussion of video games”, the problem with the game room is “I can’t find any discussions because 28 of the first 30 threads on this board are thread games with no discussion”
So what we had a few days ago was a small step in the right direction. It labeled thread games with the prefix games. That made it easier for those of us who are not interested in thread games to quickly scan the page for actual discussions.
However, the current state of affairs, in which everything is given a label, and discussions about video games are given the same label as thread games indicates that someone is not understanding the problem, because the solution makes no sense. Discussions about Wasteland 2 or Crusader Kings 2, for example, do not deserve the same label as the Trivia Dominoes or Count to infinity in pictures threads.
Nor is it necessary to label sports threads. Again, this would be the equivelant of going to café society and tagging threads with FOOD or MOVIES or MUSIC. It’s not necessary.
If you are going to tag anything, it should only be thread games which are tagged, so that those who are looking for discussions in the forum can skip over them. This was correctly done a few days ago. But when someone re-implemented the title changes, they didn’t understand the issue.
The key to this whole thing is that thread games, and discussions, are two entirely different types of content and do not belong together. It would make more sense to have a food, video games, and elections forum than it does to have thread games alongside video game and sports discussion, because while the former three are disparate topics, they at least share the commonality of being discussion and fundamentally working the same way, whereas thread games do not, regardless of the coincidence that “thread game” and “game discussion” both share a word.
So, what we need:
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Their own forum. Everyone has explained why this is the most obvious, best solution for everyone, including those who like to play thread games. But we’re told that’s not going to happen.
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Move game threads back to MPSIMS. That forum tends to be closer in format to random chatter with low content and high posting frequency. They would fit in there much better than they do in the game room, and I suspect that the overlap between people who participate in game threads and post in MPSIMS is far higher than those who play game threads and post about video games or sports.
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At the least, go back to the practice we had several days ago of labeling only thread games, and do not label discussions. Or, at the very least, do not label actual discussions about games with the same label that game threads get.
Geez, that’s horrible. That’s even more confusing than if they had left it alone.
Yeah, the first method was definitely better, adding [GAME] to the thread games only and leaving the other threads as they were. Now it looks like a total mess.
Here, I have a better solution that may be viable.
**SenorBeef ** has it exactly right. And I know, I know that only Jerry has admin rights, he’s busy, yadda yadda. But how much time have y’all spent debating back and forth, tagging threads, untagging threads, REtagging (all! GR) threads, and so on?
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.
We can mark – I’m using mark and not tag, as tag is something else entirely different and we’re not going there – we can mark old threads (up to a point, we’re not going to do them all), we can mark them however is appropriate. We may need your guidance on that because time is limited and we’re obviously not reading every post in every thread.
The important thing is moving forward – we ask that you mark your own new threads so people can see what’s going on. Then you can look at them, search through them, decide what you want to do.
At this point we’re not likely to get any administrative assistance. No resources for such. So we felt this low tech way might help. At this point there’s not much alternative available and we’re trying to meet your needs with what we got.
More information: [Game] tag for thread games. - The Game Room - Straight Dope Message Board
Okay, here’s an official answer since we’ve been talking the last few days and are all mostly on the same page now.
Dex went ahead and started to do this a few days ago, but he started doing it pretty much on his own. Nobody had any idea what he was doing or that he was going to do it, so when the obvious question was asked “Uh, what are you doing/What’s happening?”
The mods do things by consensus. We always talk things out before any big, major, or new changes are made, especially with the board and posting. Although everyone has their own ideas, suggestions, feelings and opinions, we work as a team and nobody ever goes off and does their own thing or takes action over something without first talking about it over the entire mod loop…
…So when Dex did, he was questioned about it and that lead to his topic.
Anyway, to try to do something, I’ve made a new sticky in the game room.
The most important thing to remember here, though, is that that sticky is not set in stone. If you don’t like it or any part of it, you don’t have to do it. You may also just choose to tag what threads you wish. I’m sure that, over time, it will evolve to make those happy with it how they want it.
I don’t know what happened to cause CK to post what he did that was linked in the OP, but it seems as though the board administration actually thought that the solution in which we only marked game threads was inferior, and instead, against his judgement, forced him to implement this “label all threads, and label game discussions and thread games practically the same thing” solution. I think that interpretation is supported by his post.
So could you then explain to us why you feel that a system of labeling every thread, including labeling game discussions and thread games the same way, which indicates a clear misunderstanding of the problem, is superior to the solution we had a few days ago which was actually moderately useful?
What are the benefits of this change?
FWIW, I agree with what Senorbeef is saying. Just marking out thread games with easily identifiable markers like [GAME] is better than marking everything.
It’s not really a new solution, we just tried it out as starting the Game Room off.
You are free to just tag the gaming threads with GAME, if you wish, to make it easier.
Like I said above, over time it will hopefully get fleshed out enough to help somewhat.
This isn’t within my power, because I do not start all of the thread games (and in fact, none) nor am I a moderator. So I can’t actually do what you suggest.
What I can do is to advocate for policies that actually made sense. If Dexter had to go rogue to do something that made sense, and then the consensus was to instead reverse course do something with more effort, more likely to fail, and with worse results, then there is a serious problem with the administration of this board.
No, it’s not like that at all, it’s a procedural problem.
The disagreement was about other stuff associated with this situation – Dex jumped the gun and started doing all this before we had discussed it fully and reached a consensus about how to proceed. He was doing stuff on the board and not telling the rest of the staff what he was doing, we’d just find it after the fact. We don’t work that way; we work as a team. He’s not even a moderator in the affected forum, which made it even more confusing. When we asked him to calm down and check back with us, he got upset, undid all the work he had done, and stomped off.
Dex had the very best of intentions. We get that. We want the best too and we’re trying to make this come out right for everybody. If Dex needs time away we hope he takes it and comes back refreshed and ready to be in harness again. Like I said earlier, no harm, no foul.
Okay.
So the potential solution of just labeling thread games was in the discussion, since Dexter obviously would’ve contributed that idea, right?
So could you tell us why “label everything” (including giving game discussions and thread games the same label, defeating most of the point of doing it in the first place) won over “label only thread games” as a solution? What did the consensus of mods feel was the benefit of this solution over the other?
Dex had it right. Whatever’s going on in The Game Room right now is just wrong.
We thought everything needed to be labeled so people could find everything. Didn’t want to slight anybody neither.
We wanted to cover all bases…but again, it’s a temporary solution that was just made to start you off. We’re certainly not going to be implementing it from here on or anything like that. We’ll leave it to posters and makers of topics in that forum to evolve into how they like.
As threads drop off the first page of the Game Room, it will start to look a little less confusing and a little more tidy, I’m guessing.
And furthermore, like I said above, you are also free to just tag game threads from here on out–if that’s what you want–and not tag anything else.
Then why not label Café Society threads with FOOD or MOVIES or MUSIC? Because it’s not necessary - discussions are the same type of content, on par with each other for space on the forum list.
The complaints have not been “I can’t find the sports discussion threads with all these people discussing video games” and we all know this. The complaints are “all the discussion threads are being drowned out by all these non-discussion threads”
We had a half measure that actually made the situation better by labeling non-discussion threads so they could be quickly skimmed over. It was not nearly as optimal as moving the threads to their own forum, or MPSIMS, but it did indeed help the situation.
The current situation just clutters it up and does not really help.
Being smart folks who discuss things, I assume you’re aware of that. And that’s why you’re also hesitant to answer my questions about it.
So from that, I think I have a reasonable base to speculate:
After you all repeated that thread games in the game room were a non-problem, and Dexter went ahead and labeled them - not changing the forum in any way except labeling what was already there - it would’ve become immediately apparent at a casual glance just how much thread games were choking discussion out of the game room.
This was embarrassing to you, since you’d just gone on at length about how it’s a non-problem. So what’s your solution? Label everything so that the thread game label doesn’t stand out, so that it’s not so casually easy to see how the thread games dominate the game room. You can simultaneously say “oh you guys wanted a solution, now we’re giving you one, and you’re whining again!” while covering up the embarrassment that Dexter’s useful solution gave you.
The problem is that you’re just trying to hide the problem in clutter, not actually solve it. Dexter’s solution was a half measure compared to moving the threads somewhere more appropriate, but it was an easy to implement, high compliance half measure that was actually useful. What we have now is harder to implement, not useful, and doomed to failure.
I know you’re all smart enough to see that, so it stands to reason that the most likely scenario is the one I just laid out. This route is to give us a “shrug we tried, the people of the game room didn’t like your solution, so there” token attempt at claiming to fix the problem, and to cover up the spotlight that the actual useful solution brought upon the situation.