Okay, the mods have all been talking it over again and Dex’s original idea will be used.
I’ll be undoing all of the tags over the course of the next hour save for leaving it on “Playing a game” threads only.
I’ve also modified the sticky in the Game Room to reflect just that.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to post them here, in the Game Room sticky, or PM me.
Well, thanks for at least re-evaluating this particular misstep. You’ll notice I’ve called what Dexter did and the current policy a half-measure, which it is. It does help the situation, but the situation is in need of a further solution. You have to pretty much decide if a perplexing stance on not separating discussion and non-discussion threads when it would benefit everyone involved is worth potentially strangling off all of the discussion content of the game room.
You also stress that this is voluntary on the part of the thread makers, but I suggest that you make it a mandatory thing, otherwise it may fall out of favor. It’s most useful if it’s consistently applied, and if this is to be our only respite in the game room, we should at least have it applied consistently. If this is all we’re going to get, at least make sure we get it.
Especially now that Dex’s idea has been officially adopted in the Game Room.
Who are the hoi polloi that you’re referring to in your post?
From wikipedia, I got the definition of hoi polloi as:
unless you were speaking Greek.
If you’re speaking English, it doesn’t sound like you think very highly of them.
That’s kind of the point…
You’n me, bud. You’n me.
This is an incredibly obnoxious discussion.
Hardly anyone cared about those threads. Most people who didn’t want to play ignored them. But now these threads have titles in big bold letters that is going to grab every ones attention. You can’t scan new posts for threads you’ve been reading without your eyes stumbling on these visual speed bumps. If the game players started labeling threads like that on their own I’d consider it an annoying posting style that I’d expect the mods to put a stop to.
Now we have an obnoxious solution to appease a few complainers that are determined not to get along with their fellow forum members and in typical ATMB fashion engage in the sport of mod bashing.
The uproar over games threads is far too overstated and you’ve lost me.
The argument is that game threads are not like regular threads because it is not a discussion. So, somehow members playing games solving little mental challenges hurled at each other or word nerds engaged in word play is unworthy of Straight Dope, but talking about millionaires chasing balls and slamming into each other is?
If we must choose one or the other then considering that this is Straight Dope I think we should encourage the nerds.
The sports threads are just another form of televised entertainment and should be discarded into Cafe Society if we need to turn this into a shoving match.
If that’s what you want then I believe a tag cloud is the plain and simple way to do it.
But that’s for an admin to worry about, as I see now may be a problem.
In post #3 of this thread, Crotalus links to the thread where this has been discussed at length. SenorBeef, early in that thread, posts
I do not need to paraphrase this as I can put it no better nor more succinctly than did SenorBeef.
You are correct, though, that something incredibly obnoxious is going on. I feel that it can best be addressed by a goodly dose of self-education.
Well, SenorBeef is dead wrong.
Category and *type *mean practically the same thing. As anyone who plays word games would know. 
General Questions and Great Debates rely on objective facts.
IMHO and MPSIMS are opinion and personal likes.
The BBQ pit is for spouting off.
The required content level on different boards is quite different.
You’re in something of a minority in holding that opinion.
It’s a fact. Not opinion.
Look at my post.
His word choice there may not have been the best, but the underlying point is far more sound than yours. He perhaps should have said, “Game threads are not a difference of subject, they are a difference of type.”
If your best point against him is–as it appears to be–quibbling with his word choice because it’s possible to read his sentence as being nonsensical, depending on what you imagine he means by “category,” it may turn out that you haven’t raised very substantive arguments against him.
No. It’s not a quibble at all where that part quoted by jimbuff314 goes wrong.
The basic idea that boards are differentiated by type and not level of content (as he measures) is what is terribly wrong.
Look at them yourself. They are differentiated maybe more by strength of content then they are by subject.
I think there’s a strong contingent with a real animosity towards sports here, so I have no problem at all believing that there was something to this.
I understand there is no chance of changing or adding forums at this time, I’m not arguing for that here, but I do take issue with this point. I agree with you, in general, subforums reduce traffic. To some extent, different forums serve a purpose but to some extent they also drive down traffic.
Subforums have the visibility issue of splitting too far down the tree. How many layers of folders do you click down to find actual content? But subforums are only a part of the discussion, because they are only one option listed. The other options include new main forums, or moving content within existing forums.
Another concern is the activity level within each forum. When people enter a low-activity forum, they do not feel like there are many people there to respond to their thoughts, they do not see much to draw them in or get their attention. It looks dead, there’s little activity, there isn’t much incentive to return often to see what is going on. Ergo, they don’t come back often, and so it never takes off. A healthy forum needs a certain amount of activity to keep people coming back to see what is new, to spawn new ideas for discussion.
There is also the cross-pollination issue - having several topics in one forum together gives higher visibility to every topic. People who normally don’t follow, say, cooking may see a topic that catches their eye as they are scanning a list of their favorite TV shows. So keeping larger forums with more topics together has value.
Splitting off topics for new forums has to balance the amount of discussion already available for that topic versus the counter problem of a forum being so crowded that no one can find the topic they wish to discuss because of every other topic. I mean, we could just have one forum, and lump Cecil’s column discussions with debate threads, sympathy threads, and discussion of favorite TV shows. That’s when the clutter factor starts to drown out certain kinds of topics.
So there is precedent for considering the volume of traffic in a forum, and for considering the balance of activity within those threads to make sure some topics aren’t drowning out other topics. That’s exactly why Elections was created, to keep US election threads from overwhelming discussions in GD and drowning out other topics.
Activity level is also why Cafe Society was split from MPSIMS, there was just too much going on in one place.
And overall, those forum splits have been healthy for the board, and have fostered more discussion of those types of topics.
If you’re trying to compare that with SD Chicago or The Barn House, those are unfair comparisons because those forums were not organic needs of the Straight Dope board community, those were imposed from Ed Zotti’s business interests.
The Game Room poses a special challenge. It was designed to segregate certain topics of conversation into some kind of logical cluster separate from MPSIMS and Cafe Society. The idea was that the similar topics would be enough to float the forum and draw in interest for sports and games rather than have those topics buried by sympathy threads, talk of TV shows and cooking, etc. But then someone decided it made sense to try playing games in the threads. And the first games played were fairly structured games.
But now it becomes more problematic to separate games from posting parties. Is the intent of the thread to drive post count, or to have fun? It pretty much makes the posting party rule limited to actual posting parties - “Hey, I just reached 1,000,000 posts - I am the post king!”
So any number of silly, simple, endless threads are spawned where people post in high volume and low content. Threads that aren’t discussions of topics, but simply adding a silly word, or showing some geeky vocabulary ability, etc. Maybe those threads are interesting to a segment of the board, perhaps they might draw in someone from elsewhere looking for geeky word games.
But the issue has been clearly pointed out that the function of those threads is different than the rest of the threads on the SD, threads that are about discussion and taking time to make a point or seek understanding. The game threads inherently have a much higher turnover than discussion topics, regardless of the discussion topic.
I suppose there may be some heated GD topics that have periods with high turnover where numerous posters are attempting to contribute and, thus, the thread stays pinned in the number one slot on the forum list. A couple of these ATMB threads hit that on this topic. But in general, discussions don’t have that kind of rapid-fire turnover, simply because it takes a lot longer to post anything meaningful to the discussion threads.
This particular issue is not like normal forum traffic considerations. When you have a bunch of discussion topics merged in one forum, they all operate under similar rules for how quickly people can respond, so the difference in posting frequency is largely driven by interest in the topic. But in this situation, the difference in posting frequency is driven by function of the “games”, and that overwhelms any discussion topic.
And people are right, when threads of that type dominate the top of the forum to that high a degree, it keeps new posters from looking for other topics in that forum. They see a series of pointless games in The Game Room, decide either there isn’t anything else in there, or that it isn’t worth the hassle to look for other topics when Cafe Society is hanging over here and GD is over there and you can much more easily find something to rant about.
So if your intent is to create a healthy forum in The Game Room, what you have is actively counter to that principle. Maybe sports discussions and board game discussions and video game discussions are inherently lower volume topics on the boards, and would have slow rates. Maybe they would pick up if they were more visible. Maybe they aren’t enough on their own to support the forum and make it grow. But the active games make it hard to say with any certainty, because they drive traffic away.
In short, while subforums in themselves aren’t particularly useful and drive traffic away, the splitting of threads into different forums in itself can be a healthy process for the board, and increase traffic.
Thank you to the mods for taking the concerns into consideration and working to improve the situation. Thank you for actively working to make the existing threads and the sticky reflect the desired course of action for moving forward. I know it takes a bit of time and effort, but hopefully it will provide some improvement.
No, you are refusing to listen.
They can mean the same thing, but the reason for using two different words is to convey a distinction in meaning. Perhaps his word choice wasn’t ideal, but the meaning he wished to convey is clear - one distinction is between topic subjects, the other distinction is between thread dynamic or thread behavior. Discussions operate by different topics, games function differently in posting dynamic/behavior than discussions.
To some extent, you have a valid point. The original structure of the SD was to break down the board by types of discussions, reflecting a mix of different topics and different thread behaviors. A debate functions a bit differently than a sympathy thread, which is different than an exchange of rants and insults. That structure has been muddied by later forum splits, including Cafe Society, the Game Room, and Elections, where the distinction from the parent forums was not on discussion style, but purely on topic. IMHO is a special case, because it really isn’t like a mild version of GD, but it isn’t really like what the rest of MPSIMS remains. It’s kinda carved out a new niche of discussion type.
None of that negates SenorBeef’s points. Thread Games function in a different way than discussions, or even polls. Some threads in MPSIMS have higher turnover rates and function somewhat closer in behavior to game threads than discussions about sports and video games do.
That doesn’t mean moving the thread games to MPSIMS would solve the problem - it might fix the Game Room by moving the problem and overload MPSIMS. But he at least is looking at the thread behavior as a guide to a way to improve the boards, and proposing that the function of those threads is more similar so would have less of the domination of the forum list.
Just bumping this to say “Good post!” and to quote the above section in case a lurker decides to skip over a wall of text.
The top of Page 1 is prime real estate, and drives discussion in any forum. We all have to share that space, even with threads and topics we have no interest in (which is most of them). A lot of thread-games, however, are basically squatters. Many of them quickly devolve into a very small number of people (3 or 4) swapping extremely low-content posts with high frequency. This is, among other things, an inefficient use of resources. A handful of people can (and, to a large extent, do) monopolize the the best space in a forum, for months on end, that could instead be hosting discussions that would interest far greater numbers of people and which would then make way for yet more discussions.
To be honest, in all my time here I’d never understood what harm there was from post-padding parties. However, now that they’ve been for all intents and purposes legalized in the Game Room, I can see the issue.
(emphasis* mine)
This right here is what MANY of the ccomplaints have been about, if not in those exact words. I don’t go to the GR because the games overwhelm actual discussion topics. If they were moved to a new or different forum (I’m speaking hypothetically; I know this isn’t on the table), I definitely would visit the GR because the actual discussion threads won’t be buried in 5 minutes. I know I’m not the only one.
You sure have a unique definition of short! 
Don’t know if I’ve ever done this before, but +1.
Location, location, location.
Golly.
That was followed by a 1 sentence summary of the preceeding 17 paragraphs. I think “short” is a good description.
… It was intended as a friendly joke about the preceding 17 paragraphs. No malice intended. Sorry.