I second SCAdian.
Seriously - this whole shitstorm was triggered because people cannot determine the difference between a thread labeled Would there be a designated hitter rule if baseball were played on Mars and one labeled Name all the different shoe sizes you know!
Seriously?
And so, to address a problem that practically doesn’t exist, a moderator goes off half-cocked in a forum not his own, his half-assed approach is rejected, and the chosen solution is kludgey, unenforced, partial, inconsistent, and results mostly in a hideously cluttered front page that achieves nothing except to tell those looking for discussion that they should have increased their display options in the Game Room to “Show threads from the past week” when they first joined, and annoys everybody else.
The SDMB spirit lives on.
Regards,
Shodan
Thirded (or more), except reverse which kind of thread is the target of my humorous disdain.
No offense, since I don’t know who came up with the idea, but
What idiot thought this would be a good idea? The forum is totally unreadable now. If you are going to do anything to coddle the illiterate, label ONLY THE GAME THREADS! That way those of us who ignore such goings-on can concentrate on Sports.
The replaced a half-assed solution that somewhat pleased most [those who saw it, at least] with a fully-assed solution that pleases no one except those who came up with it in the first place.
For the record, I do show threads for the last week and I still think those damned game threads clutter up the top of my forum listing.
[GREETING] Hi there.
[SUGGESTION] Label only the game threads. I suggest **GAME: **. It’s easy to type, and easily seen.
[CLOSING] Thanks!
Nicely put. And the fully-assed solution is going to be voluntary, so it is at most three-quarter-assed - a cheek and a half, plus two hemmorhoids.
[REGARDS],
Shodan
I ignored this whole issue until now. But I have to say that as someone who doesn’t give a damn about sports, and has only minimal interest in game threads, I find the current situation annoying. I used to be able to scan a New Posts list for topics of interest and skip over the rest. Now the [GAME] and [SPORTS] threads jump out and demand attention before they can be ignored.
All those [BIG BOLD] labels are too eye-catching to ignore – they make my eyes stumble. What we need is a system of much smaller labels such as:
[O] = Sports played with a ball
= Sports played without a ball
(…) = Team sports
(.) = Individual sports
{OO} = Female sports
<#> = Computer games
\T2/ = Card games
There are plenty of ASCII and Unicode symbols we can use. Colors can be added to further enhance the system. Let’s do this right. We don’t need no stinkin’ separate forum.
The funny part about all of this is that I’ve been saying the game thread players probably don’t care for the intermingling of game and discussion any more than the discussion people do. The game players would probably like having a place where they could go and see all the thread games being played currently. So pretty much everyone is for separating the content, except administration.
No. Imagine if 28 of the top 30 posts in GD were things like “Name trivia facts about presidents” and “post a picture of every politician with brown hair” and “type all bible verses that contain the word Thou!” and because a few dozen people are literally posting to these threads thousands of times per week, these threads occupy 40 or 45 of the top 50 threads listed in the thread pages. And not always in the same order, of course, and not always right at the top. Those 5-10 actual discussion threads will be in there randomly at some point. You would just have to read through 9 game threads and then find an actual discussion thread, and then decide if that interested you. Find another 6 game threads, see an actual discussion thread. Reach through another 11 game threads, find a discussion thread.
Imagine they’re threads that you would never have any interest in. I picked vaguely GD-themes to explain why they’d be in GD, but in the game room they can be anything. There’s literally a thread about COUNTING TO INFINITY with your posts.
Since they’re threads that only take up space and you’d never be interested in them, imagine they’re like advertising spam, because they really are spam, just of a different type. They’re a fundamentally different kind of content. They aren’t on par with other forms of discussion threads. y their nature they are low content and yet extremely fast back to the top refresh rate.
Imagine if during the first 50 lines dedicated to listing threads, 40+ of them were advertisements. Wouldn’t that frustrate you? Having to wade through all those spam every time you wanted to see what threads were trending at the moment? Obviously, the best solution is to take that else somewhere separate, but at the very least, wouldn’t it be nice for them to be visually distinct in some way so you that you can skim over the page and ignore them quickly? That’s what those tags were meant to do originally.
What if you saw people getting fed up with it, leaving the forum, leaving it to then be even more dominated by the spam, leading to a vicious cycle where discussion is even more drowned out? And then more people get fed up and leave, and then boom, that sort of discussion that interests you no longer has a place on this board.
If this happened in any other forum, there’d be an outrage. People aren’t even willing to consider moving them back to MPSIMS, where they fit the content much better, because they’re glad to be free of that out of control weed problem there and want to foist it on the game room. So we end up with them ruining the game room, because hey, “I’m playing a game in this thread is totally the same word as having a discussion about gaming, right?!”
Board administration has decided, though, that protecting the games, where a handful of people post hundreds or thousands of times a week, is more important than protecting discussion, which is what this whole message board is about, where a much larger number of people post much less frequently (since they’re not posting 2 word answers or links, they’re actually trying to have thoughtful discussion). They would rather lose gaming and sports discussion than lose game threads.
It’s so much more frustrating that they don’t have to lose either. They could divide the content by type and simply have them separated. This is what both the game discussion people AND the game playing people want. But there’s some bizarre institutional stubbornness at work.
As someone who would much prefer a separate subforum for thread games, and who voiced mild disdain for the original kludge of tagging only thread games, that “solution” was vastly more productive and preferable to this… kludge of a kludge.
But, unlike some, I don’t take these things too seriously and can’t help but be amused by the whole thing. Let’s face it, slightly chaotic dysfunction has always been part of the SDMB since the hamsters were but pups.
Labeling them [ADS] doesn’t reduce their number.
This sounds like a restatment of my post. In this scenario, I would have to read thru the titles and decide whether they were threads in which I might be interested, or not. Guess what - I do that in GD (and the Game Room and IMHO and ATMB and GQ and the Pit) anyway. Certainly if I were unalterably opposed to the notion that I might want to participate in a game thread, then this solution spares me the burden of reading the whole title (or part of the OP via mouse-over). But I read fast enough that the extra quarter-second to read the whole title is not all that onerous. And the new policy isn’t going to be enforced, so it won’t consistently save even that much time. And will have no effect whatever on either the number or the predomination of game threads on the front page of the Game Room.
As I said, I find it hard to believe that it is so difficult to discern the game threads from the sports threads, because the game thread titles generally announce some kind of a game and the sports threads mentions some kind of a sport.
Then again, I don’t mind the game threads, often participate in them, and don’t mind scanning the titles in the other forums to see if Skald the Rhymer has some new poll posing another impossible dilemma interspersed with amusing stuff about Athena and flying monkeys.
You don’t like a front page of the Game Room cluttered up with game threads. I don’t like a front page of the Game Room cluttered up with threads labeled either [GAME] or [SPORT]. Tastes differ, and this approach satisfies neither of us.
Regards,
Shodan
The new ‘system’ is hideous and pleases no one. Please kill it with fire.
Count me in as one who really doesn’t like the new prefixes.
Again, the problem is NOT distinguishing between threads about games and threads about sports. The problem is that high-volume low-content **NON-DISCUSSION ** threads are displacing low-volume, high-content **DISCUSSION **threads.
Discussion threads are fun to read whether they’re about games or sports. They’re interesting content and add to the value of the board. Non-discussion threads may be fun to post to, but they’re dull to read.
Didn’t we agree like less than 24 hours ago that this system sucked and removed it? Now it’s back. That’s dumb.
It’s only game playing threads now…not any other.
Tagging only thread games? No, I think everyone who commented on it thought it was an improvement. We need some way to separate the wheat from the chaff, and while it would be in everyone’s interest to actually separate them, at least we can more easily skim through and ignore the chaff more easily.
Wow that was quick. I guess saying please really does work. Thanks whoever got rid of all the ugly redundant tags.
Actually, in the poll it was loosing. It got more dislikes then likes.
I certainly hated it and said so. So did many others.