Opinions about forums on the SDMB

Continuing the discussion from MPSIMS has gotten a minor rename to “Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share”:

IMHO had polls, and MPSIMS did not.

The best part of SDMB forums is that they are not based on the subject, but on how the topic is discussed. So, instead of a forum for all the threads on one topic (for example, dinosaurs), you could have dinosaur thread in GQ (what did dinosaurs smell like), GD (should we clone dinosaurs), IMHO (which is scariest dinosaur), MPSIMS (how I found my first dinosaur fossil), BBQPit (dinosaurs pooping on my car again).

You read the forum that had the format you preferred. But then the comingling of subjects made it interesting to read, because you never knew what would be discussed. Sites that sequestered threads by subject matter ended up stagnating because there was little cross pollination.

The forum changes that irked me were the creation of Cafe Society, Game Room, Thread Games, Politics, etc. I understand why they were created (let’s not relitigate that), but I think those forums weaken the eclecticity of the site.

And it has another negative effect. Ever notice how sometimes a topic always pull threads into the same old thread rehash? It’s partially due to posters thinking about forums as subject-based, rather than format-based. For example, the mere existence of a Politics forum makes it harder to separate a factual question about politics vs a debate about politics vs opinions about politics vs observations about politics vs politics in general. Without the clear separation, all politics thread have an inertia that leads them into politics in general, losing the focus of a particular forum’s format.

I’m not advocating for any particular change, but wanted to give this old-timers view of this site. Anyway, I’m splitting this off the original thread, because it’s way too hijacky.

In my opinion changes will not improve anything. Best to muddle along the way it is for now.

Can’t say that I agree with the OP. Cafe Society (what’s your favorite dinosaur movie) and Game Room (what’s the best MMRPG dinosaur game) offer takes on a subject as distinctive as the others. Splitting Politics off from GD kept a lot of petty crap out of what was supposed to be the most serious forum. I’m a little ambivalent about Thread Games, but I’ll concede it keeps MPSIMS less cluttered.

TPTB can always sunset a forum if it turns out not to work. Remember Straight Dope Chicago and the Barn House? I suspect someday soon we’ll question whether it’s better to keep COVID threads in a separate forum.

Agree w @Kent_Clark just above. If in some future timeframe the overall traffic here is half what it is today, perhaps recombining thread games with MSPSIMS or CS with GR would make sense. And if COVID becomes just “that other flu”, QZ could become just a locked historical artifact.

But otherwise, leave well enough alone. As has been said elsewhere, what makes the current system work is that mostly the differences in moderation, with a side order of differences in broad topic area.

A-barring some new world crisis I think we’ve probably hit Peak Forums and going forward the trend will be to combine, not to split. But that time is not yet now, and may never be.

I’m pretty sure Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports use to be two forums. And even so this forum has changed names recently to Cecil’s Columns/Staff Reports.

It took quite a while to get the Game Room split out of Café Society. This was back when Café Society was so busy it was hard to find the sports & gaming threads and we also had a fair number of people thread shitting with Sports threads back them with such incredible comments as only low brow idiots would devote any time to sports. I seem to recall @RickJay & I were among those that led the campaign to get Sports out of the Café. I believe @EllisDee was another. @Omniscient, @silenus, @Justin_Bailey

I’m not even sure when Thread Games split out of the Game Room, which is a little funny as I am the Moderator there now. I know the reasoning is the posts for Thread Games were overwhelming the rest of the Game Room and again burying the Sports & Games threads.

ETA: Jan 27, 2015 Ed Zotti added the Thread Games Forum.

Try browsing by Latest Posts instead of by forum. A lot of the time I don’t even know what forum I’m reading – though if a title confuses me when I’m glancing through New or Latest, looking at which forum it’s in may help me figure it out without clicking on it. Or not.

I think some people like to have things sorted by forum, and others don’t. Getting rid of them, or reducing the numbers, would annoy the people who do want the distinctions. I can just ignore them, unless I need to check the tone of a particular post.

That’s me. I live in Unread and New. I rarely click on a category specifically.

I also have my profile set up so once I’ve spent a couple minutes reading a thread it’s tracked for changes and reappears in Unread anytime anyone adds anything to it.

So Unread shows me every post I’ve never seen in every thread I have seen. And New shows me every thread I’ve never seen. Meanwhile I have thread games muted, so it’s simply invisible unless I go into it manually. It’s easy to customize Discourse to feed you the subset of stuff you’re interested in.

I like to be able to tell right off whether I’ve ever said something in a thread, so I have Unread set in my profile to only include topics I’ve posted in. (If I really want to be sure not to miss anything in a thread I haven’t posted in, I can reset that one thread to Tracking at the bottom of the thread.) I check Unread first. Then, if I’ve got the time (or am taking it anyway), I’ll check New. Then once a day or so I’ll take a look at Latest, in case there’s been a lot of discussion in some topic I’m interested in but haven’t had anything to say about.

I read by forum, six all together. The others are hidden. I don’t do any tracking either.

I think the forums themselves are split up pretty well, but FQ and GD took a real hit in the last few years.

The Politics forum cratered GD because everything seems to be political in the US.

FQ was, I think, hit by the ease of just googling questions. Almost any FQ will turn up multiple good sources on a google search, including major newspapers.

The one that always trips me up is that breaking news threads - which seem to be the most strictly moderated - occur in MPMIS - which I generally think of as threads about cats and “How are you today?”

And I still haven’t fully internalized the somewhat different expectations and moderation for the various forums.

I generally go down the list, opening forum by forum, generally passing ATMB, Games, Marketplace, and the Pit. Works fine for me.

Breaking News is a little confusing, it is out of step with the rest of MPSIMS as far as moderation. Thus the special tags and why we add the date to the title of the thread also.

We’re pretty slow to give warnings for those threads, but we mod them more than most threads in MPSIMS is what I’ve seen.

Easy way to link to all breaking news tags, is type the # sign and a few letters of the tag: #breaking-news

Works for any tag of course. So type “#MLB” and get #baseball-mlb.

Works for Forums/Categories also. “#Stu” and get #miscellaneous-and-personal-stuff-i-must-share

Yeah - I appreciate the effort and intention, but I suspect I am not the only regular poster who just doesn’t see the tags and dates. I don’t intentionally do so, but my interaction with so much of technology involves ignoring “noise,” and those fit firmly in that category for me.

Which is why we’re slow to give warnings. I only moderate one breaking news thread, The Russia invades Ukraine {2022-02-24} (Part 2). I’ve only warned one poster in that thread, while modnoting often and banning a total of 3 posters from the thread. The warning was for ignoring moderator instructions. That will get you a warning pretty much most of the time.

BTW: No warnings in the first thread.

The tags are something I usually forget are there. I love them and think they’re great, but I’ve been browsing these boards for many years and something that new is so different that I just forget about it.

It’s like giving a car the chance to drive on water. I’d just forget I can do that and stick to roads. Someone might ask, “Why didn’t you just drive across the lake?” Then I’d feel stupid for the 100th time for forgetting.

I’d like to be able to re-order the forums. I mostly participate in MPSIMS and Thread Games, but those are down near the bottom of the list so I have to scroll down to them. It would be really helpful if I could move them up to the top, above Site Feedback.

Where do you go to look for the categories? (“Forums” was the now-obsolete vBulletin term).

When I click the hamburger menu shown on every page, MSPISMS is almost always the top category in the pop-up. That pop-up orders the categories by the ones I most participate in.

All this time, and I had no idea all that was in the hamburger menu. Thanks!

I think I tend to ignore hamburger menus unless I can’t find what I’m after any other way. That symbol just doesn’t look like a menu to me.

Hamburger menus have been all but universal on web pages and phone apps for coming up on two decades now. Look there first, not last. Much less frustrating that way.

They’re not meant as the “special secret settings nobody but nerds use” menu. They’re meant as the “main menu everybody uses all the time for almost everything” menu. Which might have the nerd settings buried in there under a couple more layers of menu.

Yes, I know. They just don’t look like anything to me, that’s all.

I have learned to look for them when there’s no obvious other way to find whatever I’m hunting for on the page.

The main page.