I was left with the impression that any new forums, or sub-forums, just aren’t in the cards, regardless of whether the staff feels there is or is not a need. Until administrative rights are given to someone that actually is involved in the day-to-day function of this board, it’s just tough luck, we’ll get a duct-tape and chewing-gum fix, if there’s a fix at all.
My take on this most recent proposal is ambivalence. Moving one group (whichever group that may be) of threads to another forum is better than what’s been employed thus far, and I applaud SenorBeef’s continuing efforts to get some sort of resolution in all this, but the current mucked-up mess that The Game Room has become is a pretty clear indication of just why this issue keeps getting raised in the first place.
Please don’t tell me you counted all those manually! :eek:
But I disagree completely with your assertion that game threads are stifling discussions in non-game threads. Lately I’ve been posting regularly in a non-game discussion thread, and there’s been no shortage of replies nor anyone complaining that the thread’s hard to find. People who are engaged in any particular discussion always have the option of bookmarking the thread itself, or subscribing, or whatever.
The best solution would indeed be a new sub-forum; pity that option’s unavailable.
Protip: the “replies” count in the threads list for each forum is actually a link. You can click it to get those numbers. Super useful for Mafia games.
Post count parties were banned, lots of people apparently liked them. There’s precedent.
Some of the games are clever, the Malapropagation one started off very well, now 3800+ posts later it has lost a little bit of its zing. Clever games could still be allowed in MPSIMS. Something like “Change two letters to make a new word” should be aborted.
The stated reason for not creating a subforum is they are more difficult to discover and people generally don’t click twice to get into them. Whether you agree with that or not, at least it is a reason based on something more than “because we said so.”
As for why a new top-level forum isn’t possible, reasons have ranged from not enough traffic to sustain the new forum or whatever is left behind (demonstrably false), to “Jerry doesn’t have time.”
I think the best analogy is the creation of the Elections forum. People realized that every 2 to 4 years, the flood of election posts would swamp the other topics in Great Debates. It was difficult to use the Great Debates forum for anything other than talking about politics.
The Elections forum solved the problem. It’s a low-volume forum that lies fallow most of the time, but heats up when a big election rolls around. Most importantly, it allows other discussions to continue in Great Debates.
Maybe the Elections forum should be eliminated? After all, it doesn’t get much traffic. Instead every election thread in Great Debates could be tagged “[Election]”. Wouldn’t that be consistent with what’s going on the The Game Room?
Now, this I can agree with. I participated in the “change two letters” and a couple other very simplistic threads for a bit, but got bored quickly with them. I’d have no problem with them not existing or being barred to begin with. Others, like the malaprop one can be entertaining, and a thread like the “Flat out wrong trivia dominoes” lets people be creative and goofy, which I enjoy.
The problem, of course, is that any mod who volunteers to monitor those threads for what is acceptable and what is not is in for a shit storm of complaints from those whose games are not considered worthy.
Post padding used to be always discouraged. Now, certain flavors of posting padding are allowed. I think that was a mistake.
Being a Mafia player, I can accept some of the blame. But the slope from Mafia games which needed explicit mod permission to the situation we have now was a slippery one. It’s time end the mess.
Further splitting of the forums and/or creation of a subforum isn’t going to happen – take it off your wish list.
And, as an MPSIMS mod, I’m against moving them back there – as it is, all game threads go in the Game Room. If the forum denizens can’t agree on “this is a game but this isn’t” – or, worse, “this is a game worth playing but this isn’t” – the answer isn’t making the distinction more confusing.
I’m sorry this has proved to be so tumultuous and difficult for everyone. Believe it or not, the staff’s intentions all along has been to be responsive, given that the creation of a new forum isn’t an option. What happened was that Dex jumped the gun before we’d reached a consensus on the mod loop, so we’ve been acting reactively, and not proactively, ever since.
In any case, though, moving some or all threads to MPSIMS (or Cafe Society) is not going to happen. The only issue is how, or whether, to label some, or all, threads in the Game Room – and it’s up to the users of that forum to decide those questions.
I don’t see a reason in that quoted bit. All I see is “they go in the Game Room.” That’s not a reason why they should go in the Game Room. Only a statement of fact that currently, that’s where they go.
I’m asking why you personally, as an MPSIMS mod, don’t want them moved from the Game Room to MPSIMS.
Because they don’t want the weeds to overgrow their forum either. No one wants these threads clogging up their forum. On some level they have to know it’s poisonous to the discussion of whatever forum they allow them in. So what forum has the least clout? The newest forum that most of the mods don’t really seem to like? Let’s let that forum get overrun. They’re relieved to have foisted it on us.
“We’re looking for a solution, other than the totally obvious one that would benefit the boards, the thread game players, AND those who want to have a forum for the discussion of games, because that’s off the table” is not a satisfying answer, and doesn’t convince anyone that you have the board’s best interest at heart. If the problem really is “we’ve lost the ability to administrate our boards”, that seems like it should be the #1 priority here.
Well, speaking as someone who never ever opens the Game Room forum, but does read MPSIMS regularly, I would be personally opposed to moving them back there purely out of personal inconvenience. I like being able to ignore all of these threads I’m not interested in in one easy wad.
On a slightly less purely selfish note, I think it would be awfully confusing for a new member to discover that we have a “Game Room” forum, but that threads for playing games go in the “stuff I must share” forum.
Well, that’s exactly it. No one, except the handful of players who post 500+ times each to those threads, is interested them. They’re toxic to discussion wherever they go. You’re saying “game room is a good fit because I don’t like the game room so let’s make that place a garbage dump” which is not a solution, it’s just dumping your garbage on your neighbor’s lawn.
As far as why they’d be a better fit for MPSIMs - well, that forum more than any other matches the rapid-fire low content sort of posts that thread games bring. I’m not saying they’re equivalent - MPSIMS often has real discussions - but it’s more similar than any other forum for having flippant silly little post count parties. If there was no game room to dump them off there, they’d certainly go in there. And I suspect they would then be banned, because MPSIMS mods seem to have more clout, and they’ve banned exactly the same sort of posting parties that these threads are.
“Fuck the game room” seems to be the attitude of everyone who doesn’t participate in the actual discussions in the game room, and that attitude is killing those discussions.
That’s why it’s so frustrating that we have a solution that benefits everyone as far as creating a new forum. The game players have a place they can see all the games in one spot so they can participate, maybe even changing the rules on posting frequency and such for that one forum, AND the people who actually want to have discussions in the game room aren’t massively inconvenienced and seeing it die off. There’s no downside to that solution. But we’ve been told by the mods that that solution is simply off the table, over and over.
So my proposal to move it to MPSIMS is an attempt at a compromise solution that’s less elegant than that solution but better than the status quo. MPSIMS is better equipped to handle threads like that because the natural rhythm of the discussion in that forum puts it more on par with thread games than game room discussions do. It would clearly be the natural place for game threads to go, if you couldn’t put them in their own forum. Literally the only reason they’re in the game room is because it has “game” in the title, and because some of the administration seems to have some leftover resentment over the creation of the game room which they opposed, so they’re happy to see it killed and buried.
Because it’s not clear which are “real” or “good” games, which thus do (don’t?) belong in MPSIMS, and which aren’t. It’s too confusing for not only casual readers, but the mods.
One possibility: If the tagging practice catches on, it would probably be possible to write a browser script (Greasemonkey or whatever the other browsers use) which would automatically hide any thread that started with the string “[GAME]” (or case-insensitive variants of that). That way, the people who absolutely hate those threads would never need to see them again, and so be happy, while the people who don’t mind them could continue seeing them same as always, and also be happy.
twickster, I think you’re misunderstanding. Nobody, as far as I can tell, thinks there’s a distinction to be made between “real” games and fake(?) games, or between “good” games and bad(?) games.
All threadgames, whether good or bad, real or fake (whatever that would mean), would go in MPSIMS instead of Game Room, according to this proposal; the current position is that all threadgames, whether good or bad, real or fake, go in Game Room.
The distinction isn’t based on judging the authenticity or goodness of a threadgame’s game. The distinction is based on whether it’s a game at all, versus being a discussion of a game. And that an extremely easy distinction to be made in virtually all cases.
