I agree with most of your post, but it was never suggested that the problem, i.e thread games, be shifted to Cafe Society. It was suggested that the sports and video game discussions be shifted there, which would, in effect, create a sub forum for thread games.
This was expressing frustration at what I wrote, and for the record, I totally agree with you. I realize that what serves my own selfish requirements best isn’t necessarily what’s best for the board as a whole, and I generally support the overall idea of finding a solution to this problem.
Oh, I agree. My concern wasn’t with what would happen to the Game Room without these post-padding threads – it would be improved. My concern is that I think the game threads would hurt MPSIMS even more than they hurt the Game Room. Maybe the increased volume in MPSIMS would make that forum paradoxically better able to absorb them, but I doubt it.
No one wants these threads clogging up their preferred forums, which should be a pretty good clue that they either (A) belong in their own place, or (B) need to be held to stricter standards if they’re to avoid being locked. A game like mafia, or or even an invitation to clever wordplay building off a previous post, isn’t a problem. But Free Association or Count to Infinity in Pictures or Make a New Word could be locked and, despite the astronomical post count in those threads, no one would really give shit. I appreciate that this would require at some point a subjective determination by a mod, but man is condemned to be free, damn it: deciding not to choose is still to have made a choice, and it’s a terrible one in this instance.
Also, (C) the congestion could easily be spread around a little. There’s no reason that the “Speak to me only in Movie/Simpsons/Monty Python quotes” threads shouldn’t be in Cafe Society.
Of course, if the real issue is, as some have implied, that there’s simply no one with Admin privileges able to monitor the boards, then maybe we ought to table all other discussions. Because, wow, that’s a fucking disaster.
If mods are willing to help decrease the threadgame congestion, a multipronged approach might work. For example, from the first couple dozen threads in the forum now:
[GAME] SIX-Letter Word-Change one or two letters make a new word
[GAME] SEVEN-Letter Word-Change one or two letters make a new word
These may not be different enough to justify two separate threads. I see why they can’t be merged, but maybe only have one active game at a time.
[GAME] Monty Python non sequitur thread
[GAME] Five-Word Movie Review
[GAME] Free Association – Characters, Actors, Celebrities, etc.
[GAME] Speak to me only in Science Fiction
[GAME] Speak to me only in Movie Quotes
These may be games in format, but they’re Cafe Society in content. If we had a games forum, a paragraph forum, and an Elizabethan sonnet forum, it’d make sense to put it in games–but threads are generally put in fora according to their content, not their format. These threads should be in Cafe Society.
[GAME] Speak to me in succinct song lyrics
[GAME] Speak To Me Only in Song Lyrics
Do we really need two separate threads like this? Merge them and move them to Cafe Society.
That would move eight threads out of the top thirty out of Game Room, putting six additional threads in Cafe Society. If I’m correct, it’d change the top thirty threads in Game room from being 18/30 games to being 10/30 games. And it’d be better in terms of keeping things where they belong, since “if it’s about creativity, entertainment, or leisure, it goes [in Cafe Society],” and those threads are all about creativity, entertainment, and leisure.
Edit: as another possibility, an activist mod in Game Room might use judgment to close threadgames that are too similar to ones currently open, judiciously pruning the forum in order to keep threadgames down to a reasonable number.
All good suggestions, and in particular you’re right about the ‘game’ threads with cafe society content. I don’t see that “Speak to me in…” is a game. Seems like Cafe society through and through.
ETA: I see Varlos had made that same suggestion also. Kudos.
You are quite right - that was a mis-step in my previous post. Perhaps I should have removed CS from point 7 and added a point 8 along the lines of mods seem unwilling to move sports and games discussion thread back to CS, because that was why TGR was created in the first place. But I then might also change my conclusion to suggest that is in fact the best solution given the constraints.
I also like the suggestions in the last two posts by LHoD and VarlosZ. Mods?
I disagree with the notion that MPSIMS would be hurt more because it has more traffic and more frequent posting. The fact that MPSIMS has a higher than average posting rate to their threads mean those threads would be more on par with the game threads (not matching them, because a dozen people are generally not posting 500+ posts to each thread), but it would give them a much better fighting chance of staying near the top than it would on a forum where the pace of posting is slower. The slower the rate of posting, and the more content per post, the more a forum is hurt by being put up against frequent posting, low content threads. If there were hypothetically a forum where everyone only posted to it once per week because they were writing thesis-level posts with extremely high content, it would be most swamped out by thread games. MPSIMS would be hurt less than any other forum by them.
So I’d like to summarize the advantages and disadvantages to a move to MPSIMS:
Advantages of game threads in MPSIMS:
-
The posting style of MPSIMS is the closest to the high post count, low content style of thread games. Those threads therefore would be choked and pushed down less than they would in forums that have a slower, more content-oriented posting style. The effect of choking out other threads would be lessened, and there would be a greater degree of parity.
-
The people who are playing the thread games in the game room are already mostly MPSIMS-centric posters. There are lots of people who post primarily in MPSIMS but have to come to the game room just for game threads. There is very little cross-pollination between game room discussion threads and game threads, whereas it is clear that the thread games are more culturally similar to MPSIMS. There would be greater cross-pollination there.
-
If the goal is to use these thread games to attract outside users to use the rest of the board - and I haven’t seen anyone suggest that thread games are particularly good at that - then wouldn’t it make sense to bring these people into MPSIMS, the obvious cultural home for these threads, so that it’s more likely that people driven here by the game threads would seem other content they would like? It’s far more likely that if someone is coming here for the free association game (ha!), they’d be much more interested in the Monday Morning Post than they would be in a discussion about the NFL or a video game.
-
The flipside of 3 - people who actually get driven to this board by game discussion very well may see the forum being choked to death by inane spammy game threads and choose not to participate on the boards, just as members who are already active posters here are leaving the game room due to frustration. This would actually reduce the influx of new users. So not only would new thread game seeking users be kept and cross-pollinated to other types of threads in MPSIMS, fewer game discussion seeking potential newbies would be driven away by the spam.
-
The game room, you know, remains a viable place for the discussion of sports, video games, RPGs, card games, and other sorts of games, instead of being slowly strangled to death with a decline in discussion content as regular posters leave out of frustration. I think the fact that, as a percentage of post count, game threads dominate the game room, and therefore people are mislead to believe that the majority of people in the game room want and are participating in that sort of content. But this is just an illusion - it’s literally a few dozen people responsible for thousands of posts per week.
Other discussion threads are read by a much wider group of people, they just don’t all post 1 word answers or a link 90 times per day. Furthermore, lurkers are much more likely to be interested in a discussion about a topic than they are to be interested in a game they’re not actually participating in, so the unspoken lurker readership would be wildly in favor of the discussions. So pulling numbers out of my ass - 10% of the forum is generating 90% of the posts, but the other 90% of the people are interested in the actual discussion and hence that 10% is flooding out the forum to the detriment of that other 90%. I would like to re-iterate, however, that I’m not blaming the thread game players for their inanity, I just want a better solution to be found than having them choke out discussion content.
Advantages of keeping game threads in the game room:
-
The word “game” is in both, lol!
-
Fuck the game room. Most of the mods didn’t want that shitty place anyway and it can serve as a garbage dump and die for all they care. Stupid fucking jocks can suck it if they want to discuss big men hitting each other real hard. Go to a sports bar or some shit you cretins.
Absurdities:
-
Mods are concerned that the thread games do not have enough content for THE FORUM SPECIFICALLY CREATED FOR LOW-CONTENT INANITY, but somehow it is appropriate for a forum with a higher level of discourse and content in its discussions.
-
We seem to simultaneously hear from the administration/mods that “these threads are not a problem” and “ewww keep those threads away from my forum, I don’t want it to be ruined like the game room”
-
The game room is not being propped up by the traffic of these threads. People aren’t coming for thread games and staying for game discussions, by and large. You can look at this yourself by seeing who’s posting to what threads. And in fact, quite the opposite - game room regulars are leaving in frustration, lowering the content of the discussion. As I said in a previous example, a game room with 100 discussion posts per day is healthier than a game room with a couple dozen people posting 950 posts per day, but drowning out the 50 posts per day of discussion of the people who didn’t abandon the game room yet.
SenorBeef, if you can’t represent one argument against your POV in good faith, there’s not much reason to argue about this with you. I have nothing against The Game Room, I post there pretty often, and I think it’s been a big success. I also mod Cafe Society and my opposition to moving some of these threads there isn’t “eww, they suck.” I don’t think that’s a good solution to this problem. I don’t think there’s a single clear solution, which is why this discussion has taken so long (and that’s also why we had the tagging and untagging brouhaha the other day). But we do want to see if we can make people’s posting experience more convenient.
I am arguing in good faith. What arguments in favor of leaving the threads in the game room am I missing? No one has made a better case that they fit better there, they’re just saying more or less “I don’t want the shit that’s going down in the game room to ruin my forum”, or quite simply “the game room. See, it says games. Therefore, games go there.” - those are really the only arguments I’ve seen. Rather than merely accusing me of acting in bad faith, you could correct me where I’m wrong.
The discussion has taken so long because the administration of this board is institutionally stubborn. The fact that they took the most obvious, most beneficial, and least downside solution off the table simply by declaring it so, rather than justifying it, shows that they’re not actually interested in really solving these problems. They don’t like to make changes or even listen to what their user base wants. They’re more likely to obfuscate than they are to have a frank and open discussion about the problem. Other than actually caving in, and changing back to Dexter’s fix, the administration’s responses in the various threads about this topic have been almost entirely unhelpful, and that’s being generous.
And, personally, do I have a history on this board of mod-bashing? I’ve been here for 13 years now, and I’m not a habitual trouble maker. Nor have I generally been hostile to the board’s moderators. The only thing that moves me to this level of involvement is that you are basically letting one of my favorite forums die and not only does no one give a shit, they may actually be enjoying it. The fact that I’m not a habitual shit stirrer should actually make you more confident in my intentions and good faith here, and more confident that there’s a legitimate problem that needs addressing.
I have spent quite a lot of time in these threads in the last few days making a good-faith effort to lay out a case as to do what’s best for this message board. I don’t think administration is the same, because I don’t think there’s any real interest in acknowledging or fixing these sorts of problems. They’re generally rejecting proposals by decree, rather than by open discussion and weighing the pros and cons. Suggesting that I am the one not acting in good faith is actually pretty absurd, and you can go ahead and count the number of times in these various threads in which people have specifically said they support me and feel that I’m making a very good case with my proposals.
See, that’s the problem. The text of the thread is right here to read. If this is what you’re coming away with, what’s to be gained by repeating stuff you’ve already characterized this way? OK, some posters don’t like game threads - fine. The mods aren’t making that argument. We’ve argued about the fit and about forum traffic, both of which are legit concerns in my view. I do think it makes more sense to leave threads for game-playing in a thread that’s devoted to, y’know, games. I don’t see how they fit in Cafe Society and I think MPSIMS would be too crowded.
I didn’t realize kings counted votes. 
In post 87, I made a case as to why culturally game threads are actually more similar to MPSIMS, and also that MPSIMS frequent posting style is also the closest fit on the board for game threads, and hence, would be damaged the least by them. Can you tell me where I’m going wrong?
And as for “makes more sense to leave threads for game-playing in a thread that’s devoted to, y’know, games”, you are making the argument you said that I mischaracterized when I said that because the phrases “game room” and “game thread” share a word, then they’re a good match.
If we renamed The Game Room “recreational activities and competition discussion” or something like that, would game threads no longer be a fit, just because it no longer has the word game in it?
Like I detailed earlier, I think adding game threads to MPSIMS would make the forum far too crowded - and I don’t think it fits the MPSIMS descriptions either. They’re not about sharing or life events. It’s a different type of entertainment from the other stuff you see in there. As constituted, The Game Room hosts both discussion of games (sports, video games, etc.) and is a space for playing of message board games. You can change the forum name if you want, but that commonality is still there.
Why do you think threads titled “Speak to me in movie quotes” or “Speak to me in song lyrics” don’t fit in Cafe Society?
That’s a small minority of game threads.
- Not *that *small.
- Every bit helps, as thread games are sucking the oxygen out of the Game Room.
- Most of them aren’t even really games: they’re collections of pop culture ephemera, which is exactly what Cafe Society is for.
How do you think they keep their throne? 
I want to re-address this. My original reply to this statement is something I still stand behind. I wasn’t leaving out an argument in favor of keeping game threads in the game room, but I summarized them in a disparaging and exaggerated way.
I’ve been trying to steer clear of making this personal or hostile. My intention here is to make the best case I can as to how the board can be improved, and hope that my ideas will get improved upon by discussion and taken under real consideration.
It can just get frustrating when it seems like sometimes the decision is made even before the merits of the ideas can be discussed, and so therefore no matter how good a case you can make, or how unanimously people agree with you, or how much it might benefit everyone involved, it’s just automatically shut down out of institutional stubbornness.
But I will try not to let that frustration slip into lowering my level of discourse. I’m here to argue in good faith and to genuinely do my best to improve the boards.
By my count, of the 29 threads labeled [GAME] on page 1, 10 could very easily be put into CS. I think they’re actually a much better fit there – a Simpsons quote thread is way more likely to find a receptive interested lurkers in CS than GR – but at the least they *could *go there, and it would go a long way towards relieving the pressure in Game Room.
You’re not the first person to make this claim, and it’s still wrong. Upthread, I showed that MPSIMS and the Game Room have a similar amount of non-game-thread traffic. I went back and counted again, and the numbers still hold up.
The Game Room ***is being ***choked out in the exact same way you fear MPSIMS would be choked out if the games were moved there. It is not the case that the Game Room is only a small number of non-game threads. It’s almost exactly as robust as MPSIMS, and that’s despite the games that are choking it to death.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
That’s a small minority of game threads.
[/QUOTE]
Really? Did you look? Currently on the front page of the game room:
[GAME] Free Association – Characters, Actors, Celebrities, etc.
[GAME] Monty Python non sequitur thread
[GAME] Speak to me only in Science Fiction
[GAME] Ruin random action/suspense movie plot
[GAME] Five-Word Movie Review
[GAME] Speak to me in succinct song lyrics
[GAME] Speak To Me Only in Song Lyrics
[GAME] Haiku Madness
[GAME] Speak to me only in Movie Quotes
[GAME] Speak to me only in Simpsons Quotes
[GAME] the Movie Title game thread
GAME: Speak To Me in INCORRECT Song Lyrics
Every single one of these fit within the Cafe Society ouvre: “art, drama, literature, movies, music, comics, cuisine.”
It looks like it’s under half, and moving some of those threads while keeping others where they are won’t satisfy anybody. It’ll make games tougher to find while adding stuff to Cafe Society that I think most Cafe users won’t want, and The Game Room will still have a bunch of game-playing threads.
I appreciate that, and I know you’re trying to make things work better. So are we. But we’ve been open to suggestions, since we’re talking about these different labeling schemes. But a subforum doesn’t strike any of us as a good idea, and I don’t think splitting these threads up makes sense. Right now we’re zeroing in on the labeling idea. And yes, it’s taken a while to get to this point - but we’re trying to get it right.
Yes, I did. As I said, that’s less than half. There are 29 of game threads on the front page, and you’ve counted up 12 pop-culture themed ones. If we moved them that would still leave 17 game threads, which I think it enough to bother Game Room users, while potentially moving enough threads to bother users in Cafe Society who wouldn’t want them there.