I misspoke. So sue me. You’re overreacting, you’re screaming, for pete’s sake.
The decision as outlined to you multiple times is the result of staff consensus. I’m not sitting here making this shit up as I go along.
We try to be responsive to the concerns of the users of this site. Sometimes we can do what is asked of us. Sometimes we can’t. This is one of those times. Yelling at me is not going to change that.
If the person who’s the head honcho on this board doesn’t even understand what we’re asking for after extensive discussion, with that level of disinterest or hostility towards the user base, how could ANYTHING the board members ask for get done?
You kind of made up the shit about him wanting to split Sports threads off to a separate forum.
No, you didn’t. You showed that after participating in these threads, with nearly unanimous agreement from the users, that you don’t even understand what it is we’re discussing and asking for. You’re here saying “We’ve thought about it, and not going to happen”, but in reality you haven’t thought about it because YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THIS DISCUSSION IS ABOUT. You think I’m trying to create a sports subforum, which no reasonable person who is even remotely paying attention could possibly think.
No, I’m not. I’m underreacting. You just admitted that the person who has the final say in decisions about administrating the forum DOES NOT EVEN PAY ATTENTION TO DISCUSSION ABOUT ISSUES and yet still confidently hands out proclamations with lies about how they’ve been thought about and discussed. There is no way you could be making an informed decision about a subject you clearly show no willingness to understand.
You basically just indicated that the person in charge of this board has no interest whatsoever in the requests, complaints, or discussions of its users.
Can’t we just move game threads over to Yahoo Answers™?
Change one letter to explain how is babby formed.
That’s not a virtue. Most of the SDMB staff doesn’t set foot in the Game Room, including yourself. They (and you) cannot possibly have informed opinions about the issue.
Wait, you can do that now? Because you couldn’t yesterday…
How are these Café Society threads:
Random Star Trek Quotes
Random Star Wars Quotes
Have you ever seen a grown man naked?
different from these Game Room threads:
[GAME] Speak to me only in Movie Quotes
[GAME] Speak to me only in Simpsons Quotes
[GAME] Speak to me only in Science Fiction
[GAME] Speak to me in succinct song lyrics
[GAME] Speak To Me Only in Song Lyrics
Seems to me that Café Society posters have no problem with those types of threads.
Nobody has said this, and you’re not doing yourself any favors by pretending we’ve made promises. I’ll try to look at some activity and poster data when I have time to see how this really stacks up because that might be useful. But a new forum is highly unlikely at best. The most likely outcome, assuming any permanent changes are made, is labels for game threads like we’re seeing right now.
Please don’t misrepresent what I’m saying. I never said promises were made. I said we were given clear parameters about what would put the possibility of a new forum on the table.
Bolding mine, natch.
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable leap of logic to say that an existing forum probably constitutes a “justified” amount of traffic. It’s not like I’m trying to contend that The Barn House should be the metric.
I also notice TubaDiva cites traffic in that quote, as if she already has data.
Backs slowly out of thread
Not to be a dick, but I want to ask one more time–I think you said that moving some of the threads to Cafe Society (specifically, the threads about Cafe Society subjects) wouldn’t satisfy anyone. I asked,
I suspect that many people would actually find this to be really helpful (although obviously not as ideal as the ideal solution of creating a new forum, which I understand is not currently on the table), but don’t know that it’s worth exploring this idea if it won’t be considered whether or not many folks would find it satisfying.
Exactly. Why are threads that are primarily about movies, TV shows and songs in The Game Room? They’re only “games” by a broad stretch of the imagination. And it seems to me that they would get more attention if put in the the appropriate forum.
Keep the [GAME] tag and distribute those threads into the forums where they would be on topic.
I think the various mod posts have made a few things reasonably clear:
[GAME] threads bring a lot of superficial traffic numbers. They’re not going to do anything to reduce that via moderating them closer to the board’s traditional values (something at least a few people have suggested). You don’t have to like this, but from a business point of view, it makes sense.
[GAME] threads are a pretty classic case of Not In My Back Yard. And the Game Room is the yard that they’re currently in. No one else wants them in their forum, I absolutely understand that, and I think that says a lot about what those threads do to discussion.
A minority of the mods view sports and game discussions as having less value than other discussions. It’s shitty, but it’s pretty clearly the way things stand, seeing how aggressively the better arguments in this thread (of which there have been a couple that just kind of seem… “duh”) have been summarily dismissed.
I’m amazed that SenorBeef has the energy to keep the fight going, and I applaud him for it, even if that energy does become a little aggressive at times. I’m glad someone keeps bringing it up, if only because it’s amusing to see how a few justify ignoring such an obvious issue. shrugs
I read and post in every forum on this website, except the Game Room. I browse through all of them and I look at and post in threads that are interesting, regardless of where they are.
I am certainly interested in threads related to computer games, puzzles, sports, etc., but I am totally uninterested in [GAME] threads, and they clutter up the forum so much that I just don’t bother to read it. They make it hard to see what threads have activity and ongoing conversations.
So, I suggest that the Game Room might actually have more traffic, and justify its existence as a standalone forum even more, if the [GAME] threads were placed somewhere else. A subforum would be perfect. The fact that the subforum is not easily discoverable is not a problem - how many member’s first posts come in one of the [GAME] threads anyway? My guess is close to zero. Those threads are not content that will attract new members, they are more of a distraction for existing members, and the people who play those games don’t really need to be able to easily browse a forum to find them, they are probably already subscribed to the appropriate threads.
Link.
I’m really not trying to denigrate anyone by referring to certain thread-games as “squatters” in the link above. I get why people post to even the lowest-content threads (I’ve posted to that one once or twice). Though the criticism of these threads often skirts a fine line, I want to make it explicitly clear that I have nothing against the posters who are keeping certain thread-games at the top of the Game Room forum.
But I do have something against the threads themselves. It’s just too easy for a very small amount of interest from a very small number of people to take up a very large part of the most important real estate in a forum.
If splitting the thread-games into their own forum is a non-starter, then what I’d suggest is moving the pop-culture based ones into Cafe Society (where they’ll find a more receptive audience anyway), and locking very lowest-content ones as de facto post-padding threads, perhaps after allowing them to run their course for a little while. I’m quite happy to share space with an epic game of Mafia or something for a long time, and with something totally inane and pointless for a short time. I’m not happy, however, that Free Association has been going for 28 freaking months, and no one else should be either.
I think there’s about 4 different topics about this some maybe I’m just repeating someone else, but here we go:
So I was bored and looked back at when The Game Room was created. And the primary reason for the creation of the board was the fact that game threads were cluttering up the site. It seems like an afterthought to throw in sport and video games and what not. So this has been known to be a problem for 6 years now and it was basically swept under a rug.
Interestingly, the mods also said they won’t allow basic post count-padding like “Let’s count to 1000”, but apparently just posting a picture of a number makes it okay.
It’s clear that the game threads are hurting activity. The NFL Weekly threads are getting slower and slower. I don’t think the NFL is becoming less popular. I think that when people click on the Game Room and all they see are topics where you literally post any word, they don’t bother searching for the NFL post. Instead they go off the NFL Subreddit or any other site where there’s an actual discussion.
So if the boards won’t be split and the game threads won’t be moved then I’m offering another proposal: Start moderating the board so game threads have to be actual games. As in, something you can win or lose. Mafia/Werewolf is a game. The Feud is a game. The Death Pool is a game. Posting lyrics or quotes is not a game.
I would agree with that. They’re chain threads.