Unless there’s a really strong reason to do so, I don’t want to shape the type of posts in the forum by moderating. It’s not like it’s one mook posting new games nobody plays - it’s a group of very active players who want to run games. I don’t think the role of moderating is to tell people “You need to post less because other people don’t post as much.”
Right now, for the most part, we are seeing a LOT of posts in the Game Room under a relatively few threads (under 700 threads accounting for 50k posts!). This means to me that we have plenty of room on the first page, and we’re getting a lot of “bang for the buck” for each post, so there’s no reason to ruin anybody’s fun just yet. I tend to read a lot of the general gaming threads because of my personal interest, and it seems to me they’re getting plenty of attention too.
I think a lot of the interest in on-forum games right now is specifically because they were throttled for so long. Now that it’s more or less anything goes, we’re seeing a flurry of activity. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if things settled down. Neither sports nor game discussion were throttled before the opening of the new forum.
Think of it like Cafe Society when Lord of the Rings fandom threatened to totally overrun it. A lot of people bitched and moaned and asked for threads to be closed. What happened? It faded away, for the most part. You still see LOTR threads but they’re not constantly in your face. I think that’s fine. Really, this is a community, and I don’t think it’s my role as a moderator to tell people what to talk about (within reason) because some folks don’t like certain kinds of threads. If folks want more sports threads - great! Start more!
Give it time. Again, we’re under 700 threads in The Game Room and that’s including all the ones that were moved there when it opened.
In my (ever so) humble opinion, it seems like sports stuff fits better in CS. A thread about Sporting Event/Team XYZ is more like a discussion of a television show or movie and its characters than it is like any sort of game for the thread’s participants.
Well, yes, Lord, but there are a number of us (judging from it, probably a third to half of the Game Room’s regular participants, and possibly more since these threads are more likely to be perused and less likely to be posted repeatedly in) who see “The Game Room” and think:
(a) Cool, somewhere to talk about sports, gaming, PCs, consoles, whatever! All of our stuff that was getting hidden in CS or occasionally IMHO has a place!
instead of
(b) Cool, somewhere to play all of the thread games that weren’t allowed in MPSIMS!
I won’t argue that they aren’t both valid interpretations, of course. But… it never even occurred to me that there would be “game” threads in that forum until I saw them there.
I think it’s just fine the way it is. Would the old way be better? Where you have no idea if a baseball/football thread would be in IMHO, MPSIMS, Cafe Society, or even the off chance of GQ or the Pit? With them being all consolidated, it’s MUCH easier to find a thread about a recent game or the playoffs, if need be.
I’m not saying the Game Room should be given over entirely to game threads.
My point is that “gaming, PCs, consoles, whatever” has some aspect of audience participation. You play the video games, RPGs and whatever that are being discussed. Meanwhile, watching and discussing pro sports lacks the audience participation element and is thus more akin to the goings on in Cafe Society. Sorry if I didn’t clarify well in my previous post.
i agree with the OP. Sports threads seem to get drowned out by the game threads. I say we call it the Sports Book. I’d be OK with moving sports back into Cafe Society though.
It does not appear that the Dope is the place for a lot of sports topics anyway, especially compared to newpaper forums and sports websites where there are many more participants to discuss more specific and regional sports stuff. For example, I’ve wanted to start an NBA playoffs thread concerning Phoenix and San Antonio but I know that it probably would not get as much interest as posting to the Phoenix newspaper site. So to me, a split wouldn’t matter.
True Mesquite-oh, but I think it’s also true to say that a lot of sports sites on the web are absolute garbage, where you cannae move for dickheads. A respectful, decently moderated site like the SD could produce an unusually good sports forum IMO.
When in doubt, back to basics. When these Message Boards were first started, Cecil thought there only needed to be two forums: “Comments on Cecil’s Columns” and “Other.” When we grew past that, we thought about dividing forums based on topics – Economics, History, Arts, Agriculture, etc. That didn’t seem to cover it. For one thing, we get discussions about topics that don’t fit standard academic classifications. So, we sorted the forums based on the type of discussion – debate (GD), question-answer (GQ), personal, (MPSIMS) and bitching (Pit.) The interjection of Cafe Society a few years later was a sort of experiment, because there were so many art/entertainment threads that they were dominating GQ and MPSIMS. Hence, we agreed to allow one forum dedicated to a particular topic, even though that topic was broad.
Now, we’ve added Games, and I like the “Rec Room” analogy. In principle, I would be against adding “Sports” as a forum – why “Sports” and not “History”? Why not separate forums for cooking, movies, law, medicine, theology? I think it’s more fun to have some hodge-podge.
I think the failure of the Games Room is precisely because you’ve combined the two approaches – subject and post type.
‘Game threads’ like mafia or whatever are types of posts. They should be separate from all the other types of posts, because of that difference. If allowed to run free, they’re bound to overwhelm whatever forum they exist in because of their nature. They’re not ‘about’ anything outside of the SDMB, they are their own raison d’etre. They’re not post count parties, since they have a purpose, but the purpose is no larger than the posts themselves. To be clear, I’m not against game threads, I think they’re interesting, but I think they’re fundamentally different from discussion threads.
Sports and video games are subjects of posts. Whether you want to keep them in Cafe Society, along with the cooking and the movies and the what are you reading, or give them their own Cafe Society like cross-type forum is a toss-up. But where they probably don’t belong is mixed up with the game threads.
The board evolves. You made a change to add the game room and I approve. But even though I read the game and sports threads ,I still think sports requires its own .
From the existence of this thread. And also from the fact that I used to read some sports threads when they were in Cafe Society, but I don’t bother reading Games Room because it’s mostly game threads that I’m not participating in, so I don’t see and read sports threads anymore.
Frankly, there isn’t enough discussion about sports on the SDMB to justify it getting its own forum. Airman Door’s First Annual Steelers March to the Superbowl thread would probably still be on the front page. The fact is that wherever the sports threads go, they’re going to be drowned out by other threads because there are so few sports threads. Better that they go in a forum with a relatively low number of live threads, so that they stay on the front page for longer.
Agreed. But I also agree it’s ten times better than the old way where threads about sports were pushed from forum to forum like wandering beggars and video game threads were non-existant.
Exactly. You can now go to a single forum and visually scan through the first two pages for all the active and recently active sports threads. This is a huge improvement.
I think jacquilynne’s and gonzomax’s expectations are somewhat unreasonable as this has been a big improvement. I only participate in about 4 game threads, so the rest are effectively the same white noise to me that they are to the other sports fans. I just have no problem as now they are all consolidated in the game room.
I don’t mind the sports, videogames, boardgames, RPGs, CCGs, etc. all in one forum. But Lord, those “game threads” (like ‘madness’ ) are annoying. I keep hoping that whoever is posting in them will tire of them soon.