:dubious:
Without the game threads, I very much doubt that we’d have a game room.
Why would you say that? I was under the impression The Game Room was created for sports and video games, with game threads being thrown in because they’re games you play on the board.
That was not my impression.
There were two problems being resolved. A noisy minority asking for a sports forum instead of being all over the board with conflicting moderation of the sports threads and the orphan game threads that the MPSIMS mods did not want cluttering up too much of their forum.
So early on **Frank ** hinted they were considering making one forum for both and would throw video and board games in with it.
I would have to search through many older threads, mostly in ATMB to show you what led up to this, but maybe **Frank ** or fluiddruid will notice this and post.
Jim
Yeah, but that won’t last. Once the novelty and the “Hey, neat idea! I think I’ll start one of those” factor wears off, and all the obvious good ideas have been used, they’ll appear a lot less frequently. The same goes for other kinds of threads (game or otherwise) that have flashes of faddish popularity.
I would like it more if the sports watching threads were still in CS. The thread games are keeping me out of GR. The only reason I go there is because they threw the Death Pool in there. Not that anyone listens to me.
The other thing to note is that there aren’t 12 Madness games going on simultaneously – several of those Madness threads are now dead(eg the Sweet Sixteen thread becomes dead when the game reaches the Elite Eight). Those dead threads aren’t taking front-page space from live threads – any thread that is still generating replies would be bumped over top of it. So the large number of Madness threads on the first page is as much a result of the low number of live threads in the Games Room as it is due to the number of Madness games running simultaneously.
The Game Room was initially suggested in the mod discussions because we curmudgeonly MPSIMS mods were severely limiting the number of game threads. (There are only so many “Words that start with the letter ‘A’” threads a sane mod can stomach.) Unfortunately, our limits meant that the more involved games, like Mafia, could only be run one at a time. And there were a bunch of folks who wanted to play at the same time.
Sports threads were thrown in because they never seemed like a good fit in Cafe Society, and depending on how the threads were written, they could end up in the Pit, MPSIMS, etc… Very little consistency with the sports threads.
The video game threads… well, they were thrown in just to keep things tidy.
But in the beginning, we just really needed a place to put the game threads.
I claim total responsibility.
Are you trying to claim that any of the mods are sane?
We do like to pretend.
I don’t give a damn about sports, and I’m glad these posts are being sent to the games forum. But, what if all the main categories in this board had 5 sub categories? Would we have more participation? Or would we just become a general, boring board with idiots of all ages? I’d like to see the board’s readership expand, and participation along with it, but at what cost? Also, I can’t see this board’s readership increase significantly without more ads of some sort, which, in my opinion, would destroy the reason for the boards existence.
I’m going to go against the flow a little here.
I like to browse. This site is great because I can browse here and get exposed to things I might not otherwise try. So my needs are best served when I see as many different threads as possible, and that means that the fewer forums we have, the better my experience here is. I’m opposed to shunting sports off to its own forum not just because I think there aren’t enough sports threads to cover it but because I’ll never check the sports forum, and so I’ll miss things I might otherwise have read.
This board isn’t much for the notion of hierarchy, but vBulletin does support subfora.
Hopefully, because right now they’re a moronic waste of bandwidth.
That’s how some of us feel about the sports threads. But I really don’t see why the game threads, sports, “audience participation” and such can’t get along in one forum.
I’ve hesistated to start a lot of sports threads in The Game Room because I’m still trying to see where the “Don’t be a jerk” line is in the new forum. I think I’d be a jerk starting 5 Harry Potter threads in Cafe Society in a month. The Game Room might be able to handle a larger number of threads from an individual member.
Please start them. We could use some more sports threads to balance out the games. We were the crowd that begged for a forum, lets use it.
I have my baseball thread going of course and Ellis Dee has had his NFL lead up to the draft. These are the sustained threads. I am surprised by how little the NHL & NBA playoffs are getting attention.
I think football season and late baseball season are usually when we have the most sports threads. I would say late August through February.
Jim
By all means, go ahead. We definitely are seeing a dominance of forum games right now, and my rule with them has been to go ahead unless we say otherwise. This applies to everyone else too.
As a non-sports example: I got a reported post about two World of Warcraft threads. Well, to me, they were on totally different topics - as far as I’m concerned, WoW PVP is different than on-board guild recruitment which is different from general discussion. The same thing applies to sports. More than one thread is fine unless we’re talking about a particular topic (not a particular sport/game, a particular topic). This means we can probably merge threads about the same exact game or athelete, but if you want to make a bunch of threads about different topics within some sport, that’s fine.
There really is no maximum number of threads you can start at once. Frankly I don’t look at who’s starting the threads. As long as people are having fun, go for it. I don’t think we’re in any danger of having too many threads in The Game Room for right now, particularly not on sports topics.
FWIW, I agree - we simply don’t have enough sports threads to warrant its own forum, even if we were wanting to make a bunch of subforums.
I agree with what Jake and appleciders are saying in posts 51 and 52. The fewer fora, the better. We are a board of general interest; we don’t specialize. One of the hallmarks of our membership is that most of us are interested in many things, and by organizing the boards by discussion type rather than subject, it’s possible to stumble across stuff you’d never see otherwise. That’s inherent to this board’s character, and fine-graining the sections, I think, is a contradiction in tone.
Yeah, the dopey game threads are a bit overwhelming, but come on, the forum was set up, what, a day and a half ago? Give it time, it’ll self-correct. I’ve been around long enough to remember when IMHO was created, and it went through similar growing pains.
I like sports.
I like games.
I like the Game Room!