Forum Arrangement

[Morrus]

@Lawngnome4hire posted this in my AMA. It being an AMA, and it being a statement of his opinion on something rather than a question, I've not responded there, but it's a subject that I'm happy to talk about.

I understand there is only so much you can do, the content posted is by and large determined by the community. But when you say "There's forums for non-D&D stuff here." All there is General RPG Discussion, and Boardgames, Card Games, Wargames and Miniatures. This doesn't exactly encourage people to talk about other systems, and finding other peoples posts about other systems is difficult since it all gets lumped together. Adding more forums that are clearly defined for other systems would help encourage more discussion. Obviously you can't add a forum for every game, maybe just the other big names besides D&D and PFRPG, or you could add forums for games divided by genre. There's a lot of different ways it could be done, but I think that if you want to attract players of other game systems, you need to give them a place to go. One generic all encompassing forum isn't very user friendly.

It works fine for RPG.net!

As a note, there are caetgory icons for each game; you can click on each to get a game-specific forum.

Here's my thoughts:

1) If I could create a bunch of subforums that would magically be suddenly filled with interesting topics about different games, I'd do it in a second.

2) I do not believe that "if you build it they will come". In my experience, the correct saying is "if you build it, it will stand empty unless you have some other trick up your sleeve to fill it". Sadly, in my experience (and I have tried opening hundreds of subforums over the last 16 years), that doesn't work.

3) Empty forums are worse than no forums. They look bad.

So, given those premises, I don't believe that simply adding new forums would have any effect whatsoever. It hasn't done in the past, and I've no reason to think it will in the future. It's not in the publishers' interests to support such a thing - publishers all want forums themselves, not on third party sites.

If folks want more discussion on non-D&D stuff, the focus should be on finding other ways to encourage it. But I strongly believe that simply opening new forums is not the way to do that. Hell, even the Pathfinder forum is pretty darn slow!

 

[Morrus]

Incidentally, as an experiment, I've opened a Star Wars Roleplaying forum.

 

[Lawngnome4hire]

@Lawngnome4hire posted this in my AMA. It being an AMA, and it being a statement of his opinion on something rather than a question, I've not responded there, but it's a subject that I'm happy to talk about.

Yeah sorry wasn't trying to side track anything, was just responding to your answer to my question.

It works fine for RPG.net!

As a note, there are caetgory icons for each game; you can click on each to get a game-specific forum.

Here's my thoughts:

1) If I could create a bunch of subforums that would magically be suddenly filled with interesting topics about different games, I'd do it in a second.

2) I do not believe that "if you build it they will come". In my experience, the correct saying is "if you build it, it will stand empty unless you have some other trick up your sleeve to fill it". Sadly, in my experience (and I have tried opening hundreds of subforums over the last 16 years), that doesn't work.

3) Empty forums are worse than no forums. They look bad.

So, given those premises, I don't believe that simply adding new forums would have any effect whatsoever. It hasn't done in the past, and I've no reason to think it will in the future. It's not in the publishers' interests to support such a thing - publishers all want forums themselves, not on third party sites.

If folks want more discussion on non-D&D stuff, the focus should be on finding other ways to encourage it. But I strongly believe that simply opening new forums is not the way to do that. Hell, even the Pathfinder forum is pretty darn slow!

I completely understand and agree with your points. Empty forums actually deter people from posting rather than encouraging new discussions. So any new forums created need to have a way to quickly add enough content to avoid appearing empty and unused.

I don't know if you've tried this or not, but you have the category icons you mentioned, it shouldn't be too difficult to use those to sort and move existing posts to pre-populate any new forums. Or at least the more recent posts if you're worried about the database exploding.

Currently it can be very difficult to find discussions about something specific for a game other than D&D on these forums, and if you're creating a new post to ask a question they frequently get lost in the soup of all the posts about other games. Rpg.net has the same issue, but I don't frequent it because I think you run a much nicer site.

The reason I bring this up is because I'd really like there to be a one stop shop for tabletop roleplaying discussions. I play a lot of different systems and it's a time consuming pain to try and keep up with several different forum sites. Plus there are plenty of games where the publishers either don't have forums, or they're so poorly organized and maintained that they might as well not have any. It's something I care about so I wanted to bring it up. But I don't have a magic fix that will solve these issues.

 

[Morrus]

Well, let's see how the Wars/Trek forum does. If people use it, I might look at opening forum for at least those games in ICv2's top 5 list. Right now, that would simply be adding forums for Fate and Numenera/Cypher.

 

[delericho]

Has "All Topics" been removed?

 

[Morrus]

I never know how to answer questions like that.

 

[delericho]

I never know how to answer questions like that.

Heh.

What I meant is that until yesterday there was a link near the top which gave a list of all forum topics sorted by latest post. Which was extremely useful - almost always I would just check that instead of bothering with any of the sub-forums (sorry - I know work went into those!). I'd only ever check a specific forum if there was a specific thread I wanted to see.

But now it's gone. I was wondering if this was a deliberate choice, an unfortunate cost of the new Wars/Trek forum, or something that can be brought back? Thanks!

 

[Umbran]

Has "All Topics" been removed?

I think you'll see there's still a 'General RPG Discussion' forum, for any RPG discussion that doesn't fit into any more specific place.

 

[Morrus]

That's not what he means. He means the virtual forum which showed threads from all forums.

The answer is - not sure. I'm cautious about things pushing stuff further and further down the page, and "What's New?" provides similar - though not identical - functionality.

 

[Riley]

That's not what he means. He means the virtual forum which showed threads from all forums.

The answer is - not sure. I'm cautious about things pushing stuff further and further down the page, and "What's New?" provides similar - though not identical - functionality.

What's new really isn't equivalent. Please, if you can, bring back the "all discussion" option.

It is the only way I read ENworld. There, I can check out conversations on any topic that interests me. I do not have time to peruse every single sub-forum separately to find out what's worth reading.