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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 5715436" data-attributes="member: 11760">(Adapted from a post on one of the three (at the time of this writing) incarnations of <a href="http://enworld.org/showthread.php?t=313161" target="_blank">this thread</a> on various sub-forums on ENWorld.)ENWorld's game-specific subforums mostly exist because there's a pool of partisans who can't behave themselves when confronted with the reality that someone else plays a different game than they do, and the entire community has to maneuver around them and their behavior.If we can have Traveller and Runequest happily sharing space on the main board, there's no reason that Pathfinder, 4E and 3E can't be there as well, except for a subset of the players of each of those games.If the purpose of running the site is serving its visitors -- which I think is absolutely what drives the folks who put in so much time and effort building and maintaining the site -- fragmenting a conversation into multiple spaces hurts that goal. Users have to realize they're in multiple versions of the same conversation and have to realize the reason they don't see a response to a question is because they're in the wrong incarnation of the thread. Likewise, publishers have to do three times or more as many forum posts just to make sure they're also practicing good customer service, which is an extra burden in the RPG industry, where many of these publishers are doing it as a part-time job along with their real "pay the mortgage" job.And this extends to ordinary conversations as well. Go to the 4E, Pathfinder and 3E boards, and you find generic RPG discussions mixed in there about structuring games, building game worlds, dealing with problem players and so on. But because those posters are in the ghetto that their unruly fellow gamers have forced them into, they're getting less feedback on their questions and ideas than they ought to.This isn't me bashing those who set up the current arrangement, but an acknowledgment (or merely an opinion, if you disagree), that it's now a suboptimal set-up. The fact that the site has been reorganized multiple times over the years is an acknowledgment that human beings built it and that circumstances change.I understand why the site is set up the way it is, I think. I just think that everyone would be better served if the sub-forums were merged back into the main site -- it would mean less duplication of content and effort for everyone and better, more robust conversations for users -- and if problem users were ejected rather than being catered to.If a child heaped screaming abuse on his siblings, his parents wouldn't move all the children to their own separate wings of the house -- they'd deal with the discipline problem directly.This site could be dramatically improved, for all users (many of those problem users are still present on the sub-forums and make themselves known in various ways), if the same thing happened here. I've moderated sites before, and I know what a massive pain in the butt it is -- the site I worked at is probably only about 75 percent of ENWorld's size, but the pain is probably comparable -- and I know I'm asking for other people to self-inflict some migraines, and I'm guessing that's why the admins chose the set-up they have.But it makes me sad when my RSS feed has multiple versions of a topic pop up, and I know that users (and in this case, publishers) are either going to have to jump through a lot of hoops to keep up or that some people are going to wonder why tumbleweeds are blowing through threads they reasonably believe should be quite active.In any case, much love for all the admins and mods. No offense is intended to ENWorld staff, past or present.</blockquote>

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