Pathfinder 1E Why do you discuss Pathfinder on ENWorld instead of Paizo.com?

[joela]

And http://www.paizo.com/ seems to be down.

Kinda sucks since there was a thread about a pathfinder book falling apart already I wanted to keep track off.

Servers being moved or something as Paizo relocates from Seattle to Redmond. An announcement was up a day or so ago: they should be back on-line in a couple of hours.

 

[DonTadow]

EN World used to be my main online hangout but these days I post (& surf) almost exclusively at Paizo. I am posting here now because I their site seems to be down (at least for me).

The reason I moved over there was because after the announcement of 4e it quickly became clear that I wasn't that into the direction WotC was taking it, and a result I increasingly found that the conversation here was less to my interest. I was far more interested in Pathfinder when it was announced and I quickly found out that there site was a better place to find people that shared that interest, though as others have pointed out the fanboy factor can get a little heavy over there at times.

It appears that things have evened out a bit here with this separate forum for Pathfinder, but for now, I still feel more at home at Paizo. Whether or not that will shift back is anyone's guess.

Cut... Paste.

I rarely come on here anymore, maybe once in a while to talk about dnd games but it became clear that enworld was catering more to the advertiser who made the most money that equal DND for all. Plus I have little in common with the gamer that likes 4e as opposed to pathfinder.

 

[Waylander the Slayer]

Funny, I think that us gamer have a lot in common, in comparison to non gamers, no matter what we play. On topic; the Paizo boards are a beast; there are so many "forums" that everything is beyond fragmented to the point of uselessness.

 

[Serphet]

I'm not sure I'm against Paizo's specialty board system. It's nice having a specific place to go and talk about.. say the council of thieves AP. Perhaps an AP forum with tags or something would be better?

 

[thurgon]

Because here you can post about any topic, as long as you keep it clean. and you can get different perspectives from people without a vested interest in the game.

 

[Stalker0]

I'll post some stuff about paizo, but I post in lots of enworld forums. So why not kill 2 birds with one stone and keep posting here?

 

[BryonD]

I discussed 3E on ENworld and not wotc.

 

[Morrus]

but it became clear that enworld was catering more to the advertiser who made the most money

What, Google Ads?

 

[seankreynolds]

I'm going to point Gary and Ross at this thread, but in the meantime I'll address some specific comments.

Make it an actual FORUM and not a blog style posting system. This promotes conversation. The current Paizo board is tied to the store item comment function making posts less conversational. This should be separated out.

Hmm, I see many posts on the Paizo boards that aren't linked to product entries. You do realize that you can start a new thread, just like any other message board, that isn't tied to a product, yes? Or am I misunderstanding you?

Also, lots of topics are nearly impossible to find because of archiving.

Well, the Paizo site does have a search feature, I use it often. I can't find ENworld's search function, perhaps because I haven't renewed my supporter status when I drifted out of the industry a few years ago.

Look at some forum packages Sean. there are some really good ones out there that are not so bad to work with and/or do not cost a crap ton of dollars. I am partial to Vbulletin and Dragonfly CMS.

Well, I'm not a tech guy, but I assume there's a reason Gary and Ross are doing it the way they are--perhaps something integral to our storefront software. But like I said, I'll point them this way so they can read these comments.

1. Navigation: You should make it show a little less in the default display. For example: Instead of having general on the main page and then the top 20 topics displayed and then class discussion and the top 20 in that forum displayed, make a clean option where you can just see the forum name (general, class discussion, product discussion, etc,) and the most recently posted in topic. As it stands your forums main page is 10 miles long, and I never make it down to the lower sections after scrolling through copious amounts of topics to get there.

I admit, we have a lot of topics, because we have a lot of product lines. Have you tried collapsing categories you're not interested in? For example, I'm not a Pathfinder Society GM, so I don't read their message board, and leave it collapsed so it just takes up 1 line on the page.

I think the first thing you could do is, to put it bluntly, to actually have a forum. Right now it is just an over abused blog commenting system. It is extremely hard to find anything, and all the subboards makes it hard to find anything. So, make searching easier, alter the organization to make things easier to find, and change to an actual forum system.

As with the first person I replied to, I'm not seeing how the Paizo boards are a "blog commenting system." Yes, you can reply to the posted entries for the various books, but you can start unique threads, just like any other board. Again, unless I'm misunderstanding you. As for the sub-boards, they're divided by product line (Companion, Chronicles, Gamemastery, Modules, Adventure Paths, Pathfinder Society, etc.), just like you might have boards for Dark Sun, Eberron, and Forgotten Realms, or D&D, GURPS, and Traveler... I don't see the difficulty. Of course, I've been using those boards for a year and I admit there are a lot of topics and at first they can be overwhelming, but there's a logical structure to them, IMO.

Now having posted there, the interface does not meet my expectations. What's worse, I can't hot-link images or even measly thumbnails .

What sort of hotlinks do you want? Like, click a button, a pop-up appears for you to enter the URL of the image, click OK, and it drops the link in for you? You can put links in using the current setup, you just have to use the BBcode. I admit, being able to click-paste-click a link would be very handy.

On topic; the Paizo boards are a beast; there are so many "forums" that everything is beyond fragmented to the point of uselessness.

This response confuses me, because it looks to me that ENworld has a similar number of forums you can post in (about 30 or so). Perhaps it's just that you are familiar with ENworld, and perhaps saw it grow from something smaller, and thus know exactly where to find things? I look at the forums here and I'm often confused as to where I should post something because there are so many options. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I think in terms of complexity they're pretty similar.

 

[Piratecat]

This response confuses me, because it looks to me that ENworld has a similar number of forums you can post in (about 30 or so). Perhaps it's just that you are familiar with ENworld, and perhaps saw it grow from something smaller, and thus know exactly where to find things? I look at the forums here and I'm often confused as to where I should post something because there are so many options. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I think in terms of complexity they're pretty similar.

Yeah, I'd argue we're too complex; it's probably intimidating for the new visitor.

In general, the less fragmented a set of forums are, the more useful they are.