Future Forum/Subforum Structure Discussion
Hahnsoo1
Make Ready.We Hunt.Registered User, Moderator, Administrator admin
Make Ready.We Hunt.Registered User, Moderator, Administrator admin
I've started a new thread here to discuss the structure of the Future Forums and propose what subforums that we might have or ways that we might change in the new forums.
Keep in mind that there's a significant chunk of users that have expressed interest in keeping what we have, and there's also a significant chunk of users that want to shake things up completely. We are likely going to compromise on some things while also agreeing with other ideas (Most of the PA-related subforums, for example, are going away simply because PA wants us to strip their branding from the forums).
I also want to emphasize that whatever decisions we make aren't necessarily set in stone. There's room for improvement or changes down the road if we find that something doesn't work. This is also something that we can decide later after physical migration to the new forums, with further time to discuss things.
Please keep the discussion civil and on-topic. The forum structure naturally ties into other issues that we have on the forums, but I ask that you focus simply on what could be improved or changed or what needs to stay the same.
Keep in mind that there's a significant chunk of users that have expressed interest in keeping what we have, and there's also a significant chunk of users that want to shake things up completely. We are likely going to compromise on some things while also agreeing with other ideas (Most of the PA-related subforums, for example, are going away simply because PA wants us to strip their branding from the forums).
I also want to emphasize that whatever decisions we make aren't necessarily set in stone. There's room for improvement or changes down the road if we find that something doesn't work. This is also something that we can decide later after physical migration to the new forums, with further time to discuss things.
Please keep the discussion civil and on-topic. The forum structure naturally ties into other issues that we have on the forums, but I ask that you focus simply on what could be improved or changed or what needs to stay the same.
MHWilds ID: JF9LL8L3
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I will note that, in particular, once SE got an election thread, both that and the D&D election thread calmed way the heck down and there was significantly less drama. (Up until post-election when everyone started shivving everybody again.)
I'm not saying we should abandon the idea of getting everyone to play nice, but if it comes down to irreconcilable differences, locking everyone in a room together may not work so great.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
That was the impression I got too, which definitely has affected the thought process there. I want to think there’s a way to accommodate comfortable types of threads for different ideologies, ostensibly based on the same topic. I have some ideas, but I don’t know what might be the best way to approach it. Xenforo has some interesting tagging and filtering options that might allow those kinds of things to coexist within a single forum, but that’s just a thought.
Honestly, if we can't fix that central issue, I don't think the forums have a long shelf-life in them.
Eventually that schism would eat the community alive.
There are lots of topics the community can engage in together that aren’t shit shows.
We can talk movies, tv, games, comics, phallas, lego bricks, music… like, so much stuff.
I think there is value in bringing us together where we can, and just starting there? Making games, mediaand othersuch topics happen in shared spaces lets us see folks as more than their more combative stances in politics and could help heal the divides more.
This means preserving a D&D and a SE, but reducing the topics that get discussed in there.
I don’t see why there would be a problem resolving the differences people have and it seems lazy to just decide it’s impossible out of hand.
A set of reasonable rules and unbiased moderation will go a long way.
There's maybe a dozen people on each side of the schism who are actually at each other's throats in serious threads, who do the majority of the contentious posts. That leaves another ~500 people who just want to post about video games and read threads on current events filtered through trusted posters.
If siloing off the tiny percent of people who have beef and can't leave it alone lets 99% of people read in peace, let's do that.
On the other hand, the threads that are split over the two spaces are very different in tone - compared the Star Wars threads for an example.
I'm ultimately very undecided in what the best structure for the forums should be and ultimately somewhat ambivalent. I heavily rely on bookmark and just visit the various sub forums to look for something specific or just see what's on the front page.
I think there's a pretty straightforward way to address the schism, which is to just permaban the repeat offenders. There are about a dozen or so folks who are so incredibly invested in the contorted history of the thing that they escalate every chance they get, whether it's through sniping on the threads or weighing down the mods so much that they inevitably quit. They are the ones who constantly reignite the fires, and I think it's worth assessing whether their participation in the community is a net benefit.
But I am admittedly pretty cut-and-dry when it comes to things like this.
Personally I'm not convinced that "the schism" will eat the community alive. There are hundreds of people who committed to migrating and supporting the migration who didn't mention the acrimony at all. I'd like to be more positive and think that it's those people who will see things through, while the rest who have strongly-held opinions about forum beefs and past mistreatment may either let it go or leave on their own.
The key here is in the moderators and moderation policies that get set in the early days. If things don't improve or actually get worse, then I can see the whole thing falling apart very quickly. Hence my earlier, only partially-facetious, suggestion.
The politics/current events threads are obviously different and I'm not going to try and say anything about those, but for some of the more "uncontroversial" topics it feels like we could get more people talking to one another if we tried to reorganise things so that the new version of those threads ended up together.
Some topics work well with both sorts of discussion, though; the SE++ fast-moving "everything about video games in a big pile plus various off-topic stuff" thread" feels different than the "let's just talk about Outer Wilds" threads, and I think there's a place for both of them, but maybe they'd both go in a "gaming" forum.
And I think it still makes sense to have a "threads in here can go anywhere" place like SE++, as well as a "please try to stay on-topic" place like D&D, but maybe those could be two separate "Other[stay on-topic]" and "Other[freeform discussion]" sub-forums, just to try and remove some of the historical baggage that comes with the existing names.
I definitely won't want the political subforum to also be the home for assorted discussion topics, like D&D is today. For example I think we should have top level forums for Games, Technology, TV/Movies, etc. I'm thinking that aside from topical forums, we could have a Chat forum where threads are not required to be about anything in particular. But IMO we shouldn't allow long-lasting topical threads to be created there - if you want a stable place to discuss a topic, you go to the topical forum.
What you qualify as "sniping" or "weighing down the mods," other people would qualify as asking reasonable questions about the culture of the boards and requesting greater accountability from community leadership.
And I'm going to put this as neutrally as I can: Misrepresenting those concerns, especially when we're at a critical juncture like this, is not going to fix anything, and only stands to make this schism worse.
Especially when you describe it as "acrimony," claim that those who keep raising questions about malfeasance on the part of moderators are simply trying to re-litigate "forum beefs," and "joke" about perma-banning those who disagree with you.
If they were, it was IMO ill-timed, in poor taste, and did not add to the discussion.
Still IMO, if the "solution" to the forum schism is to just lean into it and kick out everyone who is found to be disagreeable, the forum we end up with will be much diminished and possibly non-viable.
I submit that a greatly complicating factor here is that the current division is both cultural (as it applies specifically to moderation policy and topic drift) and political.
One group, I believe, wants less strict moderation and is also, largely, more hard-left than the other, who want stronger moderation and tend to be more center-left in their politics.
If it was one or the other, things might be a lot less contentious. We could probably have "on-topic" and "off-topic" threads; we might, perhaps, be able to have separate threads for each political camp within a larger framework, or some sort of agreement to try to get along. But when it's both at once, that makes this a lot harder to sort out and accommodate both equally.
I think it'd be fine if we snipped some of the lesser-used subforums while also making it clear that those folks are more than welcome to create the appropriate threads wherever they best fit. I used to visit webcomics regularly and wouldn't mind an active thread that wasn't sitting in its own separate place that brought new content into my view.
Regarding D&D and SE++ I think the issue is largely cultural, but even there the vast majority of users are fine with each other as long as expectations of behavior are clear. The problem is with a specific subset of people. If you aren't going to deal with those specific people and their specific issues, then it's going to be a waste of time because they will drag everything down with them.
A split more along the lines of Serious vs. Not-Serious Topics might be a better long-term fit for the new forums, but even then you will find there may be misaligned expectations regarding decorum and what constitutes a constructive post. For example, while the Glorious Edict in its specifics is pretty silly, a lot of folks stated in the survey that they would not be happy if it or its underlying spirit regarding personal attacks was removed.
I think G&T should definitely still be its own subforum, except combined. H&A I feel like is actually a really nice space with its own vibe, and I honestly think we're all the better for having it be its own place. Combined with G&T they may serve as good public faces for the entire endeavor that don't need to be restricted behind a login.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
Still IMO, and not joking one bit: I believe there are at least two such groups of people, who sincerely believe the other group(s) are the problem. And unless you're prepared to ban both/all of them, in the name of fairness, this "solution" is a non-starter.
If one group gets to kick out the other, that's not a reconciliation or a healing, it's just a purge.
I think systems like this can offer granularity without having to resort to endless subforum categorization. We can even throw on a NSFW tag or something similar for various threads. I guess the main obstacle would be fostering a culture that is encouraged to use it, but a lot of us already tag our OPs with common descriptors like [chat] or [social media] or whatever.
MHWilds ID: JF9LL8L3
That's fair, and it's obvious they were just forcing something into the Dungeons and Dragons pun back then. Could call it Discussion and Discourse or just shorten it to D&D and it just officially is D&D like how SE++ is a pun on "C++" and Games and Technology was a pun on G&T also standing for "Gabe & Tycho".
i'll start with observations:
1. the G&T+D&D / SE++ split's been in place for 20 years. It's unique to PAForums, having both a slower more on topic side and fast pace slightly less on topic chatty side that has what you would say redundant threads. Attempting to merge that into one forum is not gonna fix things and is gonna notably not be the PA forums most people would be familiar with. I wouldn't be familiar with that either. Hell, when it was just G&T and SE++ in that window before D&D existed, people were complaing about the schism between G&T and SE++ and GT being too strict (I'm literally reading a thread from 2003 right now that has identical posts to what I see today) and SE++ being too fast and loose. Here we are 20 years later with the same posts and the same "i can fix her". I'm gonna be real honest everyone, it comes installed in this community by default.
2. You can't just make subforums willy nilly and expect it to work out. More subforums means activity gets spread out means forum dries up and dies out. Forums as a whole are dying and are no longer the 15-30 category activity supporters they once were. Not everything needs to be sorted into neat little subforum piles, a little bit of threads being kicked to page 2 is just fine since people use thread bookmarking and notification functions. Someone should be able to log in, click through, and see a decent amount of new threads on each page 1 and click through to see what's interesting to read and reply to. It becomes a bore if you have to click through 20 times and all the topics on each page haven't moved or all the time. It just leads to a death spiral because people are afraid of where their threads page position is. It's like the old "bottom of page / top of page" post edits, it's not a concern people should be concerning, especially since most modern forum software lets each person customize the count anyway. I'm also seeing this problem happen again because time is a flat circle with discord servers btw. Endless subcategories of chat channels because people want everything neatly chat-categorized and moderators just spend more time meta-ing chat into the sorting slots than actual moderating the community. I've seen too many forums that were saveable just sink and die because they wanted to keep their big forum indexes from 2004 but they no longer had their 2004 population because downsizing was defeat to them.
3. Thus, there should be a good reason why a subforum should be spun up. That particular topic needs to be absolutely dominating one of the other subforums to the point that it's pushing a notable amounts of threads off the pages and making it hard to navigate, or is so narrow a topic but needs to seen. Or that topic needs to be out of one of the other forums. If you make a politics subforum, that would remove it from SE and D&D but merge the two userbases there. Movies would remove those topics from there and merge the communities. In 2003 we tried having a subforum where you posted "Game On" threads to coordinate online games and making SE and G&T matchmake together in the same subforum did not work out at all and very shortly afterwards the experiment was deemed a failure and Game On threads went back to being posted in their respective forums with the communities grabbing people cross-forum naturally when they felt less shy or crossposted on their own perogative.
4. Complaining about a subforum from another subforum obviously shouldn't be tolerated....
I posted it elsewhere but I think the layout would look something like
Administrative Forum
Games and Tech
D&D
SE++
Artist's Corner (all creative forums merged into one)
Critical Failures/Online boardgamingetc
edit: update: Help/Advice could also go in place of Critical Failures.
Then sometime post launch we look at what needs to be it's own subforum. Comics for example is not active enough to be it's own subforum anymore. Help & Advice could be the first re-spinoff but a lot of it's threads are PC builds so a PC build thread in G&T probably absorbs a lot of it, etc.
And since we don't have to be so calcified into the forum structure proposed subforums can even have trial periods of like 2 months where the community tries it, and if it turns out people don't like it the subforum doesn't live and is removed, no harm no foul. Or as I mentioned elsewhere if the demand existed for example, if a PAX megathread became unwieldy a PAX subforum could be made and then deleted after PAX is done. Or we could do dumb fun stuff like have a subforum that's a community game that last three weeks where everyone gets together to play it. We don't have to pick the forum layout and lock into it for the next 20 years when we have the keys now.
And considering we're already leaving all our posts behind and our accounts behind , we should at least have something that looks familiar, and the unique GT/DD/SE structure is that familiarity. The beefs we can squash separately.
Ban them all, and let God sort them out.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Octopath Traveler - MY BLADE IS UNBENDING
MHWilds ID: JF9LL8L3
I want to call out FyreWulff's post here as a good post along this mold:
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/46830737/#Comment_46830737
It's three posts up from this one (at the time of this writing). I may not agree with all of the conclusions, and I may differ on some of these opinions, but they put up their reasoning and proposal fairly well.
MHWilds ID: JF9LL8L3
Is say H/A should be there from the jump, it's probably got a lot of value to people. Not me people, but people.
'Critical Failures/Online boardgamingetc' is something that might have a need, but honestly I don't even know what it is supposed to cover that the G in G&T wouldn't.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Octopath Traveler - MY BLADE IS UNBENDING
Critical Failures I'm including because in my audit/check of all forums I can see, it has an active page of threads and they also play games (and Mafias) via threads there, so it's also a server list of sorts so that's why it gets a subforum. That one is definitely borderline for sure, though, and could easily be argued that it has to live inside G&T again until it picks up enough steam to spin back out.
In my proposed layout you could easily swap H/A back in and Critical back out.
I don't descend into politics threads online for valid reasons*, but from my outsiders view based on what has been reported and said, I would say that both sides of the schism would level an accusation of toxicity against the other.
The problem is that what is toxic to each 'faction' is different.
One side allows for freedom of topic discussion, even controversial, so long as the tone is non-confrontational and 'civil'. Verbal rudeness, aggression, or passion is 'toxic' in that context.
The other side cares significantly less about tone, where anger and confrontation are not held as being negative behaviours, but rather holds the views and thoughts behind the words to a higher standard, and finds marginalising, minimising, or oppressing as harmful and toxic.
Making those two cultural norms play nice in a common playground is a difficult circle to square, particularly if the acrimony is such that a portion of each side cannot see any way to co-habitate.
It might be you could have tags for [venting/anger] and [civility enforced] and thread divide that way, but ultimately I think there's going to need to be something acceptable to members of both perspectives, or we'll probably end up losing one faction or the other (or even both).
Once again, I could be very off base as I'm not familiar enough with the beef, but where I think being able to integrate most other parts of the forum into common set to reduce duplication and increase the pool of posters for sports, games, Lego, movies, comics, etc. megathreads could be highly beneficial, but actually segregating politics makes it an odd outlier. I'm in favour of the solution that works, but I think the ones involved need to be the ones leading that conversation to outline the acceptable.
I disagree. The source of friction as I see it:
a) For a number of years, we were told to keep the explicit politics threads out of SE and take them to dnd. Majority of dnd regs did not appreciate both our political views nor the way they were expressed. That caused the friction point which was exacerbated, in my humble opinion, by some poor moderation (led by multiple factors, which I’m omitting for brevity but suffice it to say extend well beyond they are Evil Monsters Who Eat Babies). The no politics in SE rule has softened over time, I think as a tacit acknowledgment the prior system was untenable.
b) we have a group of left wing dnd posters who, over the course of about a decade, were no longer welcome in a constantly evolving community dynamic. I have zero interest in who was right and who was wrong, I am simply stating what is. These dnd old posters either left the boards or found a new home in SE, yet the resentment of leaving dnd still lingers.
c) there did not appear to be much latitude in visible and proactive leadership on said issues, which lead to posters and mods bumbling our way through it all, which lead to further animosity and heartache.
d) many people in SE want it to be a place to disconnect from the hell world we live in and resent having reminders of everything they hate in this current moment infecting discussions all the time.
I think the consistent corrective action to all these factors is simply allow each group to have their space. A group who are broadly speaking for establishment politics, and a group who are broadly disestablishment in their outlook. I think if you structure it this way, you can be rigorous about enforcing the split; if you cannot post in one of those places without accepting the basic premise of that subforum, you will not be welcome.
The issue to solve, aligned with your post, zonugal, is the rules around politics in threads/subforums to do with eg social media, pop culture, and media generally. To that end, I’d like to think that’s where the moderation can be a little softer (compared to the politics subforums) where it can be the equivalent of a 0 point warning and a “take this to the politics zone” and the escalation on a case by case basis as the situation arises, backed by the new vision and values etc etc that we are going to create. I think that is not an easy problem to solve, to be clear. All media is politics, but this is the area to solve, not a curtailing of political views or discussion per se.
tl;dr have dedicated politics zones for the main political tendencies, and control the non-politics threads along those lines
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
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Honestly I think folks who go there regularly try to put their best foot forward in that subforum, and we're all the better for it. It's also a good way for people to see what we're about outside the context of gaming and gaming-adjacent endeavors, and it may make them more interested to participate in the community.
Seems like this is doable in Xenforo as there is an extension that already does the hard parts.
PSN: jrrl_absent
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
For the remaining structure, my initial support would be for an on topic/off topic split similar to what there is today. I'm not solid on this though and am open to persuasion.
My next suggestion isn't strictly structure related but I think is worth considering as a consequence: I understand that that we like expressing ourselves through thread names, but for the political/heavy threads, whether scattered among other on topic threads or quarantined into their own section, I think thread names should be encouraged to be as neutral as possible, along the lines of how Hahnsoo1 named the election threads. For myself, going to the BritPol thread and seeing a bunch of names with subtitles like "oh no" or he did WHAT" or even a simple statement of a thing that happened forces me to contemplate well what's happening now when I might not feel in the headspace to do so. It's similar to clickbait in that regard. There will always be a Congress thread or SCOTUS thread and the executive branch will be doing stuff that merits discussion, so I can handle being reminded that Congress exists, but maybe keep the sausage strictly inside the factory for us to peruse at our own choice?
Nice! It's definitely something that if it didn't exist, we'd have to create.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Octopath Traveler - MY BLADE IS UNBENDING
Two things.
Thing 1, which I’m posting here because I feel it strongly informs my thoughts about subforum structure:
1. Define the values of the community. What sets this place apart from other third spaces? Why come here? Why stay? What do we all agree are the core values that all members of this community should share?
2. Establish a code of conduct that tells us what behaviour is reflective of the values from Step 1. Where the values tell us what we believe, the code translates that into expected behaviour.
3. Build your rules based on how the code of conduct should be enforced. This should support the moderators in enforcement as well as protect users in fringe cases, always speaking back to the code that is informed by shared values.
4. Regular, scheduled reviews of the code and the rules. The values should be set and do not change, but the manner of how it manifests can. This makes it flexible and responsive to an evolving community - as all communities do.
Thing 2, which is potentially more controversial to my SE++ compadres:
That is, avoid the establishment of a separate subcommunity that just talks about all the same things everyone else is talking about, except in parallel and with an entirely different culture and value system to every other subforum.
I loved SE++. I owe the place a lot. But I think a fair criticism of where it’s at now is that it is perfectly content (and allowed) to replicate discussions in a separate space WITHIN the overall space, governed by its own unwritten rules and culture. This is where the schism started.
Replication of threads across areas means we’ll just go to the version of a thread that gives us what we want (be it tone or values) instead of engaging with the broader conversation. It creates an alternative to the mainstream from the jump (this happens normally as communities grow, but being set up this way from the jump is already inviting splits and cliques to form).
Basically - set up sub forums across a range of useful categories. Include current events if you want, but I would rename all of them to reflect the new start. All threads go to these sub forums by default, if they fit. Anything that doesn’t fit under the established subforums THEN goes to an off-topic/chat/socializing forum. Maybe your subforum categories get reviewed from time to time to make sure they’re still relevant over time.
It does mean threads should get moved to the appropriate subforum if they’re made in that social space but belong elsewhere.
And a pretty good way to do this is the tagging/filter way that Hahn mentions above. All threads everywhere, but able to be filtered by tag rather than a specific subforum. And then anything that doesn’t fit with a specified tag would be your “SE++” thread.
If the goal is to sustainably retain as much of the existing user base as possible, then I feel this is worth examining as an option and it must be done in conjunction with Thing 1. That said, maybe not everyone is as invested in retaining absolutely everyone, so obvs this option would not suit them.
But I would rather not force, say, all politics discussion entirely into the d&D or the se++ style if that makes sense.
Se++ politics threads are, by the nature of se++, much more meandering and I personally prefer that. I know others don't and that's fine, but I feel there needs to be some provision for letting people talk about stuff in a way that the conversion doesn't need to be kept on the straight and narrow, as it were. (And indeed, entirely the reverse - there needs to provision for a space where discussion is far more focused and in topic)
1) complete renames, we don't need a sentence on why SE++ is the wild west and D&D is more on topic, etc etc. Those days are gone.
2) I don't think we need individual subforum movie/tv/etc threads. There should be a general blending of the subforums, but still divided by like media/video games/news and politics, etc, just not all of that duplicated across two subforums.
3) Maybe mod nominations? Do a poll to see the 20 or so most requested people who keep a level head, as considered by the community, and see if they want to mod?
Which doesn't bother me since I still harbor ancient forum beef about the G&T Chat Threads being shut down and told to go to SE++
IM NOT THE ONLY ONE!?