The Coin Return Forum Structure Poll - POLL CLOSED - Restructure Wins - Results on page 9
minor incident
publicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Team regular
publicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Team regular
Hello!
Following up from the Forum Structure discussion thread from last week, we've spent a great deal of time going back through all the feedback offered, all the proposals presented, and also considering the best way to move forward from here. After much deliberation and consulting with other members of the community, we've decided to present the leading three proposals for a head-to-head poll. These proposals are as follows:
CURRENT STRUCTURE - This is, as the name implies, what we have now, with only minimal changes as technically/legally necessary to map onto our new home at Coin Return.
HYBRID RESTRUCTURE - This is the proposal originally offered by The Cheat and Morninglord, which opts for a middle ground between the current structure and a full restructure.
FULL RESTRUCTURE - This is the proposal that represents a ground-up redesign and is the end result of work by Zonugal and Delzhand, refined over the last few weeks of feedback.
You will find the link to the poll at the bottom of this post. But please read the following before voting:
This utilizes a type of RANKED CHOICE voting system called "Score Voting". You may give each proposal a different rating, or the same rating. You are not obligated to use all 3 scores, but you must assign a score to each proposal. For example, you could rate one proposal 1 star, a second proposal 3 stars, and the third proposal 1 star again if you find only one option acceptable. You could also rate all three proposals equally, if you are indifferent. At the end of voting, the stars (or points) will be tallied for each of the three proposals. This is not golf -- the highest score (number of stars) is the winner.
Finally you will be asked for your forum user name. This is to ensure that only current registered members vote, and only a single vote per person is counted. If you vote more than once, we will automatically disqualify all but your latest vote.
Please also note that the various administrative forums, including those for forum rules, bug reports, feature requests, etc, are not included as part of any proposal, as these will be housed in an appropriate separate subforum, according to administrative need.
---POLL CLOSED---
Results: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/46946879/#Comment_46946879
---POLL CLOSED---
This is the final vote for the launch structure -- once a winner is determined that is the option we will be using as the basis for the launch of Coin Return. Periodic running updates will be provided during the polling period.
Voting will run for seven (7) days, concluding at 2:00pm (USA EST) on Tuesday, January 21st.
The winning choice was the FULL RESTRUCTURE option. The text of that proposal and forum index mockup are included here:
FULL RESTRUCTURE
Proposal by Zonugal and Delzhand:
This proposed restructuring represents an attempt to fully craft an ideal forum layout from scratch, leaving behind any baggage or expectations that may follow us from Penny Arcade. This structure takes nothing from our current forums for granted and considers the logical layout of conversations sorted by topic in order to built a more natural forum hierarchy.
Part of the goal of this proposal is to build a forum structure that encourages groups that have largely retreated to their own corners to intermix and find common ground for allow our community to thrive, while also ensuring there are safeguards and controls in place for each member to feel safe and at home in the threads they participate in. Equally important in this proposal is ensuring the forum is more discoverable and friendly to navigation by allowing anyone to logically find a thread on a given topic without requiring prior knowledge of existing forum culture and history. In this proposal, forums are created according to broad topics, with more sensitive forums (such as those involving casual chatting around real life issues, politics, and those for sharing our art and creative endeavors are located in the private side of the forum. This section would be locked away from new members until they meet reasonable criteria (TBD).
Additionally, each topical forum will heavily utilize tagging to allow users to ignore specific threads or entire topics, or to focus only on topics that interest them. Like the hybrid system, this system would also be utilized by OPs to allow them to set specific guidelines and tone expectations for the threads they create, ensuring that threads are less likely to feel like targets for drive-bys from other members with axes to grind.
While we appreciate the last two decades of history many of us share at the Penny Arcade Forums, this proposal is our attempt to acknowledge that in order for our community to continue to thrive, not just subsist, we have to address our foundational cracks and build something fresh that compliments our community-driven Values, Code of Conduct, Forum Rules, and our new DIY community-run ethos.
Public Chat Forums
> Digital Games
> Media Discussions
> Tabletop & Analog Games
> Technology
> Sports & Fitness
> Help & Advice
Private Chat Forums
> CHAOS (Chat, Horses, and Other Stuff)
> Arts, Crafts, & Creative Hobbies
> Politics & Current Events
> Archives
Following up from the Forum Structure discussion thread from last week, we've spent a great deal of time going back through all the feedback offered, all the proposals presented, and also considering the best way to move forward from here. After much deliberation and consulting with other members of the community, we've decided to present the leading three proposals for a head-to-head poll. These proposals are as follows:
CURRENT STRUCTURE - This is, as the name implies, what we have now, with only minimal changes as technically/legally necessary to map onto our new home at Coin Return.
HYBRID RESTRUCTURE - This is the proposal originally offered by The Cheat and Morninglord, which opts for a middle ground between the current structure and a full restructure.
FULL RESTRUCTURE - This is the proposal that represents a ground-up redesign and is the end result of work by Zonugal and Delzhand, refined over the last few weeks of feedback.
You will find the link to the poll at the bottom of this post. But please read the following before voting:
This utilizes a type of RANKED CHOICE voting system called "Score Voting". You may give each proposal a different rating, or the same rating. You are not obligated to use all 3 scores, but you must assign a score to each proposal. For example, you could rate one proposal 1 star, a second proposal 3 stars, and the third proposal 1 star again if you find only one option acceptable. You could also rate all three proposals equally, if you are indifferent. At the end of voting, the stars (or points) will be tallied for each of the three proposals. This is not golf -- the highest score (number of stars) is the winner.
Finally you will be asked for your forum user name. This is to ensure that only current registered members vote, and only a single vote per person is counted. If you vote more than once, we will automatically disqualify all but your latest vote.
Please also note that the various administrative forums, including those for forum rules, bug reports, feature requests, etc, are not included as part of any proposal, as these will be housed in an appropriate separate subforum, according to administrative need.
---POLL CLOSED---
Results: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/46946879/#Comment_46946879
---POLL CLOSED---
This is the final vote for the launch structure -- once a winner is determined that is the option we will be using as the basis for the launch of Coin Return. Periodic running updates will be provided during the polling period.
Voting will run for seven (7) days, concluding at 2:00pm (USA EST) on Tuesday, January 21st.
The winning choice was the FULL RESTRUCTURE option. The text of that proposal and forum index mockup are included here:
FULL RESTRUCTURE
Proposal by Zonugal and Delzhand:
This proposed restructuring represents an attempt to fully craft an ideal forum layout from scratch, leaving behind any baggage or expectations that may follow us from Penny Arcade. This structure takes nothing from our current forums for granted and considers the logical layout of conversations sorted by topic in order to built a more natural forum hierarchy.
Part of the goal of this proposal is to build a forum structure that encourages groups that have largely retreated to their own corners to intermix and find common ground for allow our community to thrive, while also ensuring there are safeguards and controls in place for each member to feel safe and at home in the threads they participate in. Equally important in this proposal is ensuring the forum is more discoverable and friendly to navigation by allowing anyone to logically find a thread on a given topic without requiring prior knowledge of existing forum culture and history. In this proposal, forums are created according to broad topics, with more sensitive forums (such as those involving casual chatting around real life issues, politics, and those for sharing our art and creative endeavors are located in the private side of the forum. This section would be locked away from new members until they meet reasonable criteria (TBD).
Additionally, each topical forum will heavily utilize tagging to allow users to ignore specific threads or entire topics, or to focus only on topics that interest them. Like the hybrid system, this system would also be utilized by OPs to allow them to set specific guidelines and tone expectations for the threads they create, ensuring that threads are less likely to feel like targets for drive-bys from other members with axes to grind.
While we appreciate the last two decades of history many of us share at the Penny Arcade Forums, this proposal is our attempt to acknowledge that in order for our community to continue to thrive, not just subsist, we have to address our foundational cracks and build something fresh that compliments our community-driven Values, Code of Conduct, Forum Rules, and our new DIY community-run ethos.
Public Chat Forums
> Digital Games
> Media Discussions
> Tabletop & Analog Games
> Technology
> Sports & Fitness
> Help & Advice
Private Chat Forums
> CHAOS (Chat, Horses, and Other Stuff)
> Arts, Crafts, & Creative Hobbies
> Politics & Current Events
> Archives
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
minor incident on
+28
Posts
Oh well
Yeah it wasn't super clear what was actually the high score.
You should be able to resubmit and have the new vote supercede the old
There are images that show the general concept in the poll.
The proposals are all listed in great detail (with screenshots) in the poll.
because my opinion is that those updates hurt the voting process more than help, other than maybe updates of x many people have voted
We were leaning towards yes, despite having similar concerns. Our reasoning was that with a poll this... fraught, which is also running for a long time (seven days), it would likely temper a lot of surprise and hurt feeling to see occasional tally updates.
Good question -- Those forums are unfortunately very low traffic at this time, so we didn't get much feedback on that. This is good to know, however, and if there's actually demand for one of the writing forums to be moved back to "Public", I don't see any issue with that. Our instinct was simply to keep all creative forums under private to protect for IP theft, AI scrapers, etc.
I think it gives the early voting block an unfair advantage to set the momentum of the vote, increasing risk of later voters choosing to vote with the group rather than what they individually feel like
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly I would recommend retiring the Writer's Well, as nobody has posted anything in there in years, and it's honestly not serving much purpose. We can probably have a single forum to discuss general writing stuff (if even that - that place is pretty dead, too). If there's demand for a glorious resurgence, we can always tack on additional subforums later.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
I would think requesting critiques would be an ideal use of tags too.
G&T has always felt too on topic, each game had its thread and that's that; even the Steam thread is still basically on-topic. But there are many many games that don't merit their own thread, and there is meta-discussion of games, the industry, people, trends etc. that don't even fit the console/platform threads. Sometimes I just want to post that I picked an old game back up or ask for recommendations or post about something newsworthy.
I guess before I vote I'd need an idea of the thread-creating philosophy for the new forums. I think on-topic threads were enforced in G&T because they didn't want a bunch of new/short threads that bloom and die. I don't really think that's a problem anymore. The bottom thread on G&T hasn't been posted to in 2 days. The bottom of page 2 goes back to December. I would guess the new forum won't have a 'too many threads' problem, rather the opposite.
I see the chat thread is back in G&T and I think that solves a lot of it. But I do think any new G&T successor would need a looser feel under the hybrid and full restructure. That's why games talk slipped into other forums in the first place. Is that the concept?
{Bluesky Account }{Writing and Story Blog}
I have a hard time imagining any mod is going to have a problem with creating threads for small profile games, even if that thread doesn't get a lot of activity. Regardless of forum structure, I think the moderation policy has been/is going to be that it's okay to go off topic in a thread and it's also okay to make small threads that don't wind up being headliners.
Q: In Full Restructure, is the "Technology" thread the equivalent of Moe's*, or would technology current events go in there? Ex: D&D [Space], [Social Media], and [Elon] hybrid tech / politics / news threads
*Functionally H/A for tech? I think?
Also keep in mind we are not modifying proposals or adding proposals to this vote. If there is overwhelming feedback about the winning option it will be taken into consideration when it's time to actually build.
Also, it was fascinating (to me at least) that when filling in the survey I found that my rankings were different than what I thought they would be while reading the other thread. I think it's been good to have a few days of peace to let my subconscious mull over things without being distracted by the, let's say, "high energy level" of those discussions.
The only concern I would have there is if TWB is so much lower traffic than AC, then a general "Creative Works" subforum would seem like an AC since it would bury writing threads and would make it look like there wasn't a Writer's subforum at all.
That may be an unjustified concern, though.
I don't think Elon belongs in there _in general_ but something like self-driving cars would, so discussion of his mismanagement of Telsa's self-driving tech would be fair game. 3d printing, drones, the new iPhone, keyboards, PC builds, space exploration... it's a wider net than just what's in Moe's right now. Tech-related legislation could go either there or Politics & Current Events.
Don’t really see what problem’s being solved by the reworks tbh, doesn’t feel to me like the forum needs to be more segmented
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I would say that yes, "Technology" would basically be the new Moe's, and in this case would focus on technology from an end user/consumer perspective, while discussions about the ethics of certain tech, or general discussion of major tech companies would fit better in the Politics and Current Events forum. So, a thread about discussing the current crop of electric vehicles you might be shopping for would be "Technology", but discussion about Tesla as a company, or the ethics of lithium mining in the electric vehicle industry would probably be "Politics and Current Events". But I think there's plenty of room for some grey area and crossover, so as long as the expectations for the discussion are set clearly in the OP, it would probably be fine for the most part.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
So I am not done writing the new rules yet, and they will have to go through many rounds of feedback before being finalized. That said, there is nothing I see in the values or code of conduct that would prevent the creation of small new threads that didn't live long. There will certainly be on-topic threads, but plenty of space for just a meandering small thread as well regardless of final outcome.