Author Topic: Board Organization / Merging  (Read 80770 times)

Badspot

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We can discuss this here, without crapping up the resource link thread.  

I'm leaning towards this being the modification help forum and all of the active mod progress threads being moved to general discussion.  
There are already a ton of these threads in GD and they appeal to people who are not modders.

Unmixing everything at this point could be done, but would be quite difficult, so please consider that.  
Also consider if you are literally this guy:



Edit: Now this thread is sticky too, so you can't complain that I'm trampling your human rights or whatever by deleting discussion from the other thread.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2015, 11:55:58 PM by Badspot »

Yeah moving the active mod projects to GD would probably work. Something just needs to be done so the help requests don't get pushed down by all the current projects.

why not combine this with the help board then?
« Last Edit: October 29, 2015, 12:19:03 AM by PurpleMetro »

I think add-on development threads should have a sub-forum near add-ons or something. (probably not since you're trying to clean up dead sub-forums(and the difficulty of sorting that out))
General Discussion, in my opinion, works best as a server/hosting thread and general discussion forum. would be noisy with mod development threads piling in there.

the most prominent topics in GD tend to be server/mod stuff anyway. i'm mostly concerned about people asking for help being obscured by people announcing their work, so as long as those are ultimately separate i'm fine

why not combine this with the help boatd then?
because help is specifically for problems relating to running/playing the game and these are about help for modding purposes

those are two very different subjects

I like the idea of splitting addon development into its own board (not EVERYTHING is gamemode/server theme/etc. related), and keeping the previous modification help topics all contained in their own board.
It makes it a little bit more easier to search and sift through; I searched specifically on the Coding Help board quite a bit, and I can see this potentially clogging up results with less relevant results.

I like the idea of splitting addon development into its own board (not EVERYTHING is gamemode/server theme/etc. related), and keeping the previous modification help topics all contained in their own board.
It makes it a little bit more easier to search and sift through; I searched specifically on the Coding Help board quite a bit, and I can see this potentially clogging up results with less relevant results.
this

merging mod dev topics with GD is a really bad idea on the scale of merging Creativity with Community Projects (before it got renamed) as the content people expect in each board is vastly different.
honestly having a first page of a board not completely update every other month isn't that bad for boards which are basically set aside for modders/those looking to learn how to mod. mixing it in with the general population which doesn't give a stuff would only cram everyone in the same traincar and make organized discussion difficult and probably unintentionally encourage pointless points of "cool" and "when will you be done" in dev threads.

Mod disc had a reputation (from my pov) to be a relatively safe place to release betas which would only be seen by the small % of users who would actually give constructive feedback and update the mod regularly. If topics like Slayer dev are put on GD, common users who don't know better wouldn't understand that the slayer download in the dev topic is expected buggy and complain about it being a bad mod despite the stable version posted in Add-Ons.


i still think coding help should be separate, but it may not be totally necessary to go back and pull all the posts out and put it back. Coding help was a good place to drop in with one-off questions (ex: how to do raycast explosion), which just clutters actual mod. dev. projects off the first page. simply reinstating the board with the original sticky posts would probably be enough.

also what happened to being able to post in "stickied" coding help topics? Not sure if you noticed my post in the other thread since they all were deleted.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2015, 01:32:25 AM by Conan »

It was the general consensus from when the precedent was raised that modification help board is kept seperate from mod. discussion. The audience in the former is very mature and if someone wants help on coding their project it can get easily derailed with people suggesting and requesting content.

will you ever upgrade the blockland forums to a newer version of SMF

will you ever upgrade the blockland forums to a newer version of SMF
why bother? he's added in custom stuff to the forums,  it wouldn't be worth the time to recode it all.

why bother? he's added in custom stuff to the forums,  it wouldn't be worth the time to recode it all.
cause the profile information stuff is way outdated and the entire forum theme could use a face-lift

Yeah moving the active mod projects to GD would probably work. Something just needs to be done so the help requests don't get pushed down by all the current projects.
I'll change my position, coding help should have its own section. I've already encountered problems with the new merged board because my search results (specifically related to coding) are being polluted by all the normal mod discussion stuff.

what if you implemented tags like [coding help] or [mod help]

I'm totally down for the change I just still feel like this needs some sort of separation
« Last Edit: October 29, 2015, 08:36:26 AM by Trogtor »

The audiences are still unfitting, why invest work in a whole new feature if it would make more sense to just make logical board seperations?

I'll change my position, coding help should have its own section. I've already encountered problems with the new merged board because my search results (specifically related to coding) are being polluted by all the normal mod discussion stuff.
Never even saw anyone consider search results when discussing this ahead of time, but yeah, being able to search specifically through coding help was extremely handy at times.

I know merging coding help with the other mod help was done because the latter wasn't as active, but I'm starting to think that may be a mistake. The people who respond to coding help threads aren't gonna magically become able to answer modeling questions just because the sections merged, and the more active coding help threads may bury the others before someone with the relevant skills can see them.

I agree that the giant mod work in progress threads would fit in General Discussion. The fact that they remained active and on the first page of their section for months probably indicates they should be somewhere more active. Though if you do that, you'd probably want to rename this section to Modification Help just so future ones don't end up here.

Should any future discussion of AoT just go in "Games"? That's another really active section, and I imagine any threads about it would get pretty quickly buried there, making it completely pointless. I know the whole point of this restructure was to merge things to get fewer boards, but maybe it'd be worthwhile to open a new one for any discussion of your other games. AoT, Perennial, Mario Land Fun, even the older ones maybe. Could repurpose AoT General, or set up a sub-board of Games. It probably wouldn't be a hugely active board, but unlike other games with threads in the Games section, there's nowhere else on the internet for discussing them, and since this new merge I've quickly been coming to the conclusion that a section being less active isn't inherently a bad thing.