PC Games: One Forum to rule them all?

Dirt · Post by **Dirt** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 6:24 pm

Is there really enough traffic in either/or to continue having 2 forums?

The Meal · Post by **The Meal** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 6:41 pm

PC Games by Title is our second most utilized forum right now, and splitting off Unreleased Games (however that'll end up being titled) keeps *down* the number of duplicate threads, and also acts to keep the pimping/hyping threads from becoming annoying.

Unreleased Games and PC Games in General could be combined based purely on the traffic argument, but as logically defined categories and as categories that mutually exclusive segments of readers would find interesting, I think they work great as separate forums.

There is more to how forums are split than just traffic.

~Neal

Dirt · Post by **Dirt** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 7:30 pm

I would think that combining General and Title would make things easier on the user.

The Meal · Post by **The Meal** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 7:49 pm

Dirt wrote:I would think that combining General and Title would make things easier on the user.

Define user. The person reading posts or the person making posts.

~Neal

Dirt · Post by **Dirt** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 8:12 pm

The Meal wrote:
Dirt wrote:I would think that combining General and Title would make things easier on the user.
Define user. The person reading posts or the person making posts.

~Neal

The person using the boards of which there are 3.

1) Person who posts and does not read.
2) Person who reads but does not post.
3) Person who does both.

All are effected. Though the 1st less than the others since they are likely spammers.

The Meal · Post by **The Meal** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 8:21 pm

I would agree that all three are affected. But for whom do you set up the overarching forum categorization system? Whom is most affected by our topic divisional scheme? There is definitely a site philosophy with regard to that question at work in our current system.

~Neal

GuidoTKP · Post by **GuidoTKP** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 9:27 pm

The Meal wrote:I would agree that all three are affected. But for whom do you set up the overarching forum categorization system? Whom is most affected by our topic divisional scheme? There is definitely a site philosophy with regard to that question at work in our current system.

~Neal

Not really a big deal, but the current model has postives and negatives for all users. In general, I would prefer Title and General to be combined, because it can sometimes become confusing where a post should go. The thing the current system encourages, which I REALLY like, however, is that it forces people to identify the game they are discussing in the thread title. But I know that I almost never visit General, because Title will 95% of the time have the threads that I am interested in, so I sometimes feel like I might be missing out on interesting stuff in the other forum, because the traffic doesn't really justify frequent visits.

Peacedog · Post by **Peacedog** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 9:42 pm

Not really a big deal, but the current model has postives and negatives for all users

That is Meal's point, fwiw.

There are plenty of considerations: ease of use. Readability. Traffic. Also things like community scale. As we get larger, we start to make more forums, and helping users manage scale is reason enough to do it (witness Gonegold's journey from 1 to 3 to 8 to doubledigit forums).

GGD got plenty of usage back on GG. If it were soley up to me (and isn't, I'll note)I'd be inclined not to move it based soley on how much we might grow (ever the optimist, I am), especially considering how much traffic GBT did. Though it could take on more traffic depending on how things shake down with the front page.

Kasey Chang brought this up elsewhere, but we've also discussed splitting GBT in the past ("genre" forums). We weren't at that point back before GG shut down (IMO), and I'm not sure where that point is. It is out there somewhere on the horizon, though.

Edit: clarity.

Rich in KCK · Post by **Rich in KCK** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 1:51 am

I've always liked the division of General and Title. Looking for info and hype about a particular game go to Title. Want to talk about a particular genre, gaming theory or creation, looking for a game recommendation, interested in how others approach/play a certain type of genre, need a gaming periphial recommendation or just want to talk about the history of gaming go to General.

I read Title and General here for the same reason I go to Qt3 to read about movies, books, and television, it's just easier to find what interests me.

By the way Qt3 does the combine it all into one forum and it seems like a big mess to me all the time.

Dirt · Post by **Dirt** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:39 am

Dom2 needs it's own thread.

The Meal · Post by **The Meal** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 10:24 am

I think someone thought I was asking rhetorical questions when I was really asking folks to think about the overarching organization behind a webforum. I didn't want folks to think in terms of what subjects would you like delineated, but one level above that -- what *ideas* do you need to consider when you set up those delineations. And the first question to answer when you're addressing those ideas is "who is my target audience?"

Personally, I've spent *a lot* of time thinking about this sort of thing. Back in the day, I was an active participant on USENET in how that beast got organized (a google search will turn up my name/email address on many voting issues of that nature). I bring this up not to set up an "Argument of Authority" (I'm smarter about this, so everybody trust my opinion!!!) but to point out that I may overreact when our current system gets questioned.

Apologies, Dirt, if I came across as overreacting. Questioning our current system is entirely valid and ensures that everybody is thinking about what the right way is to do things.

The other reason I may have overreacted, however, is because I'm a firm believer that a webforum needs to be organized by topics such that *THE READER* can easily ascertain where they should go to find information. When I saw a poll set up (which, by its nature, is going to garner a whole lot of responses by active *WRITERS* and misrepresent the levels of support by non-writing-participants and lurkers, folks whom I think *should* have say as to how topics are organized) with a very awkward question posed (does Yes mean I like the current split of topics, or does Yes mean I want to consolidate topics? I had to read it three times to figure it out), I have to admit I got a bit miffed.

So here it is the next day, and here is my apology for that. Sorry.

Anyway, since I've let my cat out of the bag... I believe forums should be organized to make life easiest for the information-seeker. A person should not have to burn too many braincells when they come to a site with a particular idea in mind wondering which forum they should go in to find discussion of that topic (as a sidenote: this is why I get so upset when I see very obviously scientific topics posted in R&P -- *how* would a reader know to even go into that forum if they were interested in such discussions?). People who participate in the conversations are a subset of this group (folks would not be part of conversations if they weren't interested in participating in them in the first place) and so no special consideration need be made for them from the *where would I go to find this information* angle.

Among the other relevant considerations, of course, are traffic (poorly frequented forums don't achieve critical mass and thus *no* conversation takes place; overly frequented forums make difficult the goal of finding information as topics rapidly fall off the front page, for instance), ease in determining boundaries between topics (having forums delineated with "older games go in this forum, newer games go in this other forum" wouldn't work as it doesn't clearly define "older" and "newer") and logically independent subsets likely lacking likely correlation of readership populations (I think "Sports" and "Movies" make for a nice seperable subsets as I think folks are every bit as likely to read about sports as they are to pay attention to movies or not pay attention to one and enjoy reading the other -- there isn't a correlation between topics that would indicate that Sports & Movies should necessarily go together; ideally, you want Venn Diagrams of readers to be as much overlapping as they are independent with regard to other site forum topics). For readers vs. posters, there are times when these issues are not clearly aligned such that thinking only of the reader guarantees that the active participant ("posters") will also be happy. But, again, in those instances I think primacy of consideration goes to the information seeker, not the post generator.

So there's a bit of the general thoughts I go through when considering discussion topic categorization. There's a whole boatload of other considerations (would breaking off a new topic fracture a community, for instance; or if a change is negative for one portion of the site's community, is there an even larger portion for whom it benefits; etc.) at work, of course. But that's some of the big stuff.

~Neal

Meghan · Post by **Meghan** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:18 pm

Interesting, Neal. FWIW, I would say that I like the breakdown of General/GBT/Unreleased because in my mind it works out like this:

General = theoretical discussions about game playing
GBT= practical & informational discussions specific game specifics
Unreleased = speculative discussion about proposed games

So I find myself in GBT a lot because I'm often looking for practical game information. I go to General if I have the time for a random theoretical bs session (and I wish I had more time for that, at the moment.) I don't drop by Unreleased much because I don't have much interest in speculating based on press material.

If I were going to combine anything, it would be PC-GBT, MP & Console, since they all seem to have the same practical approach to current games. I can see why the specifics of each does make having separate PC, MP & CN a good idea. But combining those three would "feel" right to me while combining GBT & General wouldn't, since they seem to have different topics or approaches.

Just thinking aloud ....

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:34 pm

As someone who always digresses into offtopic conversation, I like the breakdown, because it does ask me to provide some sort of focus to my discussion, and it also allows me as the reader to assume the same thing of other posters.

If I want to know about game X, in a GBT thread my assumption will be that threads about it will stay about it. GG not only is that not the case, the conversations often become more interesting as people wiegh in with less guided approach.

I like coming soon threads as separate as it makes it easier for me to find out about up and coming games. I am often more interested about what is about to be here over what has already come (Hence my original attraction to GG).

Also the break down gives me a psychology of seeing more of what is on the first page. I rarely ever browse back beyond page 2. With every thing jumbled together a coming soon thread for a game could be on the front page for only a day and get missed in flurry of HL2 threads or whatever the new game du jour is.

So, I like what we got, but I'm cheap and easy....OK I'm free and desperate, so I could very well adapt easily to whatever new way my droogs come up with.

Dirt · Post by **Dirt** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 6:58 pm

Meh. The trend here has been that things are what they are and will be what they are regardless of what is supposed or posited.

Eel Snave · Post by **Eel Snave** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 7:18 pm

Dirt wrote:Meh. The trend here has been that things are what they are and will be what they are regardless of what is supposed or posited.

I disagree. Look, does what we're doing right now work? If it works, why change it? Does everyone have this complaint? What has been the response in this thread? Do you have an overwhelming call for a combined forum?

It seems to me that it's more trouble than it's worth, for most users, and makes things less organized. Plus, General PC topics can stick around longer and have new perspectives instead of getting kicked off of page 1 right away. That's just my take.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 7:32 pm

Dirt wrote:Meh. The trend here has been that things are what they are and will be what they are regardless of what is supposed or posited.

It seems to me that practically every person in this thread has said that they like the current system. When some people like method A, and some people like method B, and there is no clearly superior method, the one already in place is likely the best. Either way is going to make someone unhappy.

Some things are changed - we are arguing the final semantics of the new CoC right now, and new trading guidelines should be appearing soon as well. They are packed full of changes decided upon because they were supposed or posited by the readers. Every thread here is read, and every one is considered.