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Linguica

RFC 666: Paring down the forums

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The admins/mods have been discussing making a change to the forum structure and I figure I will ask for any feedback before I go ahead and do it.

As it is there are too many forums for too little traffic. You may notice I just merged all the Doom 3 forums into one. You do not care because you never post in the Doom 3 forums.

Anyways, here is the basic plan we're looking at:

Doom General, Doom Multiplayer, Source Ports, Questions -> Doom General
Doom Editing, WADs & Mods -> WADs & Mods
Demos -> Demos

This will help reduce the clutter on the forums index and make the remaining forums more consistently active. We also might shuffle the orders and move EE near the top or something, I don't know.

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What about lumping Doom 3 onto the "Misc." section?

I'd rename Wads & Mods to Wads & Editing (making it easier for people who have visited in the past to get a hint they've been merged together).

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Sounds fine to me, except for one thing. The Source Ports forum gets a lot of traffic on its own, and in my opinion, should be kept as a seperate forum and not merged with Doom General.

Also will this bit of tidying up get rid of crap like the Skulltag forum? Not that its a big deal, as most users can't see it, but still.

EDIT: Oh, and some of the stuff in Hosted Sites could probably use attention. For instance the XWE and Doom Builder forums get next to zero traffic and what traffic it gets usually isn't high quality. Or, maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.

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I'm quite happy with Wads & Mods and Editing being separate.

All for merging General, MP and Questions.

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myk said:

What about lumping Doom 3 onto the "Misc." section?

That's a bit of a stretch. I don't prefer an individual category for an individual forum, but Doom 3 isn't that much of a debacle that it needs to be dropped in with Fan Fics/Pics.

myk said:

I'd rename Wads & Mods to Wads & Editing (making it easier for people who have visited in the past to get a hint they've been merged together).

Agree.

HobbsTiger1 said:

Sounds fine to me, except for one thing. The Source Ports forum gets a lot of traffic on its own, and in my opinion, should be kept as a seperate forum and not merged with Doom General.

Yeah I'm neutral on this, Source Ports definitely has unique topics, but it's also true most of the traffic posts in a few megathreads which wouldn't easily be lost in the General Forum shuffle.

HobbsTiger1 said:

Also will this bit of tidying up get rid of crap like the Skulltag forum? Not that its a big deal, as most users can't see it, but still.

I doubt it. Archives like that don't hurt anything, and people will probably throw a fit when their postcount drops a few hundred with the forum deletion.

HobbsTiger1 said:

EDIT: Oh, and some of the stuff in Hosted Sites could probably use attention. For instance the XWE and Doom Builder forums get next to zero traffic and what traffic it gets usually isn't high quality. Or, maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.

Eh, that's their stuff, we'll close it if they ask for it or publicly abandon it. I don't want to hold the threat of shut-down over anybody cause they go on hiatus for a while.

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Lüt said:

I doubt it. Archives like that don't hurt anything, and people will probably throw a fit when their postcount drops a few hundred with the forum deletion.

Although I'm apt to agree with that, having an archive that isn't easily accessible (which is the case with the ZDoomGL and SkullTag forums) isn't much of a useful archive, is it?

Eh, that's their stuff, we'll close it if they ask for it or publicly abandon it. I don't want to hold the threat of shut-down over anybody cause they go on hiatus for a while.

Like I said, probably talking out of my ass :P

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HobbsTiger1 said:

The Source Ports forum gets a lot of traffic on its own, and in my opinion, should be kept as a seperate forum and not merged with Doom General.

I'm inclined to agree with this, not so much because of the traffic, but because of the differing nature of the threads contained within them. There's a distinct contrast between threads like 'monster nicknames', 'Doom guy's catch phrases' and other such threads found in General, compared with the more technical discussions about source ports and troubleshooting.

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DooMAD said:
There's a distinct contrast between threads like 'monster nicknames', 'Doom guy's catch phrases' and other such threads found in General, compared with the more technical discussions about source ports and troubleshooting.

The "what port do you use" was kind of like "monster nicknames" in a way, the only other consistently active or recent threads are the stickied PrBoom issues thread, the Chocolate Doom thread, and the one about wobbly lines. They would still stand out as active and big threads in a general forum. Editing was eating up a bunch of stuff related to engines anyway, with all those threads that dealt with stuff like "how do I do this in Boom/vanilla/ZDoom?"

I'm assuming if the merges take effect some stickies will remain, and some will be unstickied. To weed out clutter it must be considered which are relevant or important (obviously stuff like the "this is the Questions forum" will be pointless).

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Quasar said:

I'm for keeping Source Ports, but it doesn't look like that will happen.

I'd like to see it remain a seperate forum.

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Yes, I think Source Ports should be kept separate. It is important and distinctive enough, and a moderator with Quasar's knowledge is a big bonus for it too.

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I think the source ports section should be kept seperate. I like the idea of having the Editing forums and Wads and Mods forums combined.

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The Classic Doom section gets a lot of traffic. If any sections were merged, I'd suggest merging Questions with Doom General, because a lot of threads have been moved from Doom General to Questions, and they both cover the same sort of criteria. But I think Multiplayer and Source Ports should have their own sections because the threads tend to be more focused on their relative criteria.

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Linguica said:

You do not care because you never post in the Doom 3 forums.

You got that right!

Seriously, nthing the request for Source Ports to remain on its own.

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As long as something critical doesn't get deleted for over- or underposting, it's okay for me. I wouldn't delete EE for being too crowded as well as I wouldn't delete all Doom3 forums for being too Doom3.

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printz said:
As long as something critical doesn't get deleted for over- or underposting, it's okay for me.

The posts aren't going anywhere; they are merely "moved", since it's just a rearrangement of topic forums for the sake of simplification since less use (compared to the DOOM 3 & DOOM movie period) benefits less from specialized sections.

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Alright I

* Merged Questions and Multiplayer into Doom General
* Moved Demos and Fanfics into Hosted Sites which I renamed "Special Interest"
* Made the Blogs forum visible in its proper place
* Changed the default view age to 1000 days because anyone logged in couldn't see threads older than 30 days, how the hell did we let that go for years and years?

I am leaving Doom Editing, WADs & Mods, and Source Ports as they are for now... but I reserve the right to make a call on them later.

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Linguica said:

* Changed the default view age to 1000 days because anyone logged in couldn't see threads older than 30 days, how the hell did we let that go for years and years?

Heh, great!

"This is easily the biggest flame war I have seen on this new forum software. I ought to ban every single person who has participated in it, but if I did that, I would ban half of the active users of this forums, so I can't."

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Linguica said:

You may notice I just merged all the Doom 3 forums into one. You do not care because you never post in the Doom 3 forums.


I'd say hooray this means less work for me as a mod, but I'd get a divide by zero error. That and Doom3 has no moderators anymore... is that deliberate?

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Linguica said:

You may notice I just merged all the Doom 3 forums into one. You do not care because you never post in the Doom 3 forums.


Pretentious?

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No, you don't understand. NO-ONE posts in the Doom 3 forums. There's been like one thread there in the last 2 months.

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Linguica said:

I am leaving Doom Editing, WADs & Mods, and Source Ports as they are for now... but I reserve the right to make a call on them later.




I strongly suggest that you should keep the separation as it is. If you 'clean up' the forum to a point where everything goes into the same forum its value would be greatly devalued.

The current categories are distinct enough but imagine if you merge them, how is anyone with editing questions supposed to get adequate help when it gets mixed with all the other discussions in General which often have no real value except for the fun involved in the discuss itself.

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I still think that all we really need is a "Doom Playing" and a "Doom Editing" forum (and then EE and all the special interest stuff of course), much like the old newsgroups used to have with R.G.C.D.P. and R.G.C.D.E., but it's sufficiently cleaned up now that I don't think it's something I need to do.

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