Author Topic: where should I post?!?!  (Read 3449 times)

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Offline Mor (OP)

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where should I post?!?!
« on: January 14, 2016, 08:22:13 AM »
lots of new posters do it.  We try to keep the thread churn down in Mechanics, since that's where Steve talks about rules changes.  There's a "where should I post" thread in FAQ that you might want to read.

I can attest that in the beginning the forum can be a very confusing place. Here are couple of ideas that help with that.

1.  The 'where should I post' thread is nice but many times you stumble over it waaay after the fact. Maybe, Tweak the forum descriptions, which are the first seen and most visible part, to reflect their purpose better.
2. Maybe consolidate unused threads like "Aurora Rules", into mechanics. Which will also help searching. (better than have the "New players: this subforum is dead" popup...
3. The FAQ linked in the news, is little bit outdated and falls short of the advertised friend you seek... IMO a new FAQ or an update fist post can be a boon. Including link to 'where to post'.

Anyway, those are just couple of thought for your consideration, and with which I didn't want to bogdown the original thread or your faq sticky with offtopic discussion.
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: where should I post?!?!
« Reply #1 on: January 15, 2016, 08:38:30 PM »
I can attest that in the beginning the forum can be a very confusing place. Here are couple of ideas that help with that.

1.  The 'where should I post' thread is nice but many times you stumble over it waaay after the fact. Maybe, Tweak the forum descriptions, which are the first seen and most visible part, to reflect their purpose better.

Feel free to make some concrete suggestions for such tweaks - I'm sure Erik will strongly consider making the changes if he thinks they'll help.

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2. Maybe consolidate unused threads like "Aurora Rules", into mechanics. Which will also help searching. (better than have the "New players: this subforum is dead" popup...

I'd completely forgotten about Aurora Rules until I saw your post in it today, at which point I thought "Did Erik split Steve's rules posts out of Mechanics?"  From my point of view, the biggest problem we have is that Steve's rules threads get pushed onto back pages (where they're impractical to find) by new user threads (in Mechanics).  Merging Aurora Rules into Mechanics would make this worse, not better.  I would rather pull Steve's threads out into a location in which new threads can't be created.  I'm not keen on the idea of sticky-ing them, cause then the REALLY important Steve posts (i.e. change logs) would get diluted by them.

Note that this is MUCH less of a problem since Steve went to the Change Log + Discussion pattern in Mechanics.  I think he posts separate trial balloons every now and then, but I think a lot of those are in suggestions.  Now the problem is that the old discussion threads are getting pushed to back pages (since they're not stickied).  A few weeks ago (when 7.0 released) I contemplating asking people if they'd like a sub-forum of mechanics with the old discussion threads.

Thoughts are welcome.

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3. The FAQ linked in the news, is little bit outdated and falls short of the advertised friend you seek... IMO a new FAQ or an update fist post can be a boon. Including link to 'where to post'.
Not sure what you mean by "linked in the news" (probably because I'm not paying attention).  The FAQ didn't work out as well as I hoped - I suspect there are too many threads in it for the non-stickied ones to be useful, especially since a lot of those threads probably belong in The Academy.  I stickied the "Dumb Newbie Mistakes to Avoid" thread in The Academy since that one actually seemed to be doing a better job of being an FAQ.

I agree with what I think you're saying though - I think you're saying is that it would be really nice if new users got a "welcome to the forum - here's what you need to know" message when they first joined.  Then the only issue would be getting them to read that :)

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Anyway, those are just couple of thought for your consideration, and with which I didn't want to bogdown the original thread or your faq sticky with offtopic discussion.

Thanks for being conscientious about placement :)  I think the fundamental issue here is that web boards are optimized for conversations and aren't that good as a knowledge base while wiki's are optimized for being a "live" knowledge base, and it takes a LOT of work to keep the information in both systems consistent.  And since everyone does this in their free time, ....

John
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: where should I post?!?!
« Reply #2 on: January 15, 2016, 08:53:45 PM »
By the way, this issue (where to post) is kind of like the sunspot cycle.  Every few years someone publicizes Aurora to a new population (e.g. Dwarf Fortress players) and we get a big influx of new users who aren't acculturated.  When things are quite, the new users (I think) tend to see that most of the activity is in "The Academy", so they post there and everything's good.  The problem comes when a new users mis-posts (e.g. starting a new thread in Suggestions, rather than using the official thread), and then other new users see that post and follow suit, and pretty soon there aren't any signals that The Academy is where they should be posting.  So this time I (and Erik too, it looks like) have been pretty diligent about quickly moving things out of mechanics, FAQs and the like, and posting "please use the official thread" replies in Suggestions.  I think this has gone a long way towards keeping the situation under control - we're seeing a lot less of this sort of thing this time around than during the DF surge.

So it might not require much action - the problem will go back down in a while.  I'm more concerned with how to let people know about the MFSSTDFXYZWABSEVDR.DLL (or whatever the silly thing's name is) issue and how to fix it; we're getting a LOT of people stumbling into that one.  It might be worth putting a Readme.txt file in the install package with trouble-shooting stuff (or the address of a wiki page).

John