Castle Paradox

FyreWulff · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 12:08 am Post subject:

Either way, I would like to know if the people that are in charge are going to do this or not. This needs to be done ASAP if it wants to be recovered.

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

Agreed with Fyrewulff. I would like to see this done over most features being promised.
_________________

TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

jabbercat · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 3:22 am Post subject:

Lumping music, visual media and writing together as one big 'art' forum is essentially going to give you a cluttered and organized mess. Creating sub forums is essentially the way to go, ie:

Creative arts:
+Visual arts
+Writing
+Music

Game Creation:
+Game engine X
+Game engine Y
+Technical stuff -> sub-forums if necessary

Plenty of other forums do this, ie, gaming force, piano street.
_________________
Moogle no longer owes prizes.

FyreWulff · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 3:27 am Post subject:

Forums with population can do it. This one does not have the population to support more than the forums that I have condensed them into.

As I stated before, those forums, seperated, are moving at a glacial pace.

Music is going to be the slowest because from my observation, music is a niche of a niche. It's hard to get into and hard to be confident enough to post your work.

Stories take longer, because of editing and so on.

Art is relatively easy to post, because you can more easily post a sketch or draft and give people an idea of the final work.

The combined forum topics would be like..

"My sketches.."
"New battle theme - critique needed"
"Chapter 3 of My Small Thin Portugese Shindig"

you can tell which one is about art, which one is about music, and which one is a story. People here are capable of writing good subjects.

once again, example:

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14

The point of all this is to focus the forum activity into as few forums as possible. By focusing the activity, newcomers see a lively community. By focusing it, I only have to go to one forum to see new posts instead of clicking 3 different forums and keeping track of them seperately. If newcomers see a more lively forum, they are more likely to post, which feeds forum activity, which encourages more posting and more people likely to sign up and post, so on and so on..

also, phpBB tends to stick subforums in the most ugly way possible on the interface.

Once the userbase is back up, then you can have forums for seperate topics. But it isn't sustainable anymore.

Pepsi Ranger · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 11:19 am Post subject:

While I'm not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing to this, I think Slime Salad has proven lately that having fewer forums doesn't increase activity. There have been maybe ten posts in the last week, whereas Castle Paradox has received closer to 80 or so. While neither is impressive, or shows much activity, the difference reveals that it really doesn't matter how the forums are broken. People will respond when they have something to say. If they have nothing to say, they won't say anything. It's just the way of human nature.

Streamlining will make things easier on the eyes, especially at the Main Page level, but I agree with Jabbercat in that grouping the creative forums together risks clutter, and clutter defeats the purpose of breaking things up, as clutter is not easy on the eyes. Not to mention, if you lean heavily on art and not enough on the other two, the other two get swallowed in the fray, and a new user (who might not have the patience to scour twenty topics down to find out that we post short stories, too) will think the creative forum is for artwork only. If he's a great writer, but an awful artist, he might be tempted to go elsewhere.

I'm guessing, of course. Who knows what a new user will ultimately do? But I think the subgroups remind people that they still have the option to post something in that category and not feel like they're entirely wasting their time when their story shoots down five spots to make room for some other users' brand-spanking-new stickman art. At least with a forum devoted to writing (or music) they just have to wait for the horrible lack of response to find out they're wasting their time.

In the end, this place will come alive again when the games (and the discussions) get better. Grouping the forums together won't change anything.

I understand your point, though. It'll at least look like activity's increasing, and that I can agree with. But appearances and reality don't often play well together. I'm sure IM would rather spend his time working on the features that he wanted to release at the start of the year than worry about shrinking things down right now. Don't think this qualifies as an emergency.

And I agree with doing away with the "Review Wars" Forum. I always thought it was better to allow users to comment directly underneath the game review itself. Requests for reviews could just be posted in a general forum. As it stands now, the user has to click back and forth between two separate ends of the site just to know what the post is talking about. And that's not very efficient.
_________________
Progress Report:

The Adventures of Powerstick Man: Extended Edition

Currently Updating: General sweep of the game world and dialogue boxes. Adding extended maps.

Tightfloss Maiden

Currently Updating: Chapter 2

Mariel · Joined: 15 Oct 2008 Posts: 78 Location: In your dreams

What if the creative forum had a subforum just for art, and then all other creative topics could go in the main forum?

Also, it would be nice to have a different skin on the forums from the regular phpbb. It doesn't present a very interesting view to a newcomer. Is there a reason why the journals and gamelist have a different skin from the regular forums?

FyreWulff · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 12:10 pm Post subject:

If all the creative forums are merged, all their active topics will still be on the front page, with dead topics to spare. Nobody is going to 'lose' their topic on the front page.

Moogle1 · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 12:33 pm Post subject:

FyreWulff · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 3:50 pm Post subject:

I felt if I had said "This should have been done long ago", I would have been calling out Cube and IM on it, but honestly they're programmers, not forum admins. I'm just saying that this needs to be decided on in a short amount of time before it just up and dies altogether.

Moogle1 · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2009 4:06 pm Post subject:

Oh, you mean the idea, not the website. Yeah, though it tends to resurge every few months.
_________________

Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

I just wanted to say that I agree with joining the 'art' forums into one, and I agree with Fyre that the Plotscripting forum should remain separate. I don't have a well thought-out reason - I just think that it is the one forum where very technical discussions end up taking place, and having that separate from other discussions seems worthwhile to me. Some time ago I would have lobbied for the Game Design Discussion forum to stay separate as well, but now I'm not so sure. There have been so few real discussion topics there of late. But I remember having good threads on actual game design going on there in the past, and there were times it was the only forum I would bother checking. Not so any longer though.
_________________
My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

FyreWulff · Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2009 3:46 am Post subject: