# Forum Arrangement



## Morrus (May 8, 2015)

@_*Lawngnome4hire*_ posted this in my AMA.  It being an AMA, and it being a statement of his opinion on something rather than a question, I've not responded there, but it's a subject that I'm happy to talk about.



Lawngnome4hire said:


> I understand there is only so much you can  do, the content posted is by and large determined by the community. But  when you say "There's forums for non-D&D stuff here." All there is  General RPG Discussion, and Boardgames, Card Games, Wargames and  Miniatures. This doesn't exactly encourage people to talk about other  systems, and finding other peoples posts about other systems is  difficult since it all gets lumped together. Adding more forums that are  clearly defined for other systems would help encourage more discussion.  Obviously you can't add a forum for every game, maybe just the other  big names besides D&D and PFRPG, or you could add forums for games  divided by genre. There's a lot of different ways it could be done, but I  think that if you want to attract players of other game systems, you  need to give them a place to go. One generic all encompassing forum  isn't very user friendly.




It works fine for RPG.net! 

As a note, there are caetgory icons for each game; you can click on each to get a game-specific forum. 

Here's my thoughts:

1) If I could create a bunch of subforums that would magically be suddenly filled with interesting topics about different games, I'd do it in a second. 

2) I do not believe that "if you build it they will come". In my experience, the correct saying is "if you build it, it will stand empty unless you have some other trick up your sleeve to fill it". Sadly, in my experience (and I have tried opening hundreds of subforums over the last 16 years), that doesn't work.

3) Empty forums are worse than no forums.  They look bad.

So, given those premises, I don't believe that simply adding new forums would have any effect whatsoever.  It hasn't done in the past, and I've no reason to think it will in the future.  It's not in the publishers' interests to support such a thing - publishers all want forums themselves, not on third party sites.

If folks want more discussion on non-D&D stuff, the focus should be on finding other ways to encourage it. But I strongly believe that simply opening new forums is not the way to do that.  Hell, even the Pathfinder forum is pretty darn slow!


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## Morrus (May 8, 2015)

Incidentally, as an experiment, I've opened a Star Wars Roleplaying forum.


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## Lawngnome4hire (May 9, 2015)

Morrus said:


> @_*Lawngnome4hire*_ posted this in my AMA.  It being an AMA, and it being a statement of his opinion on something rather than a question, I've not responded there, but it's a subject that I'm happy to talk about.




Yeah sorry wasn't trying to side track anything, was just responding to your answer to my question.



> It works fine for RPG.net!
> 
> As a note, there are caetgory icons for each game; you can click on each to get a game-specific forum.
> 
> ...




I completely understand and agree with your points. Empty forums actually deter people from posting rather than encouraging new discussions. So any new forums created need to have a way to quickly add enough content to avoid appearing empty and unused. 

I don't know if you've tried this or not, but you have the category icons you mentioned, it shouldn't be too difficult to use those to sort and move existing posts to pre-populate any new forums. Or at least the more recent posts if you're worried about the database exploding.

Currently it can be very difficult to find discussions about something specific for a game other than D&D on these forums, and if you're creating a new post to ask a question they frequently get lost in the soup of all the posts about other games. Rpg.net has the same issue, but I don't frequent it because I think you run a much nicer site.

The reason I bring this up is because I'd really like there to be a one stop shop for tabletop roleplaying discussions. I play a lot of different systems and it's a time consuming pain to try and keep up with several different forum sites. Plus there are plenty of games where the publishers either don't have forums, or they're so poorly organized and maintained that they might as well not have any. It's something I care about so I wanted to bring it up. But I don't have a magic fix that will solve these issues.


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## Morrus (May 9, 2015)

Well, let's see how the Wars/Trek forum does. If people use it, I might look at opening forum for at least those games in ICv2's top 5 list.  Right now, that would simply be adding forums for Fate and Numenera/Cypher.


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## delericho (May 9, 2015)

Has "All Topics" been removed?


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## Morrus (May 9, 2015)

I never know how to answer questions like that.


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## delericho (May 9, 2015)

Morrus said:


> I never know how to answer questions like that.




Heh.

What I meant is that until yesterday there was a link near the top which gave a list of all forum topics sorted by latest post. Which was extremely useful - almost always I would just check that instead of bothering with any of the sub-forums (sorry - I know work went into those!). I'd only ever check a specific forum if there was a specific thread I wanted to see.

But now it's gone. I was wondering if this was a deliberate choice, an unfortunate cost of the new Wars/Trek forum, or something that can be brought back? Thanks!


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## Umbran (May 9, 2015)

delericho said:


> Has "All Topics" been removed?




I think you'll see there's still a 'General RPG Discussion' forum, for any RPG discussion that doesn't fit into any more specific place.


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## Morrus (May 9, 2015)

That's not what he means.  He means the virtual forum which showed threads from all forums.

The answer is - not sure.  I'm cautious about things pushing stuff further and further down the page, and "What's New?" provides similar - though not identical - functionality.


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## Riley (May 11, 2015)

Morrus said:


> That's not what he means.  He means the virtual forum which showed threads from all forums.
> 
> The answer is - not sure.  I'm cautious about things pushing stuff further and further down the page, and "What's New?" provides similar - though not identical - functionality.




What's new really isn't equivalent. Please, if you can, bring back the "all discussion" option.

It is the only way I read ENworld. There, I can check out conversations on any topic that interests me. I do not have time to peruse every single sub-forum separately to find out what's worth reading.


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## Umbran (May 11, 2015)

But... looking at "all discussion" *is* reading all the forums, mashed together....


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## Morrus (May 11, 2015)

Yeah, the content is the same (except that it includes news articles also). The layout is different, but otherwise they're functionally the same page.  The all-threads page strips out some of the extra content and doesn't show a preview of the thread content.


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## delericho (May 11, 2015)

Interestingly, I've found my bookmark to "All Discussion" still works.


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## Dannyalcatraz (May 11, 2015)

As does mine.

FWIW, I personally found that forum to be slightly more useful than "What's New?"   Seeing things at the thread level as opposed to the post level made it easier- for me, at least- to see the spammers.  My personal pattern recognition synapses see more contrast between regular postings and most of those of the spammers.  Especially right now when the spammers seem to be making new threads more than posting in other people's threads.

(The obvious exception is those spam posts within threads.)


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## Riley (May 11, 2015)

delericho said:


> Interestingly, I've found my bookmark to "All Discussion" still works.




Can you share the text of your bookmark? Mine gives a database error.


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## delericho (May 11, 2015)

Riley said:


> Can you share the text of your bookmark? Mine gives a database error.




http://www.enworld.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?500-All-Discussion

Hope that helps!


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## Riley (May 11, 2015)

delericho said:


> http://www.enworld.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?500-All-Discussion
> 
> Hope that helps!




That's the same text I was using and getting errors with on iOS.  Today it is working fine for me again - on both iOS/Safari and Win7/Chrome.

Yay!


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## Morrus (May 11, 2015)

So, as an aside, anyone got any thoughts on the OP?


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## Dannyalcatraz (May 11, 2015)

Morrus said:


> So, as an aside, anyone got any thoughts on the OP?




I think you're basically right: empty, dead forums do you no favors.  I'm a member of 4 community forums here, and the only one with a post in the past year is the one that started this year.

Personally, I think the RPG community is diverse enough that you're on the right track of dividing up the board in to subfora for different interests.  I mostly understand why you have them divided the way you do, but I probably would have done it slightly differently.  I probably would have separated them along genre lines- FRPGs, Sci-Fi, Supers, Horror, etc., with the thought in mind that concepts, lessons, resources and the like from games within a genre can be fairly easily ported into others.

Of course, then people would point out genre-mashing games like RIFTS or Shadowrun.


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## delericho (May 13, 2015)

delericho said:


> Interestingly, I've found my bookmark to "All Discussion" still works.




Worth noting, though, that the news Star Trek/Wars forum doesn't appear in "All Discussion".


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## delericho (May 13, 2015)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> I think you're basically right: empty, dead forums do you no favors.  I'm a member of 4 community forums here, and the only one with a post in the past year is the one that started this year.




Yep, this.


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## Morrus (May 14, 2015)

I'm considering one more forum, with the caveat that the threads can be moved back easily.  I was thinking of using the ICv2 chart to determine which games are popular enough to warrant their own forum.  D&D, Pathfinder, and Star Wars are the top three obvious choices.  Then we have a few choices - Cypher System right now, or Shadowrun or Fate from other recent charts.


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## Dannyalcatraz (May 14, 2015)

If you base forum breakdowns on what is hot, you'll just wind up changing them if/when those systems are not.


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## Morrus (May 14, 2015)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> If you base forum breakdowns on what is hot, you'll just wind up changing them if/when those systems are not.




Maybe.


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## delericho (May 15, 2015)

Morrus said:


> I'm considering one more forum, with the caveat that the threads can be moved back easily.  I was thinking of using the ICv2 chart to determine which games are popular enough to warrant their own forum.




Doesn't that have the problem that what's hot in terms of game-store sales may well not be what's hot amongst ENWorld members? In particular, Numenera was largely sold via Kickstarter and so probably has an artificially low position on the charts.

Based on a cursory glance at the thread tags that crop up (and ignoring all the "Aberrant" threads that the spambots seem to like), there really don't seem to be any games that see much traffic. So maybe there's no pressing need for another forum at this time?


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## Morrus (May 15, 2015)

delericho said:


> Doesn't that have the problem that what's hot in terms of game-store sales may well not be what's hot amongst ENworld members?




It does, yes.



> Based on a cursory glance at the thread tags that crop up (and ignoring all the "Aberrant" threads that the spambots seem to like), there really don't seem to be any games that see much traffic. So maybe there's no pressing need for another forum at this time?




The context of the thread isn't pressing needs. It's experimentation to test the causation hypothesis in the OP.


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## Umbran (May 16, 2015)

Morrus said:


> The context of the thread isn't pressing needs. It's experimentation to test the causation hypothesis in the OP.




Are you tracking the number of threads and number of posts per day in the new forums over time?  I think the search function will allow us to build up that information after the fact, come to think of it.  So we can have some data, rather than just impressions.  On which day did you create the Star Wars forum?


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## Morrus (May 19, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Are you tracking the number of threads and number of posts per day in the new forums over time?  I think the search function will allow us to build up that information after the fact, come to think of it.  So we can have some data, rather than just impressions.  On which day did you create the Star Wars forum?




It's slow enough that we don't need the search function.

It opened on 9th May (10 days ago).  There have been exactly 20 threads since then, 7 of which I started.  I think that's OK - less than 1 a day would be an issue, I think.


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## Umbran (May 19, 2015)

Morrus said:


> It's slow enough that we don't need the search function.




Okay, so what was the impact on General?  How many threads (or posts) per week were we getting before this, and how many after?  Because the activity change is not necessarily just "consider anything in the new forum as something that would have been in General".


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## Morrus (May 19, 2015)

Umbran said:


> Okay, so what was the impact on General?  How many threads (or posts) per week were we getting before this, and how many after?  Because the activity change is not necessarily just "consider anything in the new forum as something that would have been in General".




No significant change at all.


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## Umbran (May 19, 2015)

Cool.  That's what I expected, but verification with data is a goodness.


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