# Is it time to re-integrate the specific games sub-forums?



## Whizbang Dustyboots (Oct 26, 2011)

(Adapted from a post on one of the three (at the time of this writing) incarnations of this thread on various sub-forums on ENWorld.)

ENWorld's game-specific subforums mostly exist because there's a pool of partisans who can't behave themselves when confronted with the reality that someone else plays a different game than they do, and the entire community has to maneuver around them and their behavior.

If we can have Traveller and Runequest happily sharing space on the main board, there's no reason that Pathfinder, 4E and 3E can't be there as well, except for a subset of the players of each of those games.

If the purpose of running the site is serving its visitors -- which I think is _absolutely_ what drives the folks who put in so much time and effort building and maintaining the site -- fragmenting a conversation into multiple spaces hurts that goal. Users have to realize they're in multiple versions of the same conversation and have to realize the reason they don't see a response to a question is because they're in the wrong incarnation of the thread. Likewise, publishers have to do three times or more as many forum posts just to make sure they're also practicing good customer service, which is an extra burden in the RPG industry, where many of these publishers are doing it as a part-time job along with their real "pay the mortgage" job.

And this extends to ordinary conversations as well. Go to the 4E, Pathfinder and 3E boards, and you find generic RPG discussions mixed in there about structuring games, building game worlds, dealing with problem players and so on. But because those posters are in the ghetto that their unruly fellow gamers have forced them into, they're getting less feedback on their questions and ideas than they ought to.

This isn't me bashing those who set up the current arrangement, but an acknowledgment (or merely an opinion, if you disagree), that it's now a suboptimal set-up. The fact that the site has been reorganized multiple times over the years is an acknowledgment that human beings built it and that circumstances change.

I understand why the site is set up the way it is, I think. I just think that everyone would be better served if the sub-forums were merged back into the main site -- it would mean less duplication of content and effort for everyone and better, more robust conversations for users -- and if problem users were ejected rather than being catered to.

If a child heaped screaming abuse on his siblings, his parents wouldn't move all the children to their own separate wings of the house -- they'd deal with the discipline problem directly.

This site could be dramatically improved, for all users (many of those problem users are still present on the sub-forums and make themselves known in various ways), if the same thing happened here. I've moderated sites before, and I know what a massive pain in the butt it is -- the site I worked at is probably only about 75 percent of ENWorld's size, but the pain is probably comparable -- and I know I'm asking for other people to self-inflict some migraines, and I'm guessing that's why the admins chose the set-up they have.

But it makes me sad when my RSS feed has multiple versions of a topic pop up, and I know that users (and in this case, publishers) are either going to have to jump through a lot of hoops to keep up or that some people are going to wonder why tumbleweeds are blowing through threads they reasonably believe should be quite active.

In any case, much love for all the admins and mods. No offense is intended to ENWorld staff, past or present.


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## Umbran (Oct 26, 2011)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> If a child heaped screaming abuse on his siblings, his parents wouldn't move all the children to their own separate wings of the house -- they'd deal with the discipline problem directly.




Yes, but we of the moderation staff are not your parents.  We don't want to be your parents.  We don't have time to be parents to thousands of users.  Nor do we have the same kinds of power and authority as parents.

And, while I think to some folks it sounds good, "Just let the mods lay about them with banhammers with wild abandon if it keeps the peace," is apt to have unforeseen repercussions on the tenor of these boards that would be worse than the current situation.  The number of false positives would likely be alarming, and would cheese off many otherwise good posters.

And, to be honest, several threads lately have reaffirmed to me that this community is not really ready to be reintegrated.  Too many people are holding old grudges, too ready to re-engage in the old fights if given too much of an excuse.

You're right, it is a sub-optimal arrangement.  We didn't want to do it in the first place, but I've not seen evidence that anything else would work better.  I'll play it as Morrus wants, but if he asks my opinion, I'd officially recommend against it.


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## jonesy (Oct 26, 2011)

I thought the reason they were separated was because otherwise General was swamped by threads, and the smaller topics were lost in the tidal wave. A kind of swampy tidal wave where only the 'people arguing about stuff'-threads were visible due to their unfortunate amount of popularity.


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## Dice4Hire (Oct 26, 2011)

Overall I am quite happy with how the boards are set up now. I an easily find threads I want to see and it is easy to avoid the forums with threads I am not interested in.


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## IronWolf (Oct 26, 2011)

Whizbang Dustyboots said:


> If the purpose of running the site is serving its visitors -- which I think is _absolutely_ what drives the folks who put in so much time and effort building and maintaining the site -- fragmenting a conversation into multiple spaces hurts that goal. Users have to realize they're in multiple versions of the same conversation and have to realize the reason they don't see a response to a question is because they're in the wrong incarnation of the thread. Likewise, publishers have to do three times or more as many forum posts just to make sure they're also practicing good customer service, which is an extra burden in the RPG industry, where many of these publishers are doing it as a part-time job along with their real "pay the mortgage" job.




I'm not certain the boards are ready for re-integration, but the fragmented conversations do not seem good for the board. I believe you refer to the Rappan Athuk threads which had a couple different versions pop up.

Monte's most recent Legends and Lore article has at least three incantations of it floating around, at least two in the same forum.

Conversation would seem to be better if it all happened in one thread. I know with the Legends and Lore article it would be nice to have one thread instead of visiting a couple different threads and sometimes feeling the need to repeat something from one thread in another.

Instead of reintegration, maybe a period of more strict enforcement of appropriate places for threads or the merging of threads into one. This would serve to keep the conversation centered in one thread instead of occurring in multiple threads.


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## Umbran (Oct 26, 2011)

jonesy said:


> I thought the reason they were separated was because otherwise General was swamped by threads




No, we wouldn't integrate *everything* into General.  It would be a merging of, say, the 4e, Pathfinder, and Legacy version forums into one big D&D forum.

Even if we were ready for it, in terms of arguments, I don't know that it'd be wise to do so in terms of volume of discussion, and usability for folks looking for discussion of only one of those systems.

The real solution is to perhaps educate folks better on when a discussion is rules-specific, and when it is not.  There are some topics that, really, apply equally well to someone's Pathfinder game, someone else's 4e game, and my Deadlands game - those sorts of topics should be in General.


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## Piratecat (Oct 26, 2011)

This is going to be even trickier when 5e hits. We _really_ want to avoid the arguments that cropped up last time, and I think that's going to be done by adding a 5e forum.


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## TarionzCousin (Oct 26, 2011)

Umbran said:


> "Just let the mods lay about them with banhammers with wild abandon if it keeps the peace."



Can I quote you on that?


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## Whizbang Dustyboots (Oct 26, 2011)

Umbran said:


> And, to be honest, several threads lately have reaffirmed to me that this community is not really ready to be reintegrated.  Too many people are holding old grudges, too ready to re-engage in the old fights if given too much of an excuse.



This makes me sad, especially since there's certainly reason to believe that the 4E threads will be eligible for the Legacy forum in the next few years.

It kills me when people ask flavor questions about D&D and only get to see their slice of D&D's answer, when knowing what 4E or 2E or whatever added to the mix will almost always be germane.

I vote that to just let the mods lay about them with ... er, never mind.


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## OnlineDM (Oct 27, 2011)

I'm a relative newbie, having been into RPGs and on EN World for less than two years, but I think the current system works well. I primarily play 4e, and I imagine that discussions about rules and builds for 4e characters and campaigns would be annoying to people who don't play the game. When I tried Pathfinder, I frequented the Pathfinder forum for a while and found it useful, but since I'm not playing that game at the moment it's easier for me to have the Pathfinder threads in a different forum.

I agree that there are occasional topics that are of interest to players of multiple games that will get threads started in multiple forums, and that's sub-optimal. But that's the exception rather than the rule, and I believe there are tools the mods use to merge those threads from time to time, right?

I'd personally advocate keeping separate forums for those games that generate a lot of post traffic, as we currently have set up.


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## Whizbang Dustyboots (Oct 31, 2011)

OnlineDM said:


> I'm a relative newbie, having been into RPGs and on EN World for less than two years, but I think the current system works well. I primarily play 4e, and I imagine that discussions about rules and builds for 4e characters and campaigns would be annoying to people who don't play the game.



Look at the main RPG forum. People tag the games they're interested in -- the first page has threads tagged with Pathfinder and AD&D, and no one who doesn't play those games (or is interested in those games, probably more accurately) are fooled into thinking they're something other than what they are.

The existing 4E tags could be used to the same effect.


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## Umbran (Oct 31, 2011)

They could be used that way, but I don't think it would function as well for everyone as you might think.

In the General forum, there's a whole host of topics and games being discussed, each in a small number of threads.  A merging of the specific game forums would be the opposite - a small number of games, each being discussed in a large number of threads.  In terms of usability, the two cases are rather different.

Even if the warring weren't an issue, I'm not sure I would recommend a merge.

One partial solution for the multiple thread issue - report the threads in question, and recommend they be moved to general and merged.  That's something any of the moderators could do, if we agree that the threads are not game-specific.  I've moved threads before for just that reason.


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## Ahnehnois (Nov 1, 2011)

Seems to me if you simply took the 4e, 3e, and general forums and put them together it would be a big mess and very difficult to sift through. You have to have some organization.

I would have set up a general "fluff" forum and crunch forums for various specific games, which frankly is basically the current arrangement, if people didn't post general topics in nongeneral game forums, which as mentioned is fixable.

I don't know that the animosity is the only or best reason for separating the forums.


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## Pentius (Nov 1, 2011)

I like current set-up.  I think mixing the Edition War sides would just cause predictable in-fighting, and the mods aren't our moms(even my mom would smack me for edition warring, probably, though).  As it stands, I like that even if things get a bit hot in a general thread, I can go browse 4e forums and not think about it, or browse legacy/PF forums and feel better knowing that when differences aren't being actively discussed, we deal with the same stuff.


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## Plane Sailing (Nov 1, 2011)

Umbran said:


> One partial solution for the multiple thread issue - report the threads in question, and recommend they be moved to general and merged.  That's something any of the moderators could do, if we agree that the threads are not game-specific.  I've moved threads before for just that reason.




I was going to suggest this very thing. We often merge threads which are talking about the same topic, but more often we don't notice that such duplicated conversations are going on.

Reporting isn't only for spam and 'bad people'. Use it to bring to our attention threads which could be merged and we'll certainly look at it and check whether it is appropriate.

Cheers


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## Morrus (Nov 1, 2011)

Plane Sailing said:


> I was going to suggest this very thing. We often merge threads which are talking about the same topic, but more often we don't notice that such duplicated conversations are going on.
> 
> Reporting isn't only for spam and 'bad people'. Use it to bring to our attention threads which could be merged and we'll certainly look at it and check whether it is appropriate.
> 
> Cheers




I think that's an excellent idea.

The thing that prompted this thread was a topic which was being discussed under the news item and in a couple of different forums.  I agree I'd like to see one decent discussion rather than several fragmented discussions.

When merging threads, I'm pretty sure that a redirect is left in place, too, which helps.

I'd like to propose merging forum threads into equivalent news discussion threads, assuming the redirect works.  We can't do it the other way round, of course; can't have news items on the front page being a redirect.  The biggest potential issue I see there is that if the thread was started before the news item was posted, the first post in the thread would replace the new item; which is not ideal.


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## Whizbang Dustyboots (Nov 1, 2011)

Until the more kneejerk of the Edition Warriors stop being buttheads -- and presumably, they were buttheads before there were Edition Wars, so little chance of that -- I guess merging sounds like the right way to go.

Thanks.


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## Umbran (Nov 2, 2011)

Morrus said:


> When merging threads, I'm pretty sure that a redirect is left in place, too, which helps.




When merging or moving threads, we have the option to leave a permanent redirect, one that expires after a specified time, or none at all.


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## Morrus (Nov 2, 2011)

Umbran said:


> When merging or moving threads, we have the option to leave a permanent redirect, one that expires after a specified time, or none at all.




The expiring one is buggy IIRC.

The problem is we can only merge a thread with a corresponding news thread if the news item was posted first.  Otherwise the resultant first post will end up being the news item.  So it's of limited use, unfortunately.

The only way round that problem that I can think of is to close already-created forum threads with a request and link to continue conversation in the news item thread, but that strikes me as kludgy and heavy handed.


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## Umbran (Nov 2, 2011)

So, we may not be able to turn it into a single discussion - the news items themselves are simply a separate beast.  

We can still take non-edition-specific threads in the rest of the forums, merge them, and move them to General when they come up.  You may still have some separate discussion associated with the news item, but would I be correct to  guess that the volume there is much lower than that seen in the related forum threads?


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## Morrus (Nov 2, 2011)

Umbran said:


> So, we may not be able to turn it into a single discussion - the news items themselves are simply a separate beast.
> 
> We can still take non-edition-specific threads in the rest of the forums, merge them, and move them to General when they come up.  You may still have some separate discussion associated with the news item, but would I be correct to  guess that the volume there is much lower than that seen in the related forum threads?




It is; but it would benefit EN World immensely if that wasn't the case (for various complicated reasons, but it's in the site's interest to have well populated news threads).

Which is one of the reasons I agree with Whizbang - we benefit more from good solid threads than we do from several fragmented threads; and we benefit more from that being on the news page than from it being buried in a forum.


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## Morrus (Nov 23, 2011)

We have a perfect example of the problem right now.

The new Pathfinder MMO has:

2 x Pathfinder forum threads
1 x General Discussion thread
1 x News item thread

Making four in total.  I fully agree that some kind of solution needs to be found to this; this is seriously inefficient and counter-productive.


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## Morrus (Dec 15, 2011)

OK, I've found a way to do this.  We can merge the threads just fine (and they leave nifty redirects behind).  

It's a little tricky, because it if it involves a news item we have to change the posting time/date of the news item to ensure that the news item becomes the first post in the newly merged thread - otherwise we'll have random posts appearing as news items on the front page.  This would be bad.

I have tried it with the WoTC layoff threads.  Let me know what you think.


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## Deset Gled (Dec 15, 2011)

Ahnehnois said:


> Seems to me if you simply took the 4e, 3e, and general forums and put them together it would be a big mess and very difficult to sift through. You have to have some organization.




Give it time.  You'd be surprised how some things work out after you let things cool down a bit.

There was a time when ENWorld was pretty much forced to have separate forums for 3e rules, 3e house rules, and 2e and older legacy stuff.  The arguments of real rules vs house rules were livid and full of malice, and many people claimed (just as you do) that it would be too messy to mix 3e and previous editions.  

Then, after 4e came out, traffic died down to the point where it didn't make sense to have all those different forums, and they were merged into one Legacy forum.  And, lo and behold, that forum gets along just fine.  People specify in the thread if they're talking about a specific old edition, or talking house rules vs WotC rules.  

I'm not guaranteeing that 4e and 3e will live happily in the same forum.  Maybe it will eventually make more sense to merge 3e with pathfinder, and do something else with 2e and earlier stuff.  I don't know the best way to handle it.  But I can guarantee you that the situation will be extremely different after 5e is released.


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## Mark CMG (Dec 15, 2011)

Morrus said:


> I have tried it with the WoTC layoff threads.  Let me know what you think.





That seems to have worked well enough.


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## S'mon (Dec 17, 2011)

Well, I don't think 3e and pre-3e D&D should be in the same sub-forum.  It effectively means there is nowhere on enw to discuss pre-3e D&D, or the retro-clones.

I'd suggest having pre-3e versions of D&D in General, and either make Legacy into officially the 3e forum, or merge 3e with Pathfinder - or are there 3e fans who hate Pathfinder?

I think it makes sense to keep a 3e/Pathfinder forum and a single 4e forum.

I like rpgnet's 'General' vs 'd20' forum divide, mostly because it lets me stay in d20 and have bit of protection from the ravening fiends who lurk in General.  Thankfully not an issue on enw!  But I think a three way split  General-3e/PF-4e is best for ENW.


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## IronWolf (Dec 17, 2011)

S'mon said:


> I'd suggest having pre-3e versions of D&D in General, and either make Legacy into officially the 3e forum, or merge 3e with Pathfinder - or are there 3e fans who hate Pathfinder?




I posted a long post once about a year or so ago about not combining those two forums. It isn't so much that the 3.x/Pathfinder types don't get along as much as it makes rules discussion and build discussion more difficult because of the subtle changes between the systems. They are similar enough that it can be difficult to pick up which system someone is talking about, which can perhaps make subsequent response posts irrelevant to the system at hand.

Plus, with the continued rise in popularity of Pathfinder it certainly seems to warrant its own forum these days.

EDIT: Here's my old post when this came up:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/meta/286346-recombining-forums-3.html#post5291650


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## enrious (Dec 17, 2011)

IronWolf said:


> I posted a long post once about a year or so ago about not combining those two forums. It isn't so much that the 3.x/Pathfinder types don't get along as much as it makes rules discussion and build discussion more difficult because of the subtle changes between the systems. They are similar enough that it can be difficult to pick up which system someone is talking about, which can perhaps make subsequent response posts irrelevant to the system at hand.
> 
> Plus, with the continued rise in popularity of Pathfinder it certainly seems to warrant its own forum these days.




I agree with the above points - it's not so much that 3.5 people hate Pathfinder (although some do) or that Pathfinder people hate 3.5 (although some do), it's that things could be very, very, very confusing for people asking for help/advice.

So I'd say:

Legacy - ODD/1e/2e/clones
3e 
Pathfinder
4e
5e *


*I keed, I keed.**

** Or do I?


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## Morrus (Dec 17, 2011)

We're not gonna split out the forums more, folks.  We might combine some, but we're trying to move away from craploads of quiet forums in favour of fewer busier forums.


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## S'mon (Dec 17, 2011)

Morrus said:


> We're not gonna split out the forums more, folks.  We might combine some, but we're trying to move away from craploads of quiet forums in favour of fewer busier forums.




Cool.    I like busy forums, and I like not having to click a dozen different forum links, or worry if I'm posting in the wrong forum.

Edit: I particularly like not having a RAW-forum vs House Rules forum split.


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## enrious (Dec 18, 2011)

Then I don't think there's much more to be done, in terms of game-specific forums.


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## Lanefan (Dec 18, 2011)

Morrus said:


> OK, I've found a way to do this.  We can merge the threads just fine (and they leave nifty redirects behind).
> 
> It's a little tricky, because it if it involves a news item we have to change the posting time/date of the news item to ensure that the news item becomes the first post in the newly merged thread - otherwise we'll have random posts appearing as news items on the front page.  This would be bad.
> 
> I have tried it with the WoTC layoff threads.  Let me know what you think.



Would it be possible to do it in reverse such that trying to post to a discussion that is tied to a news article auto-redirects you to a thread in General (or wherever it would be most relevant)?  That way it's easy to find the discussion from both directions: the article itself, or wandering through the forums.

Lanefan


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## Morrus (Dec 18, 2011)

Lanefan said:


> Would it be possible to do it in reverse such that trying to post to a discussion that is tied to a news article auto-redirects you to a thread in General (or wherever it would be most relevant)?  That way it's easy to find the discussion from both directions: the article itself, or wandering through the forums.
> 
> Lanefan




I'm not even going to pretend to understand that. No, you can't redirect both to each other. You end up nowhere!


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## enrious (Dec 19, 2011)

Any thought of moving the Legacy > Conversions sub-forum into a full forum?

Seems like there's more than just pre 4e/Pathfinder conversions discussed in there already.


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## Morrus (Dec 19, 2011)

enrious said:


> Any thought of moving the Legacy > Conversions sub-forum into a full forum?




The first page of that forum goes back to _March_.  That puts it very much on the "endangered species" list, not a promotion list.  The conversions can probably go in the relevant system forum.


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## SteveC (Dec 20, 2011)

For my $.02 worth, I'd definitely suggest not merging the different forums for versions of D&D. The problem, I'd say, is that too many folks would be involved with discussions that don't relate to their gaming experience, and would end up responding "you shouldn't have this problem, and wouldn't if you weren't using your <bad> edition."

That honestly shouldn't be an issue: currently, I don't look at all in the forums for games I don't play, but I do look in the general forum. Essentially I consider that the Casablanca of forums, where you discuss general roleplaying concepts in an edition free manner, and don't come down on anyone's playstyle. I think that works quite well to discuss general concepts that carry over from edition to edition.

I don't think folks are ready to discuss 4E without venom, I really don't.


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