SO I was thinking again (nasty dangerous business - like adventures)

Now that TOR and this messageboard has greatly increased in fanbase,(which is outstanding!) I wonder if the board can be organized a little to hold onto certain types of threads.

1 _ A subfolder for "House Rules"

For threads of persons sharing new/made up ideas for rules and content. Recent threads of Men of Rohan, and the list of house rules from Rich, are perfect examples of things that should not be lost in the shuffle.

2 _ A subfolder for "Adventures"

Recent threads including Ghosts and Goblins, Blood in the Waters, and of course the journey to the Eagle's Eyrie.

3 _ A subfolder for "Rules Clarifications"

Recent threads about existing RAW: Harrass Foe, Rally Comrade, Intimidate, Stroll Through Mirkwood, Hate Sunlight, etc.

4 _ A subfolder for "General Discussion"
Pretty much everything else: How long is Longsword; Do Hobbits Make the Best Heroes? etc.

5 _ A subfolder for Advice / essentially questions seeking help on running games (not specifically clarification to a rule). Such as the Weaving a Campaign thread.



NOTE: these are just some suggested categories - but having just one folder is getting cumbersome IMO. And I'm getting Weary from the fatigue being suffered from the encumbrance.

I second this motion

Which part? That my thinking is nasty dangerous business???

Also, it would be nice to have a place to store information that is not "time-dependent" as a forum can be. Maybe a wiki? We could have lists of links to the relevant forum posts, concise explanations and rules clarifications. The forum is good to discuss, but finding info I read about months ago is tedious.

+1

Splitting forums inevitably leads to reduced traffic.

Restructuring the Forums is a good idea, but I agree in the long term with Stormcrow's observation: "Splitting forums inevitably leads to reduced traffic."

In addition, C7 appears to be swamped and having enough difficulty producing their supplements for the line (not trying to stir things up, just making an obvious point), & I suspect they already have enough on their plates

I have to be honest I would like to see the forum made a little easier to navigate as trolling through the topics looking for a particular peice of information is long and hard work. Whether that meant the board being split into subfolders or whether the search function was fixed would both be as good for me.

E

+1.

I'll check this is ok with Dom, and then we'll see what we can do.

I'm in favour of a just few carefully selected forums under the general TOR heading - too much fracturing and I think we lose something.

And of course it will be a serious job of work to move each thread individually into the new forums. But it could be done. Especially with a couple of trusted volunteers with temporary thread moving powers.

Double post!

Something I have just implemented, as an experiment, is allowing more topics per forum page. I haven't added a lot more - just stepped up from 15 to 20. But I do find on the TOR forum in particular we can lose active threads to churn. So this small change will make browsing that little bit easier and took almost no effort.

It sounds like a good idea to me, although I see Stormcrow's point about reduced traffic.

I'm not sure if 5 subforums would be too many, maybe 2 or 3 would be better.

It's a nice idea but there'd be increased moderation and admin associated with it in setup and the maintenance of the sub-sections and moving threads posted to the wrong areas, etc.

Not sure it's something that C7 should have as any kind of priority to be honest.

Let's just put the idea that we're too busy to put out TOR supplements to one side before it gets any further? It's not remotely accurate.

That said, of course we don't want to make something that is a huge amount of added work, but I don't think that this necessarily needs to be a huge task if handled smartly and with your help. Coming up with 2 or 3 cleverly devised subsections that are clearly sign-posted could make it work all the more easily.

Policing the forums is something we already (have to) do, and a couple of volunteer Bounders with powers to move threads would help hugely.

TOR is somewhat unique for us generating far more discussion than our other games on this board, so it's good to make some plans of how to handle that.

If that was in response to me then it's not what I meant. I just didn't see it as a priority, that's all. Apologies if it was interpreted as something else - I really didn't mean it in such a way, honest.

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If it's around 3 sub-sections then:

1) General Discussion

2) Rules Discussion

3) Fan Created Material

... Are the three that I'd go with. There'd be obvious cross pollination between the three but that's to be expected.

It wasn't meant for anyone in particular. I could just see it blossoming into a lovely false dichotomy of "extra subsections" vs "actual TOR books", and driving us completely off topic.

Good suggestions. Carry on!

I have an idea but it might not be feasible.

The consern about decreased traffic in my mind is related to people not having a quick and easy way to see al new posts immediately, and potentailly missing new posts that are under a sub folder that they did not look at if they are not careful.

The strength of the sub folders seems to be related to being able to find older posts more easily.

What if one of the folders listed all new posts regardless of subject, and they only got sorted after they had been sitting on the list for a specified time without any new posts?

What if thie could be automated? Like you give it sub folder when you write the post?

Just brain storming, good luck with this project, I think it's a good idea!

:-)

I like the idea of a "New Threads" feed of some sort. I think that's a cracking idea - if possible (in a practical sense).

EDIT: There's a "Today's Active Topics" link on the front page of the C7 Forums ( http://cubicle7.clicdev.com/f/index.php?tr...&CODE=getactive ) so something a bit like that, but for new threads, would be of benefit

When forums are split, they should not be split according to official rules, house rules, and fan creations. I've seen this done, and there are two problems with it: discussions almost invariably wander into another group's territory, leading to argument about taking your point somewhere else; and most people who are interested in reading about one of these things are interested in reading about all of them, so why split them?

Any split should separate distinctly different content, and should be designed to pick the specialized content out of the general content. For instance, posts of actual play session are rarely related to any other of the categories I mentioned, and may be safely separated. Fan creations may be separated also, but only if the goal is to present a list of fan projects without any other kind of discussion interspersed.

Therefore, while I still prefer this forum as a single entity, if a split were necessary I would recommend:

General Discussion [main forum]
---Play Sessions [sub-forum]
---Fan Creations [sub-forum]

If there were plans for play-by-forum, then another group would be good:

---Play-By-Post [sub-forum]

Instead of installing new subforums, I'd much rather Cubicle fix whatever is wrong with the in-forum search function. I've no problems using google's site search, but newcomers have no idea that is the default search engine here, which is the reason why certain topics have multiple threads.

You know after typing this I realize that when a question is repeated two weeks or a month later, more often than not someone offers new insight to an old question.

Maybe a working search function isn't warranted after all.

Obviously I'm very much in favor of splitting it in some-way as the original author of the thread.

Also - I run a very similar Invision board for my home-brew games. So I am quite familiar with the navigation of threads from an administrator perspective.



http://z6.invisionfree.com/World_Of_Mydian/index.php?act=idx



With that in mind, I will love to volunteer to help clean up many of the threads already in existence into sub folders.




I am of the opinion that if we use three they should be:

Adventures (including all play by post, play by email, transcripts of online live-chat RPing of the game, and fan-based adventures and ideas being shared.

Rules Discussion (new, old, made up, house rules, whatever)

General

And if we can squeeze a fourth - Player Contributions - (new character backgrounds, new monsters, new virtues, cultures, etc.)

Stormcrow, stop being such a noob about your posting. This response *totally* belongs in the "Splitting Forums" Forum.

(that lump you see on my face is my tongue shoved up against my cheek)

You don't know the first thing about Tolkien, you Nazi!