Poll: This site has too many subforums.

[Saetha]

Yeah I mostly just stick around OT and GD. Everything else might as well not-exist. And the BioWare sumbforum is... confusing, to say the least. Why even is it there? It has five threads! The BSN had a mess of subforums dedicated to every topic under the BioWare sun - the people there were never going to squeeze all of that into one subforum and be happy. Hoping to coax them to the site with one measly portion sectioned off for them was never going to work - why keep on with it?

I think they added it because the BSN is shutting down.

I'm aware - but that's my point. The BSN was entire forum. It had subforums for every game, and subforums within the subforums for certain aspects of the game. You can't reasonably ask that community to slim down to a single subforum - there was no way they were ever going to come here.

 

[Majestic Manatee_v1legacy]

You can never... Never...have too many subforums.

Never.

See I think we should do away with ALL subforums, everywhere, on all website and just combine everything into one single thread forum, Stuff and Things. And I mean everything. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, NPR forums, all news sites, all blogs, vlogs, posts, diaries, journals. Every last thing in the entire internet into one big forum, Stuff and Things.

If it involves stuff or things, it goes.

That is just. Just messy. So messy. Things need to be ordered to avoid having to search through pages and pages of pointless uninteresting waffle. Filing is important. Without filing and order, I would be mistaken for dugongs all the time. Do you know how much chaos that causes?

None. Because you know exactly where to look for something. Need a recipe for breading pudding? Check Stuff. Want to find out the exact date of the first car crash involving five or more cars, three of totally wrecked? Its in Things. Need that clip of George Bush trying to pull open a push door? Definitely a Thing.

Think of how much time would be saved, instead of having to tool around a dozen plus threads and subforums trying to find that one thing that might not even be in that forum! This way, we know where everything it. Its in Stuff and Things

But even if that works out more convenient somehow in opposite land logic, doesn't it sound better to call it "things and stuff" instead of "stuff and things?"

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Interesting...

I wonder if people would want to find stuff or things more often. If people need Stuff, then Stuff and Things works. But if they need things...

 

[Barbas]

A ton of users in the past have been all over the idea of user generated pieces and content. Users who are willing to take up the mantle to do this sort of thing. I'd be happy to see that sort of thing. Maybe someone wants to make walkthroughs or list cheats for older titles, or PS1 games exclusively, or something. There's people here who would love to make content for the site just to help bring life to it. I don't have any specific names, but I believe someone in page 1 mentioned it

Do you remember when the community found out they could submit their own quizzes?

Either just two people did it, or the staff in charge of the process only posted two. And that wasn't hard work or on a serious deadline. Complaining about how terrible things are now and how much better they supposedly were during x y z, while actively contributing to a real aura of pessimism, takes far less effort. Sometimes you have to be the first. Maybe it'll start something, maybe not, but it's better than looking back on nothing.

OT: Manage the community. Cut the dead Tech Discussion and Biowarriors sub-forums and, if you insist on keeping the other one, put it on the drop-down menu. Ask for help. Do an AMA. Do anything.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Do you remember when the community found out they could submit their own quizzes?

I don't actually. Shows how much I pay attention.

OT: Manage the community. Cut the dead Tech Discussion and Biowarriors sub-forums and, if you insist on keeping the other one, put it on the drop-down menu. Ask for help. Do an AMA. Do anything.

It'd be nice to see an AMA or SOMETHING to clue us in as to what's going on. But as it stands, the staff is leaving us in the dark right now

 

[DoPo]

Do you remember when the community found out they could submit their own quizzes?

How does one do that? Seriously.

- I've not seen a news article on it but I might have missed it
- I've not seen an announcement, either, however, I also might have missed it
- the Quizzes page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/quizzes/] does not mention the possibility
- neither does the submissions page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/content/contact]
- while the contact page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/contact/] does not have it as an option in the dropdown
- the "help page" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/contact/subject/tech] is literally just the contact page with "Technical Issues" pre-selected
- just double checked in case I missed it when finishing a quiz but no - you can share your result on social media, retry or try a random quiz but nothing on whether or not you can submit and how
- I never go to the home page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/], but I decided to have a look and...can't find anything there
- same with the My Escapist [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/profiles/] page.
- there is nothing under the Content heading in the hotlinks section
- the Find Us section isn't really the place for a quiz submission link or information and indeed doesn't have those
- the More Info section might contain something relevant, technically, but it doesn't.
- tried searching for "quiz" or "quiz submit" including narrowing down to specific section but I got bored after checking 5 pages on each result set and I didn't find anything relevant...aside from you mentioning the same possibility in another thread.

So, completely seriously: how does one submit a quiz? Also, more importantly, how were they to know that they can submit a quiz?

 

[Barbas]

Do you remember when the community found out they could submit their own quizzes?

How does one do that? Seriously.

- I've not seen a news article on it but I might have missed it
- I've not seen an announcement, either, however, I also might have missed it
- the Quizzes page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/quizzes/] does not mention the possibility
- neither does the submissions page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/content/contact]
- while the contact page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/contact/] does not have it as an option in the dropdown
- the "help page" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/contact/subject/tech] is literally just the contact page with "Technical Issues" pre-selected
- just double checked in case I missed it when finishing a quiz but no - you can share your result on social media, retry or try a random quiz but nothing on whether or not you can submit and how
- I never go to the home page [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/], but I decided to have a look and...can't find anything there
- same with the My Escapist [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/profiles/] page.
- there is nothing under the Content heading in the hotlinks section
- the Find Us section isn't really the place for a quiz submission link or information and indeed doesn't have those
- the More Info section might contain something relevant, technically, but it doesn't.
- tried searching for "quiz" or "quiz submit" including narrowing down to specific section but I got bored after checking 5 pages on each result set and I didn't find anything relevant...aside from you mentioning the same possibility in another thread.

So, completely seriously: how does one submit a quiz? Also, more importantly, how were they to know that they can submit a quiz?

Bugger. Well, if there's still no button or general announcement for it on the quizzes page, you can find quiz-related news in the Badge Hunters [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Escapist-Badge-Hunters] group. Think I mentioned it in the EUNOPF chat and that one at one point, and the CM must have done so when they started the most recent run of them. If you want to submit one, [user]Caramel Frappe[/user] should have a template that you can use, and you should submit them to [user]n0e[/user]. I will let the CM know to add some sort of announcement to the relevant page(s).

And thank you for asking.

 

[Creator002]

I was going to say that the forum can have as many sub-forums as they want, but your points turned me around. Off with their heads!

 

[IceForce]

Whoever's in charge seems to think that adding more subforums = more people = more activity, but actually the opposite is true.

Adding more subforums doesn't automatically guarantee more people will visit the site, but it DOES guarantee that the existing user pool will be split among the various subforums, actually leading to a decrease in overall activity on each one.

We can only hope the person in charge realizes this folly, before it's too late. Or it might already be too late...

 

[IceForce]

- there was no way they were ever going to come here.

(Re: "Biowarriors") Yep, I completely agree. In hindsight, the creation of that subforum was something of an embarrassment. A bit like hosting a big party, with balloons and banners and streamers and full catering, but no one turns up.

Regardless, I see the creation of "Biowarriors" to be nothing more than an attempt at capitalizing on the demise of another website, - an attempt that ultimately and immediately failed.

Then what you'd want is consistent mods, which we will never have because they're all human and barely have communication between one another at the best of times. Probably 3 at most have an open channel to one another, the rest are flying solo unless they need a higher up.

As I'm sure you're aware, that's been troubling me for quite a while.

Quite a few mod decisions, I feel, need to be joint decisions - especially cases when the misdemeanor is only minor but the infraction ends up being major (like a permaban).
The fact that too many mods are not seeking a second opinion and are "flying solo" with little or no communication certainly helps explain a lot of the inconsistencies.

*Need to have more in terms of game walkthroughs, cheats and guides as well as "how tos"

This site actually already has a walkthroughs content section that they used to post content in:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/walkthroughs

I actually criticized this at the time, because - and I know a lot of people are not going to like this - but walkthroughs are not the type of content that brings traffic to the site; potentially controversial and highly opinionated content is the sort of thing that brings in the traffic. That's why this site flourished while we had Jim/Bob/Yahtzee here together, because they are 3 of the most outspoken and opinionated people you could get in gaming and geekdom.

In this day and age, walkthroughs and game guides are simply too vapid, too pedestrian to draw in anything more than a small trickle of traffic.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well GID and RP are still going very strongly every day, you really don't want to spread that lunacy around anywhere else.
I do agree that the advice forum is neglected, should probably get more chances to pop up in the added tabs. Then again people who look for advice there usually just throw a post at the wind and walk away, meanwhile most people are here for the jokes and memes so they would be entirely unhelpful... no real easy solutions there.

And reviews, I doubt anyone really likes the reviews, even people who write them don't check out what other people made.