Hey folks! Just because it isn't spring doesn't mean we can't do a little spring cleaning. We've been talking behind the scenes, and we're looking at de-cluttering the forums a little in the name of consolidating, getting rid of less active subforums by combining them with others... removing "Newcomers", for instance, and replacing it with a permanent thread for introductions on the Tavern with relevant stickies.
This isn't just because I'm a weirdo minimalist freak. The idea is that by doing this, we can make the forums easier to navigate, have more activity taking place in larger sections (versus spates of smaller activity peppered throughout), and generally make everything cleaner and more intuitive.
So! While I'd like to start doing this within the week, I want to give all of you your chance to speak out and help us decide what goes where, what to keep and what to ditch, and how best to smoosh various subs together while making MWAH MWAH sounds so it turns out better for everyone. This is YOUR forum, after all, so we want your suggestions and feedback before we pull any triggers. Thanks for your time!
everyone agreed it was a bad idea to replace it WITH a thread
Technically, that's not true because of this post from @BalkanRenegades:
I am not so sure about removing Newcomers. Yes it will make forum a bit easier for using and it is not very used (although we are having a good number of new members every day), but it will make Tavern crowded with messages from newbies. If you really do want to remove Newcomers, go ahead. I won't mind. But it will be harder to use, find threads and clean (for mods) the Tavern.
Then again, there was no other support for the removal of the Newcomers Forum, and the above post is more ambiguous than in full support of the idea. Besides, there were plenty of good arguments against the removal, which can be summarized to the following:
Adding a newcomers thread to the Tavern will increase clutter in that forum.
The goal of an introduction is to get welcoming responses, which is easier to get if each user gets their own thread.
It will be harder for newcomers to know where to introduce themselves if the place is a thread rather than a forum.
It is traditional for newcomers to introduce themselves, but they won't know that if they can't find the place to do it.
Newcomers won't see responses unless they get tagged or keep checking the newcomers thread.
Welcomers will have to keep checking the newcomers thread to see introductions.
Now that the decision has been made to replace the forum with a thread, the admins might as well feature that thread, as it would solve some of the problems listed above, though the forum removal doesn't help forum navigation that much as there's only 1 less forum and the same number of categories.
We can understand you guys being disappointed that the Newcomers forum was removed, but this wasn't a decision the staff made lightly, or something done by only one person. Everything we do is a work in progress, and we appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback no matter what that feedback is. Ultimately, it was felt that the Newcomers forum was best removed, and while I can respect some of you being unhappy with that, I hope you can understand me when I say it wasn't something that we did just for the heck of it, or to fly in the face of your feedback.
All I can do is gather feedback and present it to the rest of the staff for everyone else to discuss as well. I can understand the disappointment in a move that doesn't follow the direction someone was hoping, and of course respect your decision to remove yourself from any discussions.
Ultimately, it was felt that the Newcomers forum was best removed
Ok, fair enough. Why? You see, this does not help really. If at all possible, I would like to see the arguments for removing that category. Various users here, me included, have made our points and why we thought the category should NOT be removed. But I haven't seen the actual reason behind its removal yet. Speculations can and have been made and the general reason of de-cluttering the forums is in the OP. But isn't there anything more specific? Especially when the general feedback was negative, it must have been something more than "we have many categories, pick the least useful to remove to de-clutter the forums". Something more specific right? If so, posting that "more specific" reason here can help clear the confusion.
Speculations can and have been made and the general reason of de-cluttering the forums is in the OP.
De-cluttering is one of the two reasons mentioned in the OP, the other (and imho better) one is to "have more activity taking place in larger sections", if I may quote the OP. Here's what I think:
The way I understand the decision to merge Newscomers into the Tavern, is that as a forum it had relatively little activity, only having occasional new users presenting themselves and a few welcoming posts; having it as an active, condensed thread in the Tavern is beneficial for the Tavern's activity, and as there are not enough active threads in the Tavern to fill the whole page right now, it doesn't push anything currently relevant back beyond the second page.
Come to think of it, the 'So this is the tavern' thread being a very general chat to talk about almost anything (at least when we're not doing huge battle royales or mini-rpg's ), having it together with a Newscomers thread in the same place may incite new users, after having presented themselves, to go check it out, participate, meet more people, etc.
There are plans in the future to tweak the way site discussion and commenting are managed. (Not sure if I can say more... not that it's secret, but more that I don't want to explicitly state something as happening in a certain way before it's been committed to.) Before I was even brought on, the staff wanted to declutter the forums to make this easier in the long run, and it was decided that the Newcomers forum was used so infrequently and to such meager extent that it was better to condense it into a thread in the Tavern, as most other sites do.
Again, I apologize if you're disappointed or feel let down by this, and all I can say is that I'll try harder in the future to push on issues you feel are make or break for you.
They took the suggestions/feedback, considered it and decided not to run with it. Nothing more to it. It doesn't mean they have to accept it.
I think what Matt is trying to say is that before the change happened, most of the feedback towards that particular idea was negative (if not all of it, because Balkan was a bit ambiguous). So since such a negative feedback towards an idea did nothing to change anything, what is the purpose of providing feedback? If even almost all of the opinions about an idea are negative and voiced by active members of the forums, and that cannot change what's going to happen, then what will? In short, what is the point of feedback if the most feedback we could possibly provide didn't change the original plan?...
At least that's how I get Matt's point. And if you are asking for my personal opinion, he is kinda right. But no one is asking for that personal opinion and I can hope that you (you, the staff) did take our arguments into consideration before going through this. After all, it is not this thread's purpose to discuss that change and how it happened. So let's try to avoid turning this into another Verwaltung situation This thread is still about providing suggestions and the changes are not yet over. So, if you are looking into turning subcategories into stickied threads, maybe you should look into the Games and Quests subcategories. There is a lot to be found there.
Also, not that it is going to solve the whole problem, but it may help, consider adding a stickied thread for searching games whose names are unknown. Many many users come to the forums looking for games they've played years ago by describing them. Until the search engine is upgraded, maybe a stickied thread will help reduce the number of new threads created in the support forum for this exact purpose.
Well, you can view it this way: Feedback is....well it's feedback. It might be negative, but if the staff eventually did consider it (there were previous discussions), but pushed through it, then feedback is not pointless.
Well, sometimes the admins might know the best. It's not like they rushed into it without consulting anyone. This idea popped up ages ago, I can tell you that.
Quantity of reasons holds no weight on its own.
I don't know how much more I can say, so I'll leave it up to the admins if they want to reply.
If you want to declutter the forums, try expanding the less-than-half-the-screen space formatted for them like it used to be.
It seems over the years that every decision made by the staff has been out of laziness. They've incorporated so many 3rd party, underdeveloped, and negatively received changes that they have mismanaged this community into oblivion.
It used to be that nobody was there to listen; now it's that nobody listens.
At this point, all I can really do is apologize for not communicating to you guys better. As has been mentioned, the removal of the Newcomers forum is something that had been floating around for a long time before I came, including because of how rarely it got used, and how scant that use actually was, and most of the issues raised here seemed like fairly simple fixes. IE, modifying the description of the Tavern to include a mention of introducing yourself so incoming folk know where to go, using a condensed thread for introductions like other forums do to eliminate the threat of clutter, encouraging posters to @ one another so new people see replies to their introduction, and so forth. Obviously some of these things still need to be implemented and will be today (or as much as I can steal time from a certain magic tech unicorn), and perhaps more obviously not all of you will be happy with them. That's something I can accept responsibility for... I'm not somebody to shirk off things onto anyone else, and if you're unhappy with me for not stopping this, then I accept that.
Going forward, obviously what needs to be done on my end then is incorporating more transparency. While I do have other duties here unrelated to the community, what I DO want to do is try and do better at the rather large task of improving the community in ways that matters to them... obviously not every suggestion can be taken on board, or every piece of feedback, but what I can do is do better about communicating to you the why of it. Obviously I'm new to you guys (if not to Armor Games itself in some capacity), and much of this history and these decisions that have come before my time here have clearly had a big impact on user/admin relations. There's no easy fix for that other than for me to try to do better and do what I can from here on out to be better.
Again, if you feel I've let you down, then I apologize. All I can really do is promise to listen better, and communicate better, when issues like this are raised in the future.
I was planning to stay out of this hot mess, but now I have a few things to say.
1. Not Dora's fault.
2. The problem is that the the users were asked, and we gave a straight answer, then the opposite of what we wanted happened. I'm not saying it was the wrong decision to get rid of the newcomers forum, I'm saying that the decision to do so happened after most of us said no.
3. We should now focus on how to make the newcomers thread easy to find.
