Forum Q&A Thread - General - Facepunch Forum

This is a thread for all those questions that you might have about the forums, but those that do no warrant a separate thread. For specific features / bug reports please don't hesitate to create a thread in the Meta forum

Is Ticker ever going to make a comeback? Is it even planned, or does Garry not want to reimplement it?

I think the Ticker would be a pretty cool feature but because it's "something nice to have" it'd be towards the bottom on the list of things we're prioritising now

I don't think it's a good idea to have User submitted Game news threads posted in Games. Mainly because I highly doubt everyone goes to the Games subsection regularly. I personally don't, I just have the few Game section threads opened up and refresh them, meaning I rarely if at all go to the subsection. I get what you are trying to do, but I can see major breaking Gaming News thread being flooded away by the constant posts in the section. The news will be flooded away by the Gaming Threads.

Can we have a new fp_read page? That was my bookmark on the old forums.

I guess that wasn't a question... Well my question is, how do you plan to avoid gaming news threads to be flooded away by popular Game threads?

Has there been any further plans about how private messages would be implemented? Last we heard was an idea of handing these off to offsite contacts

Why do you not want news threads in the news section?

I don't really understand what you're saying here. News about specific games will be posted in the thread for that specific game. General gaming news, i.e "There's a steam sale on" will either be popular, or it won't be. If it isn't popular, less people will post in it and it'll drop off of the front page. That's how forums work.

Not to mention with the auto-posting bots and now this, game threads is going to be overfilled and the actual game threads are going to be more buried.

This is a bit confusing. You don't want gaming content to be posted in the games section? Or are you saying that all content should just be posted in one giant super-forum?

If news about a game is big enough that some users think it's worth posting in the "news" subforum (as in, it's not meta enough to only interest players of the game), is there now anything wrong with doing so?

The "News" subforum is for general news, not gaming content.

threads are gettig more buried now. It’s not just “active vs inactive”. Slower threads are now being buried by a glut of what’s honesty pointless spam. Put the bots into their own dedicated subforum and put the news threads back where they belong.

Any reason for notifications not being separated anymore? Makes it more annoying to use now.

Then why not move those threads to general discussion?

What if those Games don't have threads? What if I am interested in news for a Specific game but I don't want to have thousands of tabs open, refreshing everyday and not participating in conversation while waiting for news? It would just be better for me to google the game once a week to see if there is any news about it. And I know there will be less popular threads that drop off, but there will be cases where a regular Gaming News thread that would otherwise be fairly active in SH, be dead in minutes because no one is going to the Games subsection regularly. And not to sound like an asshole but by your logic, we could easily get rid of SH and Polidicks entirely, American news can go into the American threads, Australian into the Australian Thread, LGBT news in their respective threads. Car news in the car subsection, gun news in the gun subsection, so on so forth. Why single out Games?

Two things basically, firstly - are there any plans for fixing line breaking? It is extremely annoying when a word gets broken in half in the middle of sentence. And the second thing has already been mentioned - bots spamming new threads in forums are terrible, having them in subforums (or in an entirely new forum with subforums for sections like gaming, polidicks, general) seems like a good idea.

Here's where i think you'll see a lot of people disagreeing with you. The news section never had a content over-abundance problem, so this change of policy seems to solve a problem that didn't really exist. To me, it seems that all it serves to do is to force people to change their habits for apparently no reason.

I think it should be clearly written what game-related news should go in Games vs. SH. Because up until now I was under the impression that all news (besides the political ones) should go into SH. The idea that game-related ones should instead go into Games is new to me. I think it'll cause a lot of "wrong section" incidents.

I think it was a style decision by @garry but he may be able to shed more light. Personally I miss being able to see what people have rated me Because GD is for GD. Not news I haven't singled out games. I moved Film and TV show threads as well. The reality is that SH has and always will be for general news. "The queen has died", "Celebrity X has done such a thing", "50 dead in plane crash", etc. I don't really understand what you're talking about when you say you've "got thousands of tabs open, refreshing everyday." Gaming stuff belongs in the gaming forum. Granted there may be a better way to display it, so we'll work on that. The Games section is one of the most popular parts of this forum. It is; I updated the sticky. I don't see how it can get clearer than that. We're not banning people for putting stuff in the wrong section, just moving threads to where they belong.

Why the sudden change, hasn't gaming news always been allowed in SH? It just seems like a useless decision. No one has ever had a problem about it, and it was still news. SH has never really been flooded with gaming news either so it's not like it desperately needed change. Idk I just find it way more convenient to have all news in one section, or at least with child forums/separate subfourm if it reaches a point of what SH was like before polidicks.

The problem with having gaming news in SH is that people stay there and don't read the rest of the forum. Forums work on areas of interest. You're interested in gaming, so you go to the gaming section to read about games. You're interested in films, so you go to the films section to read about films. etc It goes back to what garry said about people having their own little corner of the forum and neglecting the rest. We want people to read their areas of interest, so they're exposed to more content that they may be interested in. How we expose people to more content is still up for discussion and development, but we're firmly set in shaking things up a bit.

This is not gaming content. Facepunch is a community forum, people come here to talk to other people about things. Having to dig through possibly hundreds of newsbot posts with no replies makes that harder. Adding more newsbots means important news will get posted multiple times, choking the forums even more and fragmenting what little discussion can be had before the thread gets quickly pushed off the frontpage and forgotten. If we put a bot on the same level as a regular user, they would be banned for advertising and spam. If EVERYONE posted that much the forums would be an unusable mess. There are reasons why newsbots had their own section in the old forums and I cannot fathom why you suddently think this is a good change but if you're so adamant to have it then for the love of god give them a child subforum or even add a setting to filter bots specifically so they can be silenced when browsing the main section.

Okay so I assume we can see the rest of the sections also getting their own news yes? And yeah General News, but we had a News Node so why don't we just use that, and make it open for public? Try this example instead. I don't play MGS much anymore, I don't play Online and I haven't replayed the games, while I love the Franchise, I don't visit the MGS thread in the Games section. But this would force me to go to the MGS thread constantly to check for News, so I'd have 1 extra thread that I won't participate in, just to see if anything cool/bad happens. Then the same thing can go for Persona, love the games, don't talk about them, Fallout the same, Dead Rising the same, Sims the same. I hope that makes sense, but while typing this I am a bit worried that I took what you said a bit literal. "News about specific games will be posted in the thread for that specific game." Reading this, I think that any game specific news will be in that thread, like if MGS announces that Hideo Kojima is coming back for Survive 2, that would be in the MGS megathread, not in it's own thread in the Games Subsection.

Ok great, and films is not for news. And games isn’t for news.

We've been discussing PC Gamer's quality in another thread

When is the tag filter coming? i want to be able to read/catch up on more than 1 section, without having to dig through a thousand threads

I never go to the TV or Movies sections, but I really like TV and movie news. I will almost never see these threads now. This is just going to slow down Sensationalist Headlines to a crawl. I strongly disagree with this change, it just segments and fragments the community even more.

This doesn't fix the problem, it causes it. People who aren't that interested in Films/Movies won't go to Films/Movies, even for news. If it was posted in SH, those who aren't that interest might check it out and talk among the others in that thread. It's like a meeting hall, where we all meet up no matter our interests, to see what is New. I can see myself just avoiding other sections now because the news I care about is in Games. I can see a lot of others doing it too. Heck I can see myself never leaving specific threads, Nintendo news will always be posted in the Nintendo thread, never out. So why should I leave that thread to go to other threads let alone sections?