Garry wants people to explore the forums. How about a live ticker? - General

People have been asking for a lot of old features back, things like read threads and a subscriptions page. Garry said he doesn't want the read threads because people just sat on that page waiting for updates. I don't entirely agree but fair enough. How about we bring back another feature? The ticker was a great page on oldpunch, it updated with every new post made in the forum, it listed the thread and the person who posted. It was a great thing but it had a major flaw. It was hidden away on its own page. You had to know that the ticker existed to make use of it, and there wasn't an obvious way of discovering it existed. It sat in the "More" tab which I can say I clicked a total of 10 times at most in my entire time on oldpunch. So I propose we (and by we I mean Garry) bring back the ticker, but rather than just having its own page it should appear at the top of the main page and sjow the 5-10 most recent posts made, updated live. It would allow people to easily discover threads they might not have otherwise, it'd let people know when something big is happening when a lot of people are posting in the same thread, it'd help people find new versions of locked threads when people post in them. There's really no reason to not have a ticker. Maybe even have an expanded ticker on its own page just so people can keep track of the forums live if they want. It would solve, or at least alleviate, a lot of the complaints people have with the forums right now without needing any major changes. You could even have different highlights on the ticker for subscribed threads, subscribed forums, direct replies to your posts, and even @ mentions. It wouldn't even make the activity log redundant because the ticker would be constantly updating with new posts and only showing a set number.

Yeah I completely agree an update like this would great improv the forum experience for a lot of people and most likely increase activity on the forum.

The "Latest Threads" section of the left sidebar is pretty close, but it's useless because it only shows threads when they are first created. Facepunch has slowed down a lot when it comes to new posts, but it's even slower in terms of thread creation. Users aren't really incentivized to explore the forums when the only threads that show on the front page cover the freshest (and therefore, the most ephemeral) topics.

A good portion of preventing people from exploring the forums is that the Gaming forum is clogged up by PC Gamer & other tripe advertisements that blot out megathreads. Coupling that with multiple one-shot threads that don't really spark a lot of debate or information then it gets quite cumbersome to navigate to a thread i've been keeping my eye on, or - more importantly - looking for new threads that i'd like to try out. I know it's likely dead and buried but the migration from Oldpunch to Newpunch really cut into active members here. And, while Garry & Co are trying to entice people to lay down their roots here alongside most of the older/veteran forum-goers (I half-jokingly say), it's pushing them out because of how bothersome it is to keep up and post in their threads. Which can be a real damper for everyone around.

its ok you just should post as fast as the bots do, megathreads are evil

Back when popular thread was a thing, i used to end up many places on the forum. Now im just at the Creationism corner, cause i dont have time to check 20 subs to see if there is anything interesting.

Sort of related - ZKillboard is a killfeed for eve online and the owner recently introduced a live feed that shows kills as they happen and its drawn a lot of interest, it would definitely work for a site like FP

tbh i used to always have the ticker up on one of my monitors and would vaguely browse over it for thread titles that might be interesting so i can def say i'd be moving around the forum move if that was a thing. also helped me know whenever a shooting happened or a celebrity died because the ticker would always be spammed to fuck