So I'm going to assume that once unbanning/ban reductions get introduced, all of those high profile posters are going to get unbanned. As other people have highlighted, doing what they did would have only fetched a months ban at most depending on the person previously. As it stands, it gives you the impression that it was a personal response from garry frustrated with how some people have been responding to the changes.
I also think this due to how he responds to non-spammy suggestions and feedback - I've seen him get triggered over the use of the word 'clutter' in the new forum and simply insist that people who don't like the new approach are averse to change in general. I would say newpunch in general was a pretty huge change without doubling down on changing the fundamental forum structure and culture.
All in all I'm worried that garry spefifically is a bit out of touch with the forums these days - nothing wrong with that, of course, but he's acting as the final say in a lot of these changes and just did a huge banwave on really long-term, high-profile posters. That seems like a recipe for disaster when it comes to dealing with an almost universally derided series of changes.
What's the disaster you think is going to happen?
What's the point of subforums if the threads and being displayed in the regular forums? Right now there's a mix of Car, Lifestyle, Meta, Sexuality, Firearms, Drugs, Science, Fashion, and Fitness threads all being displayed in one place.
Less active posters, less discussion, less of a sense of community, interesting threads drown in a sea of empty throwaway threads, people leaving, dead forums.
I guess seeing a huge exodus of long-term users. The shift to newpunch already saw a lot of people tap out. Whatever, their loss. But you just forced a whole bunch of long-term users who post quality or otherwise welcomed content to leave the website. I personally am really disillusioned by seeing that. Ban the big spam posts, sure, but not permanently. We're already dealing with a lot of changes in the forums and discussion, we don't need to lose a lot of established posters in the meantime.
I've been on facepunch long enough to know better than to post this, but russian tyrannical bullshit, etc etc.
It's kind of on him for posting in a bunch of megathreads that he'd close them when he got up the next morning, and when people complained he suggested starting individual threads for things they would usually talk about in a general thread.
Playing devils advocate here:
Maybe the goal isn't to make the current set of users "happy", but instead gain a new set of users that like to use forums in a different way.
I think part of the reason for a new forum was growth and breaking out of the "secret club" vives of megathreads/chat threads/circlejerks (not saying that this is what actually happened, but a possible misinterpretation?)
That being said if we're moving towards this (which seems to be the goal):
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/57869/c4958ffe-eb1f-4613-9a88-a4281d177431/image.png
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/57869/61957635-4fe0-4942-8b74-cb859a39dd76/image.png
Then I can say that this is the complete opposite of what made Facepunch my most browsed site (mostly lurked, but hey)
So what should we call game threads that do not fit in any sub forum then? Just the Game title or are game threads in GDD exempt from that?
Megathreads are simply what happens when a topic reaches equilibrium of interest. Topics too niche naturally get incorporated into a larger thread, and topics that get too big split apart. All for the simple reason that people are sometimes (read: almost always) interested enough to reply to something niche, but not interested enough to actively seek it out. I'll gamble if my friends drag me to the casino, but I'm not interested enough that I would go on my own volition.
Osu megathread was supposed to be Osu, but 80% of the posts there were about rhythm games other than Osu because there's just dozens and dozens of these games each of which couldn't sustain themselves on their own strength.
Meanwhile Fast Anime was going strong as ever but Attack on Titan was such an stupidly huge sub-topic that it split off and had a thread dedicated to it. Then interest in the show waned and the conversation went back to Fast Anime.
I'm sure this is the case. garry has all but said himself that a lot of these changes exist to make the site more approachable to new users. I am so okay with that and I'm ready to welcome in a bunch more posters to the usual places I browse. But not okay if it means the website is at best completely alien to it's original users, and at worse unbrowsable because they're all banned for comparatively minor offenses.
You summarized it the best yourself - this is the complete opposite of what made Facepunch my go-to forum. The sense of community might break down.
Not that I'm adding anything new to the condo but get rid of those stupid subforum in games. Valve is the only one that probably could have one and work. The forum visually looks bloated and dumb.
Well as of right now peeking through the threads seeing people being permabanned for shitpost threads with the reason "XY forum idiot" gives off a vibe as attractive as your average minecraft forum, but that'll mellow over time.
Part of the issue I feel like is that people were still adapting to newpunch and getting hit by another large wave of changes might be a bit too much for some fellas.
At this point it feels like this: Would you rather keep the stable current userbase or gamble on an uncertain future?
I can honestly say generals are a bit too monolithic and intimidating for new users. A balanced solution would be to encourage a thread-creation culture while still allowing megathreads to exist for the "core community", eventually newcomers would integrate into the megathreads. I'm not even talking about TF2 megathread like we have now, maybe that could be split into classes or whatever arbitrary main topics get discussed in that megathread.
Since @garry seems to be OK with big threads (à la megathread) and small threads to coexist I'll take this chance to plug my feature request again: https://forum.facepunch.com/f/meta/bsnwi/Feature-request-Reply-and-start-New-Thread/1
Implement that and encourage users to break down megathreads organically whenever appropiate. Don't close all megathreads overnight!
I do like the idea, I'm just considering how it'd best be implemented.
Those thread title examples fit fairly closely with existing mega thread titles. If a mega thread can't be called that, what can it be called?
Or am I misunderstanding and you just mean that in the context of those protest threads which were created?
I think the issue is people (including me) (based off of historic mega thread stuff) think you have something against mega threads and worry that mega threads will be taken from us. Mega threads are part of the culture which has grown here and play a big role with the community, growing to know each other.
In the mapping subforum, the map pimpage megathread is best place for me to see peoples work and discuss it - several times I've had a couple of things I've wanted to share but not wanted a separate thread for. Is it possible to make some sorta official statement of your stance on this? people are unsure
New userbase is inevitable. FP is working on all these different games. Remember when Rust first appeared? People just need to not be dicks about the change and try to contribute via constructive feedback instead.
In slack you have the main discussion and then you have threads which evolve from you replying to a single post in the discussion.
On 4chan you can see which posts reply to a given post and can hover over for a summary - making it easy to keep track of sub discussion
Perhaps allow users to donate coins to nominate a thread to gain subforum status, obviously with some sort of mod approval.
Seems to deal with most issues:
Small threads wont be able to generate enough coins in a certain time frame to earn subforum status, thereby preventing dead subforums from being created.
Entirely voluntary on the part of the threads posters, preventing people from feeling alienated by their thread being taken away.
Gives another use for coins, which is always nice.
I think it would need to have a limit of x coins per user or some other heuristic to prevent people with large stockpiles of coins from brute forcing things, though.
Nah, "forked" threads or "subthreads" should just be fully-qualified normal threads imo, don't start a inter-thread-dependency-hell because it's really not needed, a new thread should contain a standalone discussion. It's just a tool to stop threads becoming megathreads with 4-5 topics being discussed at once.
It also helps mods handle the situation better, instead of closing threads and banning people, they can just use this tool to easily fork a discussion and just ban people who ignore this fork and keep posting offtopic.
The only thing it needs is just a clear way to indicate that a new thread started from a post in the parent thread
I ain't saying we *shouldnt* get new users, thats always gonna happen.
It's tempting to just throw all negative feedback into the "people not capable of handling change" but people provided enough constructive feedback in the first place.
I was under the assumption that the plan was to kill of megathreads as Hezzy has told several big boy threads in the TF Section which have been running for years to come, seeing that this wasn't the intention of garry gives me a sigh of relief but there doesnt seem to be clarity if those will be killed off or not, which is the main thing people I know have been getting their panties twisted about; Killing megathreads which once again doesnt appear to be the plan?
I wonder if sub threads could work.
Have your megathread which is general discussion, and then if there's something worth splitting the discussion for, a thread inside the thread is created, kind of like how subforums are currently but not part of the main thread.
If I wasn't on my phone I'd create a mockup to show what I mean but I'm not so my shitty words will have to do.
Don't offer overengineered solutions or convoluted stuff.
It is very clear that garry is aiming for simple and elegant solutions whenever possible, even if sometimes too simple solutions can be a problem (for instance, I don't like to have all subforum threads together in the parent), it is better to scale up than to scale down in features
I swear to god, if Facepunch becomes that, I might as well just move to reddit.
I like how clean, easy and sorted everything is here, it makes finding threads easier.
I still think the best way to do this would be to make the Main subforums (GD, GGD, FT, Videos, so on) a "hub" where you can't make a thread, and the only threads there are ones from the subsections.
So instead of having GGD for threads that don't have a section, it just shows all the threads in the Subsections.
This way you achieve what that picture shows, but you also don't have threads being flushed down the drain, left to the ages as it's probably already 10 pages back.
They would just have to get their own specific sections.
But like I said that is what I think the best way to do what they are trying, I still don't think it's a great idea because you then have the problem "What about the threads for Games that don't have a section?"
Either they get their own section, or we get a miscellaneous section for the miscellaneous Game threads.
But we'd be back at square one since GGD is just that, so why make another section for that when we already have one?
The only difference would be a new miscellaneous section, and GGD being just a hub to show all the threads in that entire area.
Then how would you handle subsubthreads? A thread is a thread, they're standalone discussions in the forum and this shouldn't change (from what I can tell from garry's philosophy, again)
OR, we can go back to what you guys were trying to do last year/2016.
We have the ability to create our own Subforums.
I think the elegant version of my idea then is just threads can ask to get their own subforum if they want one and feel that the thread is too cluttered.
My idea was basically just putting the ability to ask behind a paywall of coins.
Yeah, if you're going to merge all subforums into the parent one, at least offer a separate way to view just the parent forum by itself. Or implement a filtering system where each user can opt in/out of displaying specific subforums in the parent.
Similarly to how 4chan has the post numbers of each reply to a post you could have the title of a reply thread at the bottom of or just underneath the post it is a reply to.
This might be the best way to solve all this, and have the concept Garry wants retained.
The Hardcore~ users like you and me get to go into Options and disable the Subforum threads being showed in the main one, and the Casual new users~ like Craptasket, can just view it the way it is normally, aka: The default setting which shows all the threads from ever subsection in the main subforum.
Reply threads should be full threads in their own right. A user should be able to see a reply thread in the forum/subforum without opening any other threads.
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