Subscriptions would greatly benefit from an entire page display instead of just receiving alerts - they get mixed together and becomes difficult to maintain large amounts.
No idea why replies to posts you made aren't notified in the User Alerts. Haven't seen it be used once except once every week or so to tell me I leveled up. Yay.
I'm completely agreeing with this. The intent of "creating more discussion" did happen, but not as intended.
Discussion of anything not megapopular ground to a halt as it'd be knocked away by all the posts from subforums.
Rather than broadening horizons, at narrowed them as you can only discuss what's deemed popular now - the FFXIV thread was slow but able to stay on page one before, but now it's constantly knocked as far back as page FOUR, and the Paladins thread likely doesnt have any hope at all now.
The XCOM thread used to constantly be floating around page 1. It hasn't gotten a post in 5 days and that post was about an entirely different, but related, game. The last post before that was 22 days ago, not long after the change to the forums happened.
Garry got pretty offended when people were complaining that his change created clutter, which it fucking did, but the more important problem is that his change has actually killed a large amount of conversation on the forums. Hell, I've noticed I'm seeing fewer different people posting these days too.
I honestly think the change to the forum was the most destructive thing Garry could have done and all it has done is push people away. The exact opposite of what he insisted it would do.
Right now if you wanted to follow everything about PUBG you can go into its subfourm and subscribe to it. There are 2 subscription methods for forums right now: being notified when a new thread is made and when a post is made in any of the threads in the section, essentially automatically subscribing you to all the threads in the section.
If there were better organized, named and more subforums then users can subscribe to all discussion for their topic of interest
Overall I think the current state of the forums has a lot of potential if it's expanded. Some of my ideas and suggestions I've seen made include:
More subfourms/more general ones at least.
An "other" subfourm for everything else, so any thread that doesn't belong go there by default instead of the parent forum.
Let us choose what subforums we want to see in the parent forum, so if we aren't into TF2 then we don't have to scroll past all the related threads.
Thread icons, I know it's going to be added but once they do each section will have their own set making them much more useful.
A subscription page so we can find threads that haven't had posts in a while.
A popular threads page, with a section for popular subforums
There are more but this is what I could come up with at work
Like I brought up here, browsing's just become super inconvenient because of the lack of "central hubs" of content like Read or Popular. Without that stuff, there's no way this idea of pushing for more threads is gonna get off the ground
Thrift is dead. Discussion basically only takes place in the discord and the only new members of our community we get are people who found the link in the FP discord other-discords channel. I'm not really happy with this.
Here's a wacky metaphor: the content being posted is your ingredients, and the amount of content the site allows for is your baking tray. If you just keep pouring ingredients in with no concern for how well the current layout handles those amounts, it bloats and slows everything down. If you want more space for that content to settle in, get a bigger tray. We need better ways to navigate through content, but idk if we're ever getting them seeing the way garry handles this forum. At first I figured he wanted people to get out of their comfort zones more for the sake of the community. But it sounds like he just wants to redirect FP's whole format towards, specifically, the way he uses it (popping in every 3 months and never being a part of anything)
the whole "getting out of your comfort zone" feels contradictory as far as the games subforum goes because given that you can only realistically talk about stuff with a subforum or popular megathread, it's actually encouraging people to stay in it.
I'd say that's just as much part of the illness as the symptom, the discord that is.
Something I've noticed over the past ten years of floating around the internet like a nomadic fart is that often Forums or Forum Based Communities tend to migrate off of their old mediums in to more interactive mediums as they age, and their user-base is pruned down to a group of strongly like-minded individuals who share increasingly specific interests.
I used to be part of a Command & Conquer group that saw a few hundred forum posts a day. Then, over time, it boiled down to a dozen hard-liners still using the forums, who eventually just began speaking to each other over Ventrillo (then Teamspeak, now Discord). The forums were quietly, uncontroversially axed three years ago, and the entire community (what's left of it) runs entirely out of it's Discord.
Simply put, Discord's functionality is, as far as I can tell, putting the torch to forum systems that were already weakening for a dozen imaginable reasons.
I dislike Discord replacing forums not only because it is usually full of irrelevant small chatter, it is difficult to access and keep track of old content.
Asking for a discussion or criticism? Your window is 1 hour until everybody ignores it.
@everyone is so annoying. There's some prick in the Blender discord who does it for things that a lot of people just don't give a crap about and really don't need to be notified for.
There's an admin of a Discord I'm in who does shit like this:
https://i.imgur.com/ySd8VVU.png
This is not fucking important and it's really annoying.
Back on point, anecdotally I know a couple of people who stopped using Facepunch because of these changes, so it's clear that it's a problem to many people. The only threads that really give me post activity notifications that I subscribed to are LMAO Pics and the Nintendo thread, and even then I can remember when these threads would get waaaaay more posts than they're currently getting.
I already did that, I'm just saying that if I see that yellow glow when I'm reading chat I'm assuming it's something important
The concept is stupid because it's just pushed me from reading my usual 10/15 threads to just keeping track of about 4 that have been turned into subforums but kinda not really because all the subforums still have the one megathread in so it's just a more obtuse way of pinning those threads.
I remove admins in my discord for using @everyone in public channels
I mute them on every single discord server. There's nothing more annoying than HAPPY EASTER YALL
yeah quite frankly all these changes have stifled me from posting as much as I would like too. too many threads of stuff I just don't care about getting in the way of stuff I do.
on that note, it's too much of a hassle to find threads I actually want to talk in, and I can't even mark threads unread that I don't want to. Like, I don't care that there are 6,000+ new posts in the TF2 thread. I clicked on it once by accident. I don't play TF2, I don't need that cluttering up my screen.
That's a fair comment. Have you got any screenshots of large amounts of subscriptions? If they don't all fit within the box it may be prudent to look at alternatives.
That sounds cool. I'll see what I can do
I've been looking at how people contribute content and the way we've set it out works well for most places. Not the games forum though, which is where the majority of criticism has come from. I'm having a long hard think about the best way to organise content and will be presenting my theories to garry at some point over the next week.
We've always had a chat room alongside the forums. First it was IRC, then it was Slack, now it is Discord. Chat rooms provide a different style of discussion to forums, so I'm not worried about one replacing the other.
You can unsubscribe from threads you don't want. You can subscribe to threads that you do want. What kind of threads are you trying to find, so that I can better understand the problem?
It works well for most places as in, it's working well for the other non-games forums rn? Or, working well in other websites? If it's the latter, I think some examples would help people see what we're aiming for. If it's the former, I couldn't disagree more. The entire forum's slowed to a crawl, and the changes have been nothing but a detriment
I went from lurking and occasionally posting on Games to just subscribing to, like, two threads (one of which is the Overwatch megathread lol, why does it even have its own sub) because I can't be arsed to scroll through TF2 threads that I don't care about.
This is honestly a pretty large contributor to my dwindling participation on the forums I think
https://i.imgur.com/XZaMpP3.png
But I'm not subscribed to them, that's the whole fucking problem. I don't want to see on the thread list "x new posts" for threads I don't actually read. It's just more visual clutter now. I should be able to mark those threads unread and not have to see "x new replies" on the forums for those threads. Nor do I want to subscribe to threads because I don't want constant updates. whenever a new post is made.
And I don't know man, just ones that aren't a billion one second TF2, guns, car, or Overwatch thread. All these small threads are making it a chore to visit and post. Many threads I'm interested in have been buried behind all the clutter that was introduced for no good reason.
Would it be better if the phrasing is switched around? Like so:
Racing Games General V2: Mighty AU and 2 others replied.
The "Quick Questions That Don't Deserve A Thread"... Thread v7: Trekintosh and 17 others replied.
Same goes for Ratings Alert
The thing about megathreads vs subforums is that megathreads have a train of thought and one off questions or a topic different to the one people are currently on can easily get buried.
Your saying you would rather follow a discord style train of discussion thread of a broad topic vs finding more concise discussions and questions in their own threads in a section for said broad topic?
Megathreads can't hold more then one discussion simultaneously. Any topic that can raise multiple conversations at once should have more then one thread to hold them and grouping them into subforums make sence. I'm not saying there should be a subfourm for every single game, don't be silly, but larger categories like Valve, EA, Indie games, table top, hobbies, ect would be perfect because you can easily find what you're looking for.
But... discussion topics are intertwined. Fun conversations are always moving around different subjects. Why are we clamping down so hard on this shit? Why is every step we take in rearranging the forums about forcing posting culture to change - to something no one seems to agree on - instead of coming up with a format that organically leads to the intended result? This clearly isn't it.
Have you never used a megathread before? They're constantly used for multiple conversations at once.
Yeah idk what you’re smoking megathreads always have different things going on. It’s never a singular track of thought
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The current state of play of the forums
