The current state of play of the forums - General

Just take this thread for example, there has been many different things discussed.

SomethingAwful megathreads already do this. The early FPS megathread has been active for 7 years, multiple posts a day, 1300+ pages and the topics shift all the time. If there's enough active people it's not hard at all to keep multiple discussions going simultaneously, just quote posts so it doesn't seem like it's coming from nowhere. Just the last page of that thread was about Shadow Warrior 2, Serious Sam, the Doom movie, Overload and Unreal. Every one of those topics got at least one reply

At what rate do you think people are being introduced to new threads and games by having everything obfuscated like this? Do you think people aren't aware that there are also discussions for games they don't play or hobbies they don't have interest in? This forum is small. There is not a lot of activity on it, so its not some grand library full of new wonderful things to uncover for posters right now. Just trying to make people click past other stuff doesn't make them actually post on those other threads. What kind of exposure rate do you think people have on starting to post on topics they weren't organically posting on before? And this is clearly affecting the forum's activity. It's just so weird because even megathreads i used to see updates on constantly are not being used and that discussion isn't going to smaller threads either. For example the fortnite thread/subforum is so dead right now despite the fact that its one essentially one of the biggest and highest player count games around right now. That one used to be pumping constantly. I used to feel like there was SO MUCH reading to do that i could only be reading so many of these threads due to the volume of posts, now i get through them all and its sometimes the next day before there is any activity.

I wouldn't call FP a small forum but it is mostly a big collection of sub-communities that mingle in SH and GD. And that was fine. FP consistently had some of the better communities I've been part of and those have really had their activity dialed back.

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm finding that it's actually harder to discover new threads I might be interested in now that general gaming discussion is gone - if the intention is to get people to read around more then ironically it's achieved the exact opposite as I rarely look in the gaming subforum anymore as everything gets drowned out by TF2 threads.

Late, but that's what we call a chat room, specifically a real time one. Threads are appropriately long form

Yeah I kinda stopped browsing GGD since this subforum thing started. There used to be a handful of threads I'd check out and they were usually on the front page. Now they're buried behind pages of threads. All this really did is force me to subscribe to the 2 or 3 threads I frequent and forget about browsing that forum entirely

Call me a lurker (that I am) but I've been reading FP less and less since sub forum changes, I keep forgetting that threads even exist with the amount of new threads being made. Personally I prefer the megathead style mostly because that's how it has always been and is how most other forums deal with topics. Having a sub forum for every single conceivable game is a bit silly and is obviously not the end goal. Perhaps a better way of reading megathreads is the way to go, say a function that acts like a quote but is called a topic and anyone who quotes that topic is added to the topic and can filter all posts down to said topic within that thread. Have a list of all topics within the thread on the sidebar. Just my two pence, not perfect but it feels like the sort of thing that would maybe help.

Everyday each subforum should nominate (algorithm / community) one thread to represent in the parent forum instead of fighting over seats.

You can't click on the subtags of a forum section on some browsers like the {{Meta}} in General Discussion.

Works just fine in Chrome and Vivaldi.

I've noticed that words are now cutting off really annoingly very often. Was this always a thing that I just noticed now? I mean like th is.

This is definitely anecdotal on my part but I find that my threads in the games forum barely get any exposure now. Like, I make threads about indie/obscure games and they used to be able to compete because they would occupy the same amount of space as behemoths like Call of Duty, League, Nintendo games ect. They would get a good amount of replies on a semi-consistent basis and people got to discover those obscure games. Nowadays they get buried in under half a day and once it's off the first page it's basically dead. That makes me sad and saps my motivation to make new threads.

If the subforums' threads didn't show in the main section, but were more obvious to navigate to (some nice little boxes around them on the main page, a drop-down or side menu of all the subforums on a section's page, etc) I think that would be a lot better. Also, the Ticker was one of the best parts of Oldpunch. It would certainly do better to have it than the current logs.

Cute rating should be changed to a dog. This is by far the most crucial aspect of this forum and needs addressing immediately !! https://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/thumbs/240/emoji-one/104/dog-face_1f436.png

Any word on when these sub-forum changes are getting rolled back?

facepunch.com is in a redirect loop on chrome for 3 days for me

Kitty kats 4 lyfe

Any way we could have this thing at bottom of the forums as well as the top? Like in the same "row" as "Post Reply" appears. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/132416/bd5882e6-7ee2-4748-b513-2ffbd4f50260/fabspeuchn.jpg

What if we changes spoiler tags that have been quoted from the current asterisk replacement, to just "*Spoilers*"? The current implementation is a huge waste of space since it's just spamming *'s, and it also fails to replace punctuation and symbols. A simple "*Spoiler*" that replaces the tagged text would be much cleaner in a quote box, especially where multi-line spoilers are posted.

Not sure if it was suggested, too lazy to check https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/668/6c594e82-c7e0-4156-a5b3-1fa7971b5b46/image.png

Also, please tell me this is some kind of forum title/description meme. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109738/e1f0f86a-6e74-47c2-b210-bee5231f2dc7/image.png

For real the moment the news node bots are fixed SH is going to become a nightmare to even look at. It may as well be killed off once that happens.

Oh god I didn't even think of that. That's gonna be horrible.

And to make it even better, since SH itself is untagged, you won't be able to filter it out https://i.imgur.com/rAS3FlV.png

I know Garry tends to have a "I don't give a fuck" attitude, but there are times where that attitude completely fucks over something getting designed well.

It's not "I don't give a fuck", it's "I know better". And then he fucks off for a month long vacation.

I don't like having to go back to the quoted post to actually see what was said

I'll take a look at this. We were on the cusp of removing PC Gamer from the bot selection in the old forum because of the frequency of their paid shite

That's half a fix, but still missing the main issue?