The apparent disconnect between management and users - General

it's interesting that when something on the forums changes and the community dislikes it, garry takes his sweet time doing anything to remedy it, and often does so resentfully, and we're all told that "these things take time, be patient" but also we constantly get dumb changes like the post limit thing that don't appear to take nearly as much time really makes ya think

No offense but I am also getting the impression that the facepunch community does not approve of ANY changes of anything in general at the moment and that the current userbase became overly entrenched in a forum structure that is ultimately a dead end in terms of community growth. Trying something new that may be potentially effective does not work if no one ever wants to try anything actually new, and fixing previously existent functionality does not count as trying something actually new.

The facepunch community is open to changes if they're actually improvements. What improvements are provided by tedious to navigate subforums, lack of reporting, and threads that close after 1000 posts?

To be completely fair, I've noticed some wierdness in big threads at the end of pages. Sometimes if you post a post that creates a new page, it'll only be accessible via url, and it'll take a second person posting on that new page to make that new page be accessible by the page selector. If there are other problems with long threads, this could be a temporary measure.

The thing is that among those things there were also attempts to try fundamentally new forum mechanics as well. I feel that the users may be overly critical of forum experimentation. Maybe the reason why garry stopped talking about shit is because none of his ideas were met with any support or tolerance whatsoever, even if they could have eventually turned into something actually nice.

i like a lot of the stuff that's happened with the new forums, actually! the overall look and feel is really good, the design rules, it feels a lot faster and smoother, and all kinds of other things. i don't think i'm alone in that opinion, either. i just think that a lot of the rules and policies that came with it are very much less good, and that garry for some reason refuses to change them, or does so only after severe backlash, while continuing to make more changes that people obviously don't want at the same time. it's really frustrating because FP is a community i've been a part of for like a decade at this point and i don't like how garry/the moderators/whoever seem to keen on turning it into something it's not, something it's never been, and something nobody here wants it to be.

What do people here want it to be exactly?

A functioning mobile site would be a nice start. Not only did garry break his previous implementation with the new update, but it also broke Mobile Bandaid CSS for me as well.

Garry should hire Community Manager of some sort, someone who would focus on community development/happiness.

We have a community manager, the problem is Garry doesn't seem to listen to them.

Well community manager should be given more power then. I mean I understand it's higher risk but you know.... facepunch has grown into more than just a "gmod forum", I am 100% certain most of veterans here don't play GMod anymore but they are so used to community - they still use forums. I mean I've been here 10 years or so, I went through so many stages of my life - yet I am here, I barely launch gmod anymore but I still enjoy the community. Facepunch forums should be seen more than just "Facepunch projects" forum. Although it's probably not in business interests.

Garry ought to just let Hezzy have control of the forums.

Threads can only be 33 1/3 pages now with the 1K post limit at 30 posts per page. Oldpunch was 5K posts/125 pages at 40 posts per page.

Hezzy should be in charge of the forums. I know opinions of him are a bit divided, but I think he's really proven that he's willing to do what's best for the community. I'd feel much better were he running the show. Maybe garry could release the forum's source and development could become community-driven? I know that's a bigger stretch but hey, I'm throwing ideas out there

I would definitely be open to this provided Garry (or someone he picks/hires) is willing to monitor the repo for pull requests. I’d personally be happy to contribute to it. No point in making it open source if the repo isn’t maintained however. Unfortunately I really doubt this will happen. Still would be cool if it did imo

I'm not even a fan of Hezzy, but I really do agree, at least he listens to the community.

Yeah, I mean. My opinion on him is pretty mixed. he called me a retard once and that hurt my ~feewings~ but yeah he's pretty darn good at his job.

On the bright side at least browsing on mobile isn't entirely cancer anymore

I suppose I'll put my two cents on the recent changes, just to show that it's not just a vocal bunch of people complaining. I'm not even going to talk about how ridiculous the low post limit is for any kind of active discussion. I think that's been made clear already. But when I saw a bunch of old threads closed, I thought something was wrong, and started searching for the reason. Only when I came to this particular subforum to see people lamenting the changes I understood what was going on. I get that this forum is a work-in-progress and it's constantly in development, but please, please at least notify the users about the upcoming changes. It's frustrating to not understand what's happening, and getting information about the changes through users' complaints is not the best way, to say the least.

I'm really curious at this point just what Garry's goals are with the forums. His actions don't actually seem to line up with his previously stated goals. Things like the subforum threads appearing in the main forum and combining all notifications into one single pane which apparently doesn't even show all your notifications at once clearly sabotage the goal of encouraging people to make threads for everything. It makes it a total shit show trying to sort through all those threads so not many are going to take the time necessary to bother with it. Except for the times he doesn't. And usually in those times cracks down on even discussing the issue in a really dickish way rather than trying to actually handle the problem.

I've kind of left these forums for a few months so it's good to see I'm not the only one who feels a bit weird about all these design changes

Newpunch launched with significantly less feature for both posters and mods, while specifically designed to be easier to maintain, and all Garry has done is make the forums worse purely based on what mood he's in.

I just wish Garry was a little less "my forum my rules!!" and listened more

I used to lurk here constantly. The 'Read Threads' and 'Popular Threads' were always an easy go-to source for all important video game news, political news, 'Trump was a dick again' news, etc. Now it's just easier to go to Reddit. Which sucks, because this community is great. There have just been a shitton of changes to 'modernise' the forums without really considering the how and why of the modernisation. There's also a shitton of things that should be easy fixes but are either being left unchanged 'just coz' or because there's a technical reason they can't be changed. Like the fact that the Nintendo subforum is still called 'Mario'. Either nobody can be screwed to take the 2 mins to rename it, or there's a limit to how many times a subforum can be renamed (which would explain why 2D Art is still 2D ARt). Just weird stuff, weird choices, and very little progress on features that actually matter to the day-to-day browsing experience of users - it's frustrating

This. So much this. Before the transition, whenever somebody asked me about some world event, I would know what they were talking about because I had seen the headline on fp_popular or fp_read before. Now, I'm clueless about what's going on in the outside world.

Popular threads is in the road map, but the road map is a joke too.

Why doesn't garry focus on shit on the roadmap before implementing random changes?

this is just outright factually wrong. You must not have been around for the era of furry shaming lmao. We used to have some unbelievably toxicity that no longer is here. Bans have been MASSIVELY reduced though, what are you even talking about. Bans have always been a warning, its never been an issue before, you used to be banned for saying 'snigger', and now I don't even know if I can get banned or not any more. I see republicans post, I see democrats post, I see myself post as well, and we can argue a point without everyone being retarded. we can have a hearty gun debate with no problems. The one time it becomes a problem is when someone is retarded as shit and literally advocate genocide or nazism, or phobia and hysteria. Or they just Tudd it and ignore replies. "people replying to me only confirm what I'm saying as true" yeah no, that stinks like a big fat pee. Every time someone says this I instantly know that they're sniffing their own farts. That's interesting because I seem to be doing fine and most of my posts are just drenching in sarcasm.

In my opinion bans on the new site are a bit too lax. I've made at least one or two posts I'm pretty confident would've gotten me banned in the past and it wasn't because the rules I would've been breaking were shit rules to begin with, it's because those specific posts went a bit overboard. (Not debating your point here, expanding on it a little bit to be clear.) People have debates with good and respectable posters they disagree with all the time. They just get drowned out by people Tudding it up like Sgman and a few others do. The respectable posters are also easily overlooked because they're far more civil. Then again the people who tend to actually think it's a matter of bandwagoning and echo chambers and other such bullshit typically only complain because they're on the receiving end and can't be bothered to debate their points worth a damn. It's certainly not a matter of simply having different opinions as people give constant examples of. Ie: There's conservative posters who are basically globally considered to be good posters by the majority of those who frequent SH and Polidicks because it's not simply a matter of opinion but quality of debate.

I think it's a shame because I think this community is better than ever, but the software that we rely on isn't up to the necessary standard anymore.