Most comments can be summed up into two categories:
1. PROBLEM: forum is over segregated - if people chipped in and gave positive reinforcement to threads that interested them in the other boards more often, I reckon we can lift overall site moral. SUGGESTED SOLUTION: merge forums. BUT by merging sections you are just gonna piss people off.
2. PROBLEM: abuse of new users. SUGGESTED SOLUTION: edit/delete abusive posts. BUT it's not practical to monitor every thread.- I have consistently pushed to having most of the forums merged, as the I think the forum is over segregated. The backlash from the vocal minority might be too much though.
- General is still a bit of a wasteland, Releases is just a mess, Mixes hardly anything gets responses these days outside of the established rolling threads...
- ...if people chipped in and gave positive reinforcement to threads the interested them in the other boards more often, I reckon we can lift overall site moral (for want of a better word)
- ...but the existence of the SNH deads out the general discussion (i don't know how true or not this was in the past), literally nothing jokes ever happens in general and anything interesting like talking about the last system/ zomby hudmo fights gets posted in snh leaving nothing to talk about in general except to say 'big up' about a new thelem ep
- the forum is too segregated. I think that the house sub-forum should be merged with the snh or converted to an all genres of music other that dubstep sub-forum. The only problems I see are the reduction of traffic to the snh and possible confusion arising from so many different genres. It just seems a bit odd that we have a sub-forum dedicated to house, but no other genres. The only thing that would suck about getting rid of the house dedicated forum would be the possible alienation of people who only visit the forum to post in the house section.
- I'm relatively new to this forum and I mostly visit the General Discussion board as things there seem to be well organized to me, although, I admit, it could be more jokes. I don't always visit the SNH, so much content being posted here I sometimes get confused and don't have that much time to read everything! Also it sometimes seems too hermetic tbh. When I registered I didn't really know why does something get posted in the SNH and not General Discussion and as a matter of fact I'm still not sure. For example the recent Compa thread, isn't that something music related meant to be posted in GD?
- yeah but by merging sections you are just gonna piss people off
- Actually I wasn't aware of the house subforum until now, never checked it before
- I never understood why there's a house subforum and not a drum & bass subforum.
Second problem could indeed be solved by stricter moderation, but also with help from other users (there is option called: "!" Report this post).- People should be more supportive of the new guys
- To many folk think it's hilarious to effectively spam new user threads like this with abuse just 'because'.
- when a new member posts shit in general discussion, and a neckbeard tells him off, why don't u just delete/edit the neckbeard's post? that'll send the message to other neckbeards - this is what we're talking about. stop making these kinds of posts. cause i feel like at the time they don't realize that what they're doing is pushing away prospective new heds.
- not practical to do it every time, of course, but just a few times could send the message and change attitudes. actually editing the post would be better than deleting it because then other ppl who came to the thread to do the same thing would see the mod edit.
First problem, segregated forum, could be solved by "flat" forum software structure like Discourse, which is a brand new modern interactive forum software, where default view gives you overview of all latest topics in all categories, but if you are interested in particular category you just click on a specific category and get a list of latests topics in that category http://discuss.howtogeek.com/categories
It would allow us to have more categories than what we have now, which would be more like tags actually (house, drum and bass, 130, hiphop, SNH...) you would just have to choose a category when you start a new topic (instead of starting the topic in that subforum - what we have now).
It also solves many of the problems with traditional forums:
I tried it and I think it's really cool. http://www.discourse.org/You can login with anything: Who wants to make an account for every forum? Just sign in with Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Yahoo. Of course, you can still make a traditional account if you choose.
Conversations aren’t broken up into multiple pages: Topics are on a single page, with continuous scrolling.
You’ll get notifications when you are mentioned, or when somebody replies to you. You can even @mention somebody in a post to pull them into the conversation.
Reply while you read: The new Reply and New Topic composers are docked to the screen, so you can even browse around the forum while writing your reply.
Paste to share images, links, videos – you don’t have to go through a bunch of hoops to embed a YouTube video – just paste in the link and it will automatically embed. You can drag and drop to upload a picture. You can even Ctrl + V with a screenshot in some browsers.
Remembers your place: If you read 50 posts out of a 100-topic-long thread, Discourse will remember your place and the next time you open that topic, it will start you where you left off.
Over the last 12 months we have quietly improved the forum back-end (new layout, HTTPS, fast stable server, regular updates, plugins, automatic registration procedure for new users...) and we will start adding new features to the forum (and we are very excited about them!), but now when we have solid foundation we would like to start slowly changing things and we want to get you involved into these changes, that's why we've opened this thread for public discussion.
