Changing the gaming forums
 

I mentioned this once in my journal before but I'd like to bring it up here to get a wider opinion on what everyone thinks. What I would like to do is condense the amount of gaming forums we have to just 2 or three. Then we can allow people to set prefixes when they create a thread (like xbox360/Wii/DS/RPG/whatever). There are a few reasons I want to do this:

1. Its annoying having to visit each individual forum to see all the topics, especially when they each only have like 2-5 active topics. Having them all in one forum makes it easier and look more active.

2. With the prefixes its still just as easy to scroll past threads you wouldn't want to read in the first place.

One thing everyone likes about the current setup is that the fanboys can stick to their forum. Having it all mixed might cause huge fanboy wars and crap like that. That's why I plan on making a new sticky thread with much stricter rules. And if people insist on running around posting "xbox360 is better than wii and ps3" we'll remove their access to the gaming section completely for a set amount of time or permanently.

Thoughts? Opinions?

I think some sort of separation is still needed. Maybe not by platform, but if we have everything in one giant mass, it could be pretty confusing for people who don't readily know about applying filters.

Mostly I think RPGs should still have their own forum, and I think PC/Online games should have their own forum. Other than that, I think it's OK for everything else to be mixed up, assuming everything gets tagged and is easily filterable.

I still think it would be much more convenient and less troublesome to leave the forums seperated, but apparently few people agree with that sentiment. At least not anyone willing to be vocal about it since I've talked to several members who agreed, but would never post during previous debates. Considering how things turned out with Guru, I can't say that I blame them.

I'm fine with this new setup as long as Blah codes those tags at the top that sort by console and such. Keeping the RPG forum around would also be great, of course.

If we go through with this, I was thinking we could have 2 subforums inside the gaming forum. One for planning online game meets with GFF members and the other for all the RPG (Final Fantasy SIGH) threads.

I don't know how flexible vB forums are, but would it be possible for users to "create" a custom forum that contains specific tags? For instance, my account could have a forum that displays all gaming threads that are tagged as "RPG" and "PC"? This would be in addition to the two proposed default gaming threads, so no posts/threads are missed.

The gaming section of GFF was dead before the crash. We're going to start with a lot less activity on this new iteration. I fail to see the need to even discuss this. Having separate forums for each system is like having separate kitchen forums for each kind of food. Tags are a good idea, but not really needed for the three threads being active at the same time. We can use the search function for everything else.

I'd say the board index needs to consolidate even further. This place feels terribly empty with all the countless categories and subforums.

Whatever happened to the discussion over at SB regarding the much needed consolidation and purging of forums?

Yeah, I like the idea of chucking it all into one, with the RPG's and online games still keeping their own seperate sections. I don't think this would cause an explosion of fanboy horror to smear all over the joint, we're not retarded like NeoGAF. =) If we are gonna go with tags, keep 'em simple, just the current systems and a 'multi' or something. Like Rock mentioned, the whole gaming part of GFF was a dead as a doorknob. Removing the electric fences and compressing it all down can only be a good thing.

A single overbranching game forum would be fine by me, especially since there has been a bit of confusion in the past about where to put threads about certain games/events and what to do when a game goes to different platforms, etc. (for example we had a Prey thread in general gaming and a Prey thread in the Xbox forum...wouldn't it make sense to just have ONE Prey thread since it's the same game?).

Out of curiosity though, would it be possible to set it up so that you could filter threads based on the tags they have? So if, for example, a person only wants Xbox 360 news, they can set it so that threads about Wii, PS3, DS, PSP, PC, etc. don't show up? Since I own (or will be owning) all the current systems it isn't something I'd use personally, but it might make things more convenient for anyone that only cares about news for a limited number of platforms.

Shouldn't this announcement be in all the other gaming forums as well (or at least a redirect to it)?

If we're going to merge the gaming forums, why keep the RPG forums seperate? I understand the Online Forums are different and used more for planning rather than discussion, but why RPG forums?

I'm all for the merging, though I do not entirely understand how it's going to lead to stricter moderating. It's not like it was impossible to enforce rules when they were kept seperate.

I'm pro-merging. I thik everyone saw my large post about this on SB. I still hope this means that the gaming forums will be cleaned up rather significantly though. No more "What's your favorite emulator" or things like this. (That should be in the Wii thread).

But perhaps, as expanding on something DarkComet said, how about we put an online megathread as a sticky or something. Not just Live tags. Not just friend codes, not just PSN names. Something incorporating all that. I dunno if we'd need a seperate forum for organizing games, you could either start a thread or ask in a game's official thread or whatnot.

I think I'd like this the best:

General (need to have this for things that don't fit elsewhere)
Consoles+Handhelds+Console/Handheld Online Gaming (tagged forum)
PC+MMOs+PC Online Gaming
Non-Online RPG

That's really all you need.

I do agree that if we're going to do tags by console/handheld, they need to be filterable. And I like the idea of a second layer of genre tags, similarly filterable.

And I like keeping RPG in its own forum since we have a large section of the community that is exclusively interested in RPG...the tone in those threads are always completely different from the other gaming threads.

I don't know why but maybe a genre grouping as opposed to the current one or lumping it all together is what I would like best. RPGs for sure with their own forum, and then FPS, action, puzzle, music, etc. to their own devices. I keep getting the impression that popular games for everything will override everything else and that obscure sleeper releases will be quickly pushed to the bottom by the newest most popular games.

That's just my opinion though.

There are too many games that fill multiple genres, and if we were to separate them into the most logical groupings, we'd have like 20 forums.

That's why I like adding tags for genres, and being able to check multiple tags for certain games. So you can mark a game like Actraiser as an action and a sim game.

Ah yes the issue of multi-platformgames. The genre tags would be a neat idea, and I guess as long as gaming isn't just lumped into a single solitary forum altogther, then sleeper titles will have a chance of being seen.

I am confused. Most of the people who advocate keeping the forums split seem to think that our gaming section is active enough that there's enough activity to make finding specific threads difficult. Even merged, you probably won't even have to dive one page to find the thread you're looking for, if it's recent.

Going Sony tags might give you 5 or 6 active threads, while Sony-->Action like BM is saying for Genres would give you what? A God of War 2 thread?

I guess I shouldn't have said second "layer", like they were on top of each other. But a second group. So you can search for Sony or you can search for Action or Sony and Action. Think Newegg Power Search. There's a logical grouping (the 4 categories) but you can get whatever categories you want. You could even get rid of the RPG forum with that.

And when you do specific searches like that, you won't miss stuff that fell off the first page that you might want to remember. And we could have it so each user can save certain search types so every time they log in they could always look at Sony+Action and DS separately.

(I've been designing new user interfaces for my product at work so I'm thinking way too big probably.)

The only objections I have to this higher-level "genre tag" system is:

1. I can optimistically trust newbies to tag a thread as SONY / MICROSOFT / NINTENDO, but not add on the specific "puzzle/action" or "action/dating" or "music/rpg" etc... This would result in a lot of moderator action, properly tagging game threads when people don't label the different genres correctly.

2. Where would these tags appear? If they're on the main forum listing for the threads, the tags would be incredibly cluttered. You'd be seeing SONY / RPG / ACTION images for a single thread. I'd much prefer a single SONY icon.

My thought was to the right of the "(Started on ______)" text. Just a list of the tags that represent the game.

My argument about the moderator thing is that we don't really have enough to do as it is. And if the gaming forums stay dead, it won't be hard to tag new threads. We get fewer than 10 new threads a day in the gaming forums currently.

It's just a thought, it's a lot of work and probably not feasible, but I'm a dreamer. :P

I really dug the merged forums of SB, so I'm all for merging them now. The adding in the MMO and RPG subforums eased my worries of seeing a half dozen Final Fantasy threads always bumping other game's (or genre's) threads off the front pages.

Couldn't agree more with this. Plus, it brings up all sorts of problems with things that are hard to classify, like a thread on Katamari or something. Someone might search "puzzler" while someone else searches "action", or something.

Tagging threads depending on the platform is a nice idea, but adding a genre is a bit too much. Not only are some games open for interpretation, and is giving them in one genre be different depending on the person, but I also think that the forums aren't active enough to NEED this sort of detailed tagging. It would be different if there were 50 active threads a day, but if the trend from before the crash continues, I doubt that there will be any confusion. I would definately get rid of the Music Games section, and PC gaming, since these aren't the most effective places on GFF, and they could easily be assimilated with other forums.

Something like this could be interesting:
-General Discussion (guess the videogame, do you buy guides, etc, stuff that can't really belong to a console. I also think that it would be better to put the console discussion threads in here, like the PS3, DS or 360 threads)
-Online Games, MMO
-Game Discussion (This would be the forum to discuss specific games, were the platform tags would be used, with sorting options, etc)
-A Seperate section for RPGs, like it or not, this is still a niche on GFF and a few general threads wouldn't cut it, maybe a subforum in Game Discussion?

I like the slit sections like they are now, but I can understand there has to be some change because there is not enough activity.

I think it would be better to just merge the respective platform-specific sections into 1 general forum, but have a seperate PC-section. Also keep the RPG-section. Something like what BlueMickey proposed would be very good.

I think you have to be very carefull not to merge too many sections (see NeoGAF; it's not very user-friendy wading through the topics you like).

You wouldn't be restricted to tagging it with a single genre.

I'd actually like the tags because I tend to read threads on GFF about games that look neat, but I can never remember what they are a few months later when the games are cheap enough for me to buy them. This way I could just look under the certain tags I think it was under.

So I think we'll end up doing something like this.

Video Gaming with following tags:
360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PC, DS, PSP, Arcade, Multiplatform, classic, general gaming

I included PS2 since it still has a decent flow of games coming out on it. The original xbox and the gamecube are pretty much dead now and could be considered classic. We'll have a Online gaming subforum for planning meets, sharing friends codes, xbox live stuff, MMORPG meets, etc. We'll also give the RPG section its own subforum due to popular demand.

What do you guys think?

(we could include xbox, gba, and gamecube tags too if you want)