Let's talk about how to best organize our forum. We've had many people explain why it's bloated/problematic for integration purposes, particularly in this thread. Discussing forum reorganization isn't new either, see for example here or here. There had also been ideas to have a "landing page" which may give an easier overview of all things TSP (see here).

What's undoubtedly true is that newer members are less and less likely to be familiar with the kind of forum culture that many of us had grown up with and are familiar with. The Internet now prefers tagged short-form information exchange a la Twitter, Instagram, FB etc., rather than a hierarchical system like a forum. Nonetheless, for what we do here, a forum is and remains the appropriate tool to use precisely because it offers a structured hierarchy with delineated permission sets placed on sub-hierarchies.

Our goals here should be to make the forum easier for newer members not familiar with forum culture, easier in general for anybody to navigate, and easier to moderate/administrate. This is a perfect community project where everybody from TSP can contribute in a meaningful way.

Amerion has asked about forum organization in his last poll, and I presume he'll post a link to those results here when he has collated them. These results should surely inform us. I will also reach out to gameside and invite them to testify in this thread about what they think is wrong in the forum. And of course, you (yes, you reading this right now!) should reply here, no matter if you have concrete ideas, specific goals we should strive for, or just have a specific thing that bothers you.

(This post was last modified: 02-21-2019, 07:16 AM by Roavin.)

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Some first comments from me on the subject:

• Let's identify stale/rarely used forums and see if we can't merge them or put them together
  
• There are a ton of sub-forums in the Executive forum in a deep hierarchy. I don't think we need ministry-specific sub-forums that in turn contain other sub-forums. We can probably work just fine by having specific sub-forums as needed, contained within the executive sub-forum.
  
• I don't think we need separate forums for newspapers and such. The NS forums just use megathreads and they are at a much bigger scale than we, and it works just fine there.
  
• Introducing a landing page that lists a few prominent things you're likely to do in an easy to click way
  
• Signups for everything should be unified.
  
• Most people don't care how many threads there are in a sub-forum, or who it's moderated by. We can adjust the default forum to present a much simpler view, making the forum seem less overwhelming.
  

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Let's talk about how to best organize our forum. We've had many people explain why it's bloated/problematic for integration purposes, particularly in this thread. Discussing forum reorganization isn't new either, see for example here or here. There had also been ideas to have a "landing page" which may give an easier overview of all things TSP (see here).

What's undoubtedly true is that newer members are less and less likely to be familiar with the kind of forum culture that many of us had grown up with and are familiar with. The Internet now prefers tagged short-form information exchange a la Twitter, Instagram, FB etc., rather than a hierarchical system like a forum. Nonetheless, for what we do here, a forum is and remains the appropriate tool to use precisely because it offers a structured hierarchy with delineated permission sets placed on sub-hierarchies.

Our goals here should be to make the forum easier for newer members not familiar with forum culture, easier in general for anybody to navigate, and easier to moderate/administrate. This is a perfect community project where everybody from TSP can contribute in a meaningful way.

Amerion has asked about forum organization in his last poll, and I presume he'll post a link to those results here when he has collated them. These results should surely inform us. I will also reach out to gameside and invite them to testify in this thread about what they think is wrong in the forum. And of course, you (yes, you reading this right now!) should reply here, no matter if you have concrete ideas, specific goals we should strive for, or just have a specific thing that bothers you.

One thing that I 've noticed is that we lack a sort of window to start newbs all over. In fact, the first time I've come as an ambassador to TSP I was a bit bamboozled where the on forum embassy was. I think a introductionary field could help the new players orient themselves a bit better. Here is a neat example from TEP: 

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One thing I wanted to do to address “what the hell do I do?” sentiment is create an interactive welcome page for anyone who’s coming to the forum for the first time. But perhaps having a notification box like that is a suitable temporary fix.

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I definitely think we need to provide a bit more direction to new forum users. As a fairly new forum user myself I kinda just stared at the screen for a while wondering what the point was. Thankfully I had an election that I could use to jumpstart my forum experience but I still think we should more clearly give people stuff to do right off the bat in an easily digestible package. Also, just a little thing I noticed, the "welcoming and registration" place seems to be 99% about registration and 1% about welcoming. Maybe provide a more clear thread where noobs can just post hi in and then get replied to? This could even help the previous problem I mentioned since if we can more clearly lead noobs to a place where they can be introduce themselves to more experienced forum members then the aforementioned experienced members can just tell them what they can start off doing and better guide them. I just noticed that it's kinda hard to just start off here, in part because the welcoming center doesn't do much welcoming (I mean there isn't even a pinned thread where they can say hi for the first time, they have to make their own for that and if they're new they might not even know how to make a new thread)

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I'm more active gameside than here but either place I'd love to talk ^-^

(This post was last modified: 02-22-2019, 12:21 AM by Poppy.)

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One thing I wanted to do to address “what the hell do I do?” sentiment is create an interactive welcome page for anyone who’s coming to the forum for the first time. But perhaps having a notification box like that is a suitable temporary fix.

This sounds interesting. Do you have an example of this?

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Summary of game-side feedback I've received so far:

• It's not clear why we need a separate off-site platform
  
• Issue answerers really really don't care
  
• Some feel that the more serious (one person said "negative") appearance is off-putting to them, compared to our gung-ho RMB culture.
  
• Ostensibly, some are confused or don't know about the difference between the NS forum and the TSP forum.
  

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Those are all par for the course answers and I don’t think there really any more helpful today than they were years ago.

(This post was last modified: 02-24-2019, 06:47 AM by sandaoguo.)

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Pretty much ... unfortunately.

I noticed that our RP section has started a thread on reorganization, so we should probably let the talks of that area happen there rather than in this thread and just consider Treasure Island as one opaque black box to be included in the overall structure.

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What is wrong with the suggestions made in the previous threads? Tsu's proposal seemed perfectly fine.

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