An Easy-To-See Display of Activity for Earlier Civ Games

[Nathiri]

Hey I was wondering if there could be a small easy-to-read area where it showed activity in the forum pages of the earlier Civ games to show there are topics/mods/files being posted, so one would not have to look through sub-sections and that or subscribe to those sections on a regular basis. Maybe it shows traffic to these forums or how many files or topics have been posted each month etc. Maybe there could be a list of the 3 or 5 best or most popular mods of each Civ game, either overall, or in a specific category that has alternating categories shown on different days. Now I know one could go to the Resources and go to whatever Civ downloads and it shows the top downloaded/latest, but I was hoping for a more prominent display of these things and topics to promote more activity. There are some people who only look at a specific section and ignore the others because they do not want to take the time to look at them, or maybe they just think not much is happening there, or it is not their main civ game anymore. I have found there are things I'm not interested in normally, but when it's posted in a prominent place and it has some lines that peaks my interest, I notice it and take a look, even if I do not play the game right at this time or I just like reading about the accomplishments in recent years.

I understand there was a Monthly News that may have talked about some of these things, but there does not appear to be anything recent.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Are you looking for a Watch Forum feature? Because there's a Watch Forum feature.

 

[Nathiri]

Are you looking for a Watch Forum feature? Because there's a Watch Forum feature.

"so one would not have to look through sub-sections and that or subscribe to those sections on a regular basis."

Down the line if one wanted to do that and stay up to date sure that can be done.

 

[Quintillus]

I think this is a good idea. There used to be threads for III/IV/V where you could post your mods (units, scenarios, updates to scenarios, etc.), and every month or so the updates from the respective Civ game would be collected, and they'd be posted on the front page. This is the closest thing I can recall having existed here previously, and it was a decent way to have some visibility on what the community was creating, even if you didn't visit each game's forum.

However, I just looked through the most recent 5 pages of home page articles (dating back about 4 months to late April), and didn't find any of these for any Civ game. The home page articles are nearly all PolyCast updates and HOF updates (with one article linking to a recent review of a Civ4 mod, and a couple on Civ6 game updates). And while there's nothing wrong with those, that's only a small portion of the Civ-related activity here.

I don't know if these fell by the wayside with the XenForo migration, or due to the maintainers no longer having time for them. It would probably be a good thing to revitalize them, IMO (and create one for Civ6); seeing posts about cool mods being created on the home page has probably helped the site's audience grow over the years.

I like what you describe more specifically, too. Something like at the top of each Civ section, have links (including small images if available, perhaps?) showcasing either recent or popular mods, units, etc. Something easy to glance at, and where a new unit might catch your eye scrolling by where you might not otherwise have noticed it. I certainly have went into fora that I didn't plan to thanks to seeing an interesting thread title on the main forum page (as the most-recently-posted-to-thread), so I can see how this would help with discoverability, and most posters probably visit the forums more than the Downloads Database. It probably would require a XenForo plugin though, and I don't know if something like that exists currently. Which decreases the chances of it happening, but it's still an interesting idea.