Off Topic reorganization

[Leoreth]

Well, I can't help it if you feel that way but believe me, I am not trying to ridicule or demean you or something.

Maybe the many years of dealing with people complaining has made me too tired to try to sound coherent anymore...

It's just that I gave a reason why I think the "simply start another thread in the other forum" argument doesn't work, which you promptly ignored and simply repeated that I could simply start another thread in the other forum.

If you're tired of people complaining fine, but that's the purpose of this thread, I'm sure there would've been a colleague who could handle my complaints for you.

That's one thing a group of posters are asking for... So are we wrong in providing for that (a little)?

And yes, one of the goals is to lessen moderation work in the OT section. The workload for OT is just way too heavy, and it makes little sense to continually expend so much effort (probably like 80% to 90%) on an area which has nothing to do with Civ (we're called CFC for a reason you know ). Also the problem of personnel.

Lessening your workload is of course a valid goal, but I don't think applying moderation arbitrarily is a good way to achieve it (that is, it would achieve it, but to the detriment of the forum).

My point is that you can't let someone who happens to be the OP decide what kind of moderation a topic should receive. Most OT topics are created in reaction to news events. Once they're discussed in one thread, they'll stay there. Starting another thread just means you're locking yourself out of the discussion. So why is the degree of moderation decided by the choice of forum to post it in, instead of the degree of moderation it requires due to its topic?

 

[ori]

We are precisely aiming for two forums with different moderation standards and not with different topics though.

 

[Camikaze]

@Leoreth- That's a decent argument.

We were going to do something similar with the RD idea; force all political topics to carry the RD designation. But that seemed to be a wildly unpopular idea. I think it's probably that experience that has made us more inclined to take a 'let the free market decide' approach. The theory goes; if someone posts a thread on a topic in one forum, someone is also welcome to post that topic in the other forum. Whoever got in first might have the advantage in attracting traffic, but if people want proper discussion of a topic (or just discussion that doesn't necessarily involve normally rule-breaking posts) they'll tend towards the thread in this forum, and vote with their feet accordingly. If people want it the other way around, same thing.

It's true though that that theory might end up not working out. We'll have to wait and see. There is a bit of an issue in that not everyone is in the habit of making threads, so it could really end up being a handful of people who are deciding where the traffic is, even if most people want it elsewhere, so we might need to take a different approach. Don't know yet.

One of the problems may be perception. It's hard to tell, but general perception at the moment seems to be that this forum is meant to be RD standard all the time or something? It's not. It's meant to be pretty much the same as the old OT, but with more of a tendency to evict annoying people promptly (which seemed to be one of the big requests to come out of the last couple of years of feedback).

 

[Mise]

I approve of this "vote with your feet" thing. I think that a separate subforum would work a lot better than IALS, for example, because subforums are just far superior to vB groups. I liked the idea behind RD threads, but people didn't really use them. However, I think that's fine: it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I think the split in the forum is unnecessary, because we already had RD threads that served basically the same purpose, but IMO in a better way.

EDIT: I guess the advantage is that by having separate forums, it might be less odd to have duplicate threads on the same topic. So people might be less put off from creating another "SRS" or "LITE" version of the topic in a different forum, whereas with RD threads, it looked a bit odd having two threads with the same topic in the same forum.

 

[Cutlass]

This is actually a feature of the split that we will almost certainly not entertain to change. One aspect of the reduction in moderation in the lighter moderated forum is that we will allow for more spam than we would if postcount was active.

Now that's just utterly ridiculous. Having moderators complain about post count spamming is as childish as post count spamming.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

We are very seriously looking into that.
If the split works out, a merging of Humor and Jokes into the lighter OT is very likely - the others forums will also likely be consolidated (at least in part), but how is still up for discussion.

I hope that further subforum merges are done on a case by case basis. For example, H&J should obviously go to Taberna, but so should Sports in my opinion. On the other hand, S&T and WH are more "serious" and "mature" subjects that should go to FC. As for A&E, that's anybody's guess I suppose, but I think it's more of a civil discussion that goes on there than what you might expect to find in a pub (though I've certainly gotten into a formalism vs. illusionism debate over a pint before), so perhaps it should go to FC also.

 

[Leoreth]

We are precisely aiming for two forums with different moderation standards and not with different topics though.

In my opinion, moderation standard are inherently tied to the topic that is discussed. Apparently we simply disagree here

@Leoreth- That's a decent argument.

We were going to do something similar with the RD idea; force all political topics to carry the RD designation. But that seemed to be a wildly unpopular idea. I think it's probably that experience that has made us more inclined to take a 'let the free market decide' approach. The theory goes; if someone posts a thread on a topic in one forum, someone is also welcome to post that topic in the other forum. Whoever got in first might have the advantage in attracting traffic, but if people want proper discussion of a topic (or just discussion that doesn't necessarily involve normally rule-breaking posts) they'll tend towards the thread in this forum, and vote with their feet accordingly. If people want it the other way around, same thing.

It's true though that that theory might end up not working out. We'll have to wait and see. There is a bit of an issue in that not everyone is in the habit of making threads, so it could really end up being a handful of people who are deciding where the traffic is, even if most people want it elsewhere, so we might need to take a different approach. Don't know yet.

One of the problems may be perception. It's hard to tell, but general perception at the moment seems to be that this forum is meant to be RD standard all the time or something? It's not. It's meant to be pretty much the same as the old OT, but with more of a tendency to evict annoying people promptly (which seemed to be one of the big requests to come out of the last couple of years of feedback).

I agree about the perception part. The thing is, no matter what level of discussion you envisioned when you thought up the split, the actual level of discussion that takes place in both forums is ultimately decided by those who decide to create their threads there, and their perception of the level of discussion. That's why I (maybe a little unfairly) jumped at your distribution of topics into the new forums: because most people will use them as examples for what the forum is for. I don't want to treat one day as evidence but all new threads so far have been created in FT (this should definitely be watched closely for the next weeks, of course). That lends credence to my assumption that people will treat FC as the "RD forum" even though it apparently isn't meant to be.

And so I don't have to appear overly critical all the time, I have to say that I completely support the general idea of the OT split, as well as the planned mergers of other Colosseum subforums into FT. I only think that a stricter separation between the new "halves" of OT like "debate" vs. "chatter" would've made more sense.

 

[Plotinus]

I hope that further subforum merges are done on a case by case basis. For example, H&J should obviously go to Taberna, but so should Sports in my opinion. On the other hand, S&T and WH are more "serious" and "mature" subjects that should go to FC. As for A&E, that's anybody's guess I suppose, but I think it's more of a civil discussion that goes on there than what you might expect to find in a pub (though I've certainly gotten into a formalism vs. illusionism debate over a pint before), so perhaps it should go to FC also.

I'm not sure it actually makes any difference. Any Colosseum forum that does get "merged" will in effect simply be closed, and people invited to discuss those topics in either of the two new forums, depending on what sort of discussion they want to have. The only material question, once the decision to close a Colosseum forum has been made, would be where to move the currently active threads. And that can be done on a thread-by-thread basis.

 

[Takhisis]

Can't you just move an entire forum? Is the only way to do it thread-by-thread?

 

[Antilogic]

Yeah, I just moved most to Taberna, so as not to confuse the Civilium standard. A lot of the topics themselves would be more appropriate for Civilium.

edit: actually, I'm not entirely sure which book recommendation thread you're referring to. Link?

The latest incarnation of it: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=384994. I'll let the other OP-ers of the "Ask a ..." threads post if they want their threads moved, but I've (forcibly) adopted the book thread.

While this thread series started off as a bunch of quicker one-liner type comments on what books people were reading, it has gone through periods where there was much greater analysis provided--the posts here on history books were often better than the ones in the WH forum thread. Moving it to Civilium (with a caveat as to what kind of posts are acceptable, if you want) could encourage the latter behavior.

That, or if it's so close to the inevitable archiving anyway, just lock it out now and we can create a new one here.

Side note: I always wondered why this thread series was archived (and PC was removed)--people don't run through books the same way they run through rants, raves, and current music, etc., and there's at least as much potential for good OT talk as there is in the average thread here.

 

[Turner]

Side note: I always wondered why this thread series was archived (and PC was removed)--people don't run through books the same way they run through rants, raves, and current music, etc., and there's at least as much potential for good OT talk as there is in the average thread here.

It's a serial thread, and as such they are archived after 1000 posts.

 

[Antilogic]

It's a serial thread, and as such they are archived after 1000 posts.

I understand that; I'm wondering why the book threads aren't an exception due to the factors I mentioned above. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

 

[Turner]

There wasn't a lot of thought put into it...

I would be okay with an ongoing book discussion thread, separate from the "What I'm reading now" thread.

 

[JollyRoger]

Were people really asking to spam? I thought that the big complaint about over-moderation was on the mods being too heavy on so-called trolling and flaming. I am not looking forward to have to eat spam to be able to have a place to post that (hopefully) allows for my posting style, but I guess those are the breaks.

Post count does not matter to me ( I would be willing to lose significant amounts of it to have all my OT threads moved to OT-JR), but it does seem a bit silly to say post count doesn't matter, spam doesn't matter, but we are going to take away one to cut down on the other.

 

[Takhisis]

It's not silly, it's hypocritical.

 

[LucyDuke]

However we are looking quite strongly into folding H&J into the new pc free OT forum.

So you want to actually push down the standards. Awesome.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I still dont understand. If post count is to count how many posts a member has, doesn't turning off post count mean they are not actually posts? Or they are of less value? It's still all very subjective. Somebody could write out a very well-written, good post in the "light" forum that could be seen as better than a sloppily-written post in the "serious" section, yet only the serious one would count. Its as though the entire thing is of less value. As for post-counts being a reward, seriously? The idea of a post-count is to know how much posts you have. Not as a reward.

 

[ori]

Were people really asking to spam? I thought that the big complaint about over-moderation was on the mods being too heavy on so-called trolling and flaming. I am not looking forward to have to eat spam to be able to have a place to post that (hopefully) allows for my posting style, but I guess those are the breaks.

If we relax on moderation in terms of trolling/flaming, there is no reason not to relax on spam which is a lot less disruptive usually (and complains have been that we are too tough on spam and not tough enough on trolling and the reverse - for essentially similar degrees I'd say). That said we are looking at relaxing on any non-disruptive behavior in threads. That is if someone goes into a thread and purposefully runs it into the ground or tries to, it won't matter what section of the book covers it, we'll deal with that user. Non-disruptive posts of either type will now be tolerated where they would not have been previously, though.

 

[JollyRoger]

If we relax on moderation in terms of trolling/flaming, there is no reason not to relax on spam which is a lot less disruptive usually (and complains have been that we are too tough on spam and not tough enough on trolling and the reverse - for essentially similar degrees I'd say). That said we are looking at relaxing on any non-disruptive behavior in threads. That is if someone goes into a thread and purposefully runs it into the ground or tries to, it won't matter what section of the book covers it, we'll deal with that user. Non-disruptive posts of either type will now be tolerated where they would not have been previously, though.

So if I get this correctly, the moderators are trying to increase the incentve for spam-motivated disruptive posts to be made in the Civilium, because at least the spam-motivated disrupter gets post count out of the deal.

 

[ori]

So if I get this correctly, you are trying to increase the incentve for disruptive post to be made in the Civilium, because at least you get post count out of the deal.

We will quite strictly remove a user from that forum who tries to be disruptive in any way - so no.