Idea : Make some new forums

[Ksempac]

The Trem's community is growing, and so is the forum.

I think that the few categories we have (General Discussion, Feedback, Troubleshooting,...) worked pretty well when there wasn t many posters. However we now have quite a lot of posts everyday and it's getting a bit messy, especially in the General Discussion (The total number of posts is about 20K, and GD has 12K posts).
Moreover, people tends to get less and less patient for newbies. We're getting a bit "nervous" when we reply (a number of posters are pretty angry when they post and we see a lot of posts with big "OBJECTION" or "STFU Noob" in them)

I think we should divide this section into 3 parts at least :
- Help section : you ve got a question about the game, then post here. (And people who hates newbies can avoid this section...this way the forum will be a little more nice to new members)
- General Discussion : General things related to Trem.
- Off topic : Things that aren t directly related to Trem.

This is only an idea...we could also add some others like a rant section where every guy who wanna complain about a bad admin or a bad teamate could post so that no one will have to read him.

I m also thinking about a dedicated forum for beta testing of maps. As a matter of fact, we have quite a lot of them now, and half of the posts about betas are in the General section and the other half is in the Mapping section.
This has some pretty annoyings drawbacks :
- Many people dont read the mapping section so they dont see when a new beta is launched in this forum
- In the general discussion, the threads with the link to the maps and the comments move out of the front page really fast.
- Some maps have comments in both forum, because some people posts in the topic about the beta in general discussion, and other post in the topic about the making of the map in the mapping section.
- When you look for a specific map, you have to know tremulous.info, or search for it quite a long time in the forum. And people often fails to give their comments on them because they didn t see the topic about it.

[Lava Croft]

Pro!

[David]

each of the top three forums should become a group.
the more the better!

[Howitzer]

Pro!

But i'm having a dilemma here:
It would be super to maintain this fun and loose community with a lot of off-topic and funny spam things (Objection for ex. ) but to newbies, it would seem enormously unprofessional..

[Lava Croft]

As long as we do not cross a certain line, that shouldn't have to change.

[PIE]

I always like the idea of an off-topic board.. where people can talk about their cat or whatever..
.. a help strategy/game board would be good.... as long as people don't think its the same as the troubleshooting board. General has basically become the help board though..

[jmonteiro]

A forum for development (for general bug discussion and implementations ideas) would be very nice too.

[Paradox]

A random topic, to discuss anything.

[Paradox]

I got my wish!

[Ksempac]

Pro!

But i'm having a dilemma here:
It would be super to maintain this fun and loose community with a lot of off-topic and funny spam things (Objection for ex. ) but to newbies, it would seem enormously unprofessional..

I want to make something clear : The only point of this idea is to reduce the size of General Discussion and makes it a bit more clear. I never said i wanted to make special topics to entertain the community. I hate the stupid games you can find on some forums that are supposed to keep it alive, but are only flooders' paradise (like "someone gives a word, and then you must reply with a word related to the last one")

The only thing i dont like is that more than 50% of the posts of this forum are in GD. If we look closely we can see there are 3 main types of topics in general discussion :

- The newbie asking for help topic : http://tremulous.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1835

- A trem-related topic (here its the automatic map downloader) :
http://tremulous.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1669
A sub-section of this is the topics about beta maps. There isn t too many of them, but they often get replies a month after their creation. And sometimes there are several topics for the same map (one in mapping section, and 1 or more at the beta stage in GD). Hence my idea for a dedicated beta forum.

- And the thing that isnt Trem related (i took as an example : DIGY_byte complaining about spambot) :
http://tremulous.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1811

(All the examples are taken from the first page of General Discussion)

This makes a lot of topic for a single forum : I checked Trem's forum just before going to sleep and left it with all posts read. Now, 10 hours later, nearlly all the topic in the first page of GD have at least one new post. That's why i proposed the ideas of new forums.

As stated before, this will have some positive side effects.
The most important one is that, if there is a help section, a newbie may find some answers in the first or second page of the help forum, and he wont have to create a new topic. And old players who are sick of newbies can avoid this section instead of replying "you re a noob, STFU, and get some skillz". The newbie will get a warmer welcome and has more chances to get involved in the game. And the old players will stop being so angry.

jmonteiro > there is already Feedback and Troubleshooting for that

[squishy]

Server Op forum plz!

[[db@]Megabite]

Server Op forum plz!

There actually is one. Closed Usergroup. If you are a server operator post your data here and contact one member of the developers user group to add you.

Danny

[squishy]

Cool. I wasn't aware of that. I had already posted my info in that topic, so I'll contact a dev.