Forum Merger Discussion/Suggestions

[Mipha]

Not to put a bullet in a dead horse many of those emotes have no place anywhere and were just put in for the hell of it (i speak of those godawful super emotes) i think we need to remove at least the ones that have ABSOLUTELY nothing to with Zelda.

But the non zelda ones are the best

 

[Lozjam]

Not to put a bullet in a dead horse many of those emotes have no place anywhere and were just put in for the hell of it (i speak of those godawful super emotes) i think we need to remove at least the ones that have ABSOLUTELY nothing to with Zelda.

Yeah..... No......
So many of our emotes are definitely suited to many situations.

The only way I would even consider this is if a ton of new Zelda Emotes were added.... I mean, a ton. With only our Zelda emotes we are so limited.

 

[Polychrome]

Quite frankly, I think I arrived here just as the emotes got bad. Often I'd look at the shoutbox and there would be nothing but "ebola" and "xtremely scray" rubber stamped as far as the eye could see. I'm not sure whether or not the people spamming these understood that they were the ones making the shoutbox "xtremely scray".

I'd say it's okay to have non-Zelda emotes, but for God's sake keep them small and reasonably-sized! D: For example, I'd say every other forum in existence has that one emote of smiley Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader doing the "I am your father" thing, but that's small, cute, funny, and doesn't completely overwhelm the chat. Stuff like that. I'd really rather we not return to the time where someone typing was rudely interrupted by a gigantic King-Of-Hyrule-Is-A-Jerk.

 

[Adventurer of Hyrule]

My suggestion is to keep the forum exactly like this one, much better than the current ZI board.

 

[Djinn]

I am very interested in maintaining the non Zelda themed sections. The off topic but interest/fan related ones like Media, Science and Technology, Mafia, Roleplaying, General Gaming, etc. Especially since those were added when people were complaining about how they had to go elsewhere if they ever wanted to talk about things that were not Zelda related. A few of them might not even be within my own interest but I see that other people are pretty dedicated to those sections and would not want to see them gone.

ZI in comparison seems to be generally on topic only, with a single general discussion board and then the rest are Zelda. I wanted to make this place a bit more open to more things. With a Zelda section at the top and the rest beneath it.

 

[Spiritual Mask Salesman]

I am very interested in maintaining the non Zelda themed sections. The off topic but interest/fan related ones like Media, Science and Technology, Mafia, Roleplaying, General Gaming, etc. Especially since those were added when people were complaining about how they had to go elsewhere if they ever wanted to talk about things that were not Zelda related. A few of them might not even be within my own interest but I see that other people are pretty dedicated to those sections and would not want to see them gone.

ZI in comparison seems to be generally on topic only, with a single general discussion board and then the rest are Zelda. I wanted to make this place a bit more open to more things. With a Zelda section at the top and the rest beneath it.

I agree with this. I'd really like to try reviving the Mafia section.

 

[Mido]

I agree with this. I'd really like to try reviving the Mafia section.

I was actually meaning to get a small game going last month, but school-related errands came into play, so I lost time to act as such. I suppose if we are to revive it, I'll need to post a signup within the coming days. (Perhaps even today!)

Onto what Djinn said above, I agree that it is imperative to retain such sections of the forums, just as it is equally important to keep the primary Zelda forums intact.

 

[Spiritual Mask Salesman]

I was actually meaning to get a small game going last month, but school-related errands came into play, so I lost time to act as such. I suppose if we are to revive it, I'll need to post a signup within the coming days. (Perhaps even today!)

Onto what Djinn said above, I agree that it is imperative to retain such sections of the forums, just as it is equally important to keep the primary Zelda forums intact.

We could start a new one, or see if @Jamie wants to restart his SSB themed game.

 

[Emma]

I'm pretty sure no matter what happens, the absurd emotes have to go and there has to be rules set in place of what ones are acceptable. In particular a size limit. They have no place. They were put there in the first place to be deliberately annoying and they make it look incredibly unprofessional.

As for everything else, the non-Zelda sections should stay. And I've said this a million times, but the Zelda sections need to expand. We can't keep mashing everything together in one big super forum and expect that to turn out well. All that accomplishes is making it absurdly difficult to find anything interesting because it flies by too fast and only very popular stuff stays on the first page. More nuanced topics die extremely fast. Especially about games that are not the thing right now. We've had nonsense reason after nonsense reason for why it's done and it's never made sense and it certainly has never succeeded in boosting activity -- which was the most commonly cited reason why everything is forced into one amorphous blob, and ironically enough the lack of it being reason why the fate of the forum is being considered such a non-issue.

 

[Dio]

Quite frankly, I think I arrived here just as the emotes got bad. Often I'd look at the shoutbox and there would be nothing but "ebola" and "xtremely scray" rubber stamped as far as the eye could see. I'm not sure whether or not the people spamming these understood that they were the ones making the shoutbox "xtremely scray".

I'd say it's okay to have non-Zelda emotes, but for God's sake keep them small and reasonably-sized! D: For example, I'd say every other forum in existence has that one emote of smiley Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader doing the "I am your father" thing, but that's small, cute, funny, and doesn't completely overwhelm the chat. Stuff like that. I'd really rather we not return to the time where someone typing was rudely interrupted by a gigantic King-Of-Hyrule-Is-A-Jerk.

I think you did arrive around the time they began getting out of hand. It was hard to have a decent conversation with someone in the shoutbox even if you blocked the emotes because you would still have to see lines and lines of the input codes people were using to spam the emotes.

I like the little Zelda ones, they are cute and fit in well. But some of the others are really not good. They need to be removed and confined to the ashpile of ZD history.

 

[Dio]

I'm pretty sure no matter what happens, the absurd emotes have to go and there has to be rules set in place of what ones are acceptable. In particular a size limit. They have no place. They were put there in the first place to be deliberately annoying and they make it look incredibly unprofessional.

As for everything else, the non-Zelda sections should stay. And I've said this a million times, but the Zelda sections need to expand. We can't keep mashing everything together in one big super forum and expect that to turn out well. All that accomplishes is making it absurdly difficult to find anything interesting because it flies by too fast and only very popular stuff stays on the first page. More nuanced topics die extremely fast. Especially about games that are not the thing right now. We've had nonsense reason after nonsense reason for why it's done and it's never made sense and it certainly has never succeeded in boosting activity -- which was the most commonly cited reason why everything is forced into one amorphous blob, and ironically enough the lack of it being reason why the fate of the forum is being considered such a non-issue.

More subsections do you think? Upcoming game discussion separate to already released game discussion?

 

[Emma]

More subsections do you think? Upcoming game discussion separate to already released game discussion?

No matter how many times it was attempted and never worked, we have NEVER seen an increase in activity after merging a new game's forum into the main world of zelda. In fact we got a decrease in activity every single time. To the point where we're perhaps a third (i'm guessing roughly) as active as when I first became active here in 2010. This whole "it's not active enough to care about" mentality is the same backwards logic as cutting a school's funding if they aren't doing well enough according to No Child Left Behind. It makes the problem worse, not better. The constant failure to admit that these things just don't work is holding it back. Every single time we merged an older new game's forum into World of Zelda, I warned the staff it'll reduce our activity. They stubbornly refused to believe that, insisting that moving all those threads there would make it look more active and would encourage people to post. But it was going way too far and only made much harder for people to find something to post about, murdering our activity levels. And despite that having every damn time, the exact same logic was used to justify it the next time. We need to have a subsection for EVERY SINGLE GAME. Think that'll look too cluttered? That's what subsections are for, USE THEM, you can nest them if you need to.

Ugh.... I'm sorry, it just angers me that people use the consequences of their own poor decisions to justify making the exact same decision over and over again. It gets me flustered.

 

[Soul]

I agree with Matt here. I always thought it was weird how there weren't specific sections for older games.

 

[Djinn]

Breaking down the Zelda sections, while making things look nice and neat, do have a way of just killing the activity on all of them equally. It's partly not completely knowing what section to place X thread, and part just dropping everything into General Zelda because do not care enough to really bother discovering where it should go. So having a General Zelda, and an Upcoming Zelda that is retitled as soon as we learn it seems to work out best. We have played around with things like a division between Modern Zelda, Handheld Zelda, Classic Zelda etc.

My Ideal has always been

Zelda
General Zelda
Upcoming Zelda/WiiU
Game that have released within the last 2 years (TP HD/HW/TFH) Each could be their own section
Zelda Theory

Entertainment
General Discussion
General Gaming
General Pokemon
Science and Technology
Mature Discussion
Forum Games
Mafia
Roleplay

Creative Boards
Fanworks
>Drawings
Writing
Avatar/Sig

Community/Site
Community Central
Rules/Faq
Suggestions/Feedback
Competitions
Future Site Projects

Still, a slightly more streamlined method of dividing up the main series games could be done. But it generally adds confusion. Like people not knowing where classic ends and modern begins etc.

Thing is, lots of people among the staff want perfectly clean streamlines and everything kept in a single section without questions. Their last answer was to keep it all in a single section and then make a hard requirement of thread tags labeling each and every game. I hated those tags.

 

[Dan]

This emote stays no matter what > or there will be hell to pay.