First off, sorry I wasn't around. My 4 month old got pneumonia so the forums themselves weren't exactly on my mind the last few days.
Oh ****.
@Satan do you have am archive of these bad boys? STOP THE MERGER
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.
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.
Emotes are something always up for conversation. I initially thought we'd just keep all of the ones here and simply import some of the old ZI emotes. But obviously ZI never had a chat box on it, so we didn't have to deal with emote spamming. It is entirely possible that some of the chat box options for IPB have the ability to block all or some emotes from being used in just the chat box, which may solve many of the issues people brought up.
My suggestion is to keep the forum exactly like this one, much better than the current ZI board.
The current ZI board isn't necessarily indicative of anything. It's not even out of Beta.
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.
Things were consolidated for activity purposes alone. We use to have things expanded like that in years past. However, 3 or 4 sections that are completely dead are extremely unattractive to new users. It makes the forums overall look dead and drives new users away. Assuming these boards are active, there is no reason for them to vanish.
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.
We don't need boards for every game. If that's where you're going, that's absurd. 50% or more of the boards would be dead 90% of the year if not more. Dead boards = lack of driving new user activity. If a forum looks dead to an onlooker, they are far less likely to join. Now if there are 10 dead boards, they aren't even going to bother to look elsewhere. The idea that forums need to be expanded into 50 boards is an archaic one. The more spread out the activity is, the less people are going to join to use them. There is a direct correlation between new user activity levels and signups and dead forums.
As for more "nuanced discussions move to page two" - pages exist for a reason, like you can go them. But beyond that, the most active board in terms of pure number of topics actually posted in this month is the World of Zelda board. It has 5 or 6 topics that basically haven't been posted in in two weeks on the front. That to me tells me that there isn't even enough active conversations happening to support a full page, let alone worrying about "consolidation leading to lost topics". You already don't have that many boards and none of them are overly active save a handful of threads.
While the proposal and goal now is to maintain all ZD structure with some slight renaming where needed, I do propose a more ZI like setup for consideration. We have 5 boards to your six, but new boards are never needed to be created or deleted. It's a very simple setup - Future Zelda game talk (yet to be released games), Home Console, Handheld (can change this to some sort of different organiation method if you prefer), Theories, and General Zelda.
The idea here is that really, there is no single game that can actually properly support full board activity levels of a truly active page one. Not even Zelda U. But, if you consolidate future Zelda talks together, that allows TPHD and Zelda U talk to exist together, creating a more full and active single board for that talk. Obviously once TPHD releases, any currently active threads move to home console discussion with ghost links left behind.
Home console is self explanitory. So is handheld. But those dedfinitions and names can change to whatever. 2D/3D, however people want to work out it out. But generally, 2D Zelda games are talked about less - so they don't need individual boards. But one board for all of that chatter is better. 3D games are talked about more, but none can support a board on their own as it stands right now today. None of them.
So, while I accept my ideas probably will never be used, the very best and most active forums in the world consolidate down to similar measures because it drives further activity levels higher. It's not like I'm saying "let's be NeoGAF and put it all in one board" - that's silly. We're a very specific game driven place. You can split up the convos. But split it too far and no one new is going to bother anymore and you're left with a forum that has a ton of scrolling and 4 active boards.
I never liked how you folks made boards for newer games tbh. It seems redundant. A future games sectiont akes care of all of that naturally.
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.
This is why you don't merge anything into world of zelda (basically, a general zelda chat area). This is why I like ZI's structure better in this case. There is no new boards to make and merge down the road. THe paths to disucssing the games you care about are very, very clear.
I agree with Matt here. I always thought it was weird how there weren't specific sections for older games.
Again, the issue here is that the forum gets cluttered with inactive boards. I've seen other places try this and it just killed off the whole forum. A smaller, more compact but direct forum in general, leads to increased new user activity and growth. It's hard to sell a place with 20+ boards and only 4 of them actively being used.
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.
I'm only going to focus on the Zelda sections for now, but I will say I think ZD has a few too many boards outside of the Zelda area. As an example - does Science and Technology need to really exist? It has 1 active thread this motnh and 2 all year, and many that haven't been touched since January 2015. What's the purpose of keeping that section there? Forum tutorials and FAQ too could easily find a way to consolidate into the feedback area (and you can make rules appear on every single forum in IPB easily). It's barely active and creates scrolling,a nd it's purpose crosses over a lot with feedback and suggestions. Mafia hasn't been used in ages - I'd say can it, but if the communtiy wants to bring it back, cool. Just noting that no one is really using it at all.
As for the Zelda boards - I outlined my ideals for it already earlier in this post. Feel free to look and tell me what you think! (remember, nothing is actually planned to change at all, these are just my suggestions). I think they mesh well with your thought process though.
Uh... I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be rude. But honestly, this is getting ridiculous. I'm going to repeat this one more time. So I'm sure no one is missing what I have said. We have tried merging sections before. Many times. You've been among those who always suggested merging them to increase activity and it's ALWAYS had the exact opposite effect. I'm sorry, but you don't exactly have a good track record of getting this particular consequence correct. It's always precisely the opposite you claim it's going to be and you keep suggesting it the next time despite it not working the any of the previous times.
Given how the existence of this forum is being threatened by low activity, I don't see the harm of abandoning the traditional assumption of mergers = more activity. Because it clearly doesn't do that. Honestly, what's the harm in trying it for a while? It's not like things can get worse. We are essentially being shut down for being too inactive. Regardless of what anyone wants to call it.
The forums low activity level is the exact reason so many boards should be around - however, the idea has nothing to do with users that are here. It's driving new users here. See, in the past ZD the site has basically ignored the boards because well, they weren't that important to Mases on the whole. They ARE important to me in my efforts of solidfying the ZI community. That means I need to drive users to boards that actually are active. When they see 50 dead boards, they are running away. Whne they see a mile long forum scroll list, they are running away. Too many boards drives away new users. If the boards activity is low (say, you only have 40 members), than this discussion should be less about what our personal desires are and more about what we think will appeal the most to new viewers.Because those are the ones we want to nab and those are the ones that will increase the amount of activity.
Will the forum layout be similar to this one or ZI's?
There will be one for ZD and one for ZI. What shape these layouts take are not really known yet, only the color schemes are.
