Open conversations in the forum

Houdin

There has been a recent string of posts being dinged for being off topic, being merged together and a few other things.

I myself have fallen prey to these.

I would like to take a minute to give my opinion on this and get the opinion of all my fellow mtgpq family.

I really feel this road we seem to be going down completely ruins the free flow of ideas, the sense of family and the entire purpose of an open conversation forum.

Conversations are not linear. They do not run from point A to B without deviation.

Conversation is a fluid, ever-changing journey amongst people. This is what makes it great. That fluidity helps to spawn new ideas and new ways of looking at things.

Can you imagine having your mates over and halfway through a discussion someone sidebars because something said spawns a new thought. Suddenly a referee pops out of your loo and blows a penalty whistle?

I mean yeah hilarious but not realistic.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps all discussions we have here in the forums should be simply yes or no with an allowance to describe your reasoning and nothing else.

I realize fully that the forum rules state no spamming. The same rule also references that to advertising other games or other things.

Allowing a conversation to evolve or have the occasional sidebar is in my opinion the nature of conversation.

Thoughts?

Kinesia

Agreed. But there are problems in implementation.

We are all reading and responding to things at different times and places. At the moment noone else has replied to this, but it's entirely possible someone else will post something before I finish.

Internet conversations aren't linear at all, they are a mishmash by necessity.

Moving the bug reports to that section is great, but the links that stay here don't always work completely right.

Merging things is way more complicated and messes thing up, I can't really think of a _good_ solution though. It is a pain when there are 3 different conversations on the same thing and you're trying to bring points from one into another and the like... Maybe close the other conversations but have links to them in the one that's kept open, so you can still see them in their original form... Don't know.

I used to do creative collaborative writing on Usenet and some of this stuff we never worked out _good_ solutions for.

bk1234

[MOD NOTE]Moved to appropriate subforum. [//MOD NOTE]

Kinesia

The problem with Off Topic is that many people won't read it. We actually need feedback and solutions from the company too, but I only even knew it was probably here because I could anticipate this happening. Do the mods and company folk bother with Off Topic normally or are things ignored once they are "parked" here?

Many people will never know, but this is a relevant topic for everyone. How we all use the forum isn't relevant to the game but it's absolutely relevant to the forum and needs discussing by everyone.

khurram

Kinesia said:

The problem with Off Topic is that many people won't read it.

I think that's the point. 
Of course this post had to be banished here.

Houdin

Hmm.
A post about the forum it was posted in being removed from the forum it was posted in for being off topic.
Hmmm I must be confused by what the term off topic means

Kinesia

There are existing posts that are still there, sorted in the "last top ten" that are far more off topic than this.

And talking about such inconsistencies is also on topic.

Laeuftbeidir

Don't forget that you're not allowed to question /comment such decisions

Kinesia

Laeuftbeidir said:

Don't forget that you're not allowed to question /comment such decisions

Heh. Carefully avoided giving examples. I'd much rather talk general principles anyway. I don't care about current specifics, I care about long term policy and getting that aligned with the people who are going to run foul of such.

When my kids do something wrong I'm not trying to punish them for that infraction, I'm trying to teach them _why_ it's a problem so it never comes up again.

Just moving things to off-topic and not leaving a link in the original place means that 100 people might independantly post the same thing because not a single one realises this has been brought up before because it's been obfuscated and hidden away instead of openly dealt with.

In terms of fixing the forums long term to be the way the company wants, this isn't the path.


Also, not actually forcing people to use the Events, Coalitions and Tips forums also seems to be not doing things in their own best interest.

Sarahschmara

I think this is one of the reasons so many of us hold most of our conversations in third party chat apps. 

Conversations are living things and it can be really frustrating to be “dinged” for infractions that aren’t evenly enforced. It’s especially frustrating to be lectured on forum rules by those that openly flout them. 

broll

The forums didn't used to be like this.  When I first started I feel like they were less controlled and they were also far busier...  Maybe there's a correlation there....

When they switched over to this new forum (which was a major downgrade and still is sub par to the original) they started over-enforcing rules a lot.  They've backed down on that some, but it still feels like it stifles a lot and really nerfs these forums.  

Sorin81

Amazingly, this off topic conversation has still managed to generate a bit of traffic. 

And yes sir, I would like a peanut.