I believe what Caithness is getting at is not a subforum dedicated to 20G ARS strategies, but a subforum on strategies in general. I really believe such a subforum would be a benefit for us and the wiki since no one really digresses about strategies in General. It was the same for record threads. Before there was a subforum, people were more cautious about making record threads in fear that it would clog General. With the current state of things, strategies on the wiki are rarely discussed on the forum before they are added. Most of the discussion takes place on IRC but even that is only a portion of what is actually added. We end up excluding some of the forum visitors from the discussion. We're lucky if a forum visitor who looks through the wiki brings up a discussion (I'm looking at you zaphod).
What would it take to have you reconsider? Me pushing all the topics in General to page 2 with strategy topics? In all honesty, I really see this as a big step forward to promoting wiki completeness. The wiki right now is not truly community focused. Only a few regulars end up editing the articles there with little input from others. If we want to attract more contributors, we need to actually reach out to the vast amount of forum visitors.
There's simply not enough activity to justify a separate forum just for strategy. I don't see why you guys just can't discuss the article in one thread. It's really not a big a difference as you're making it out to be.
That's the problem. There's not enough activity because people don't know where to post such topics. They may be too specific to warrant a thread of their own in General. Some discussion may end up in the records thread where they are eventually buried (due to decentralization) and nothing is contributed to the wiki. This issue does not only have to do with this thread. It applies to every game.
extra forum would be... extra... just do it in long threads like this and, if you really need to, encourage people to make new threads for seemingly small questions or ideas.
Perhaps you'd like me to entertain you with a full page worth of different strategy topics in General? This is not about making a subforum for this thread alone.
You're exagerating a bit there, DIGITAL. Even if you've got plenty of ideas, the quality of discussion would be low if we talked about everything at once. I agree 100% with caffeine on this issue... There should never be a new sub forum unless posts in the main forum clearly show they could fill it up. And for the foreseeable future, I think the current setup would be just fine for strategy discussions.
Well, just a "General Discussion" and "Records", to me, seems a bit minimalist. I realise the wiki has talk pages, but the forum is much more natural for discussion than MediaWiki's awkward editing-a-page-to-discuss-something metaphor. Also, I wouldn't want to check both the wiki talk pages and the forum if I could just check the forum and be done in one go. I can really relate to Digital's vision on the matter. Having an actual section for strategy, techniques and special moves would be motivating for people to contribute. People are more likely to point out that something needs updating, rather than updating it themselves. This goes for the entire wiki. That said, maybe it could be a possibility to have a "Wiki discussion" subforum and have the wiki "talk" link link to that forum instead. That way you don't have two separate site sections that both function for discussing something.
No one said that we would talk about everything at once. I don't see everyone posting in every records topic. I don't see everyone posting in every general topic. The function of a subforum is to house topics of the same nature. Topics will grow and become more sophisticated as the forum posters continue to add to it. They don't pop up out of thin air nor will they grow if you don't give them room. All I'm asking is for us to take the initiative, not wait until it's blown out of proportion and then seek amends.
Regardless of whether or not people think a strategy subforum would be nice, it looks like we're not going to get one in the foreseeable future, so we'll have to make do with what we've got. DIGITAL, you do make a reasonable argument, and I know opinions are quite divided on this. Perhaps you might want to start a thread for people to post their thoughts on how to improve forum structure.
Here's an idea. Why are we attacking this issue passively? Why not make the subforum and if it doesn't live up to its expectation, remove it. Simple as that. It's the wiki philosophy.
i want the strategy and technique discussions to be in General Discussion. that's prime time for me. i didn't want to do the records thread, and we did it anyway, so just give it some time. let's see how the records subforum does in the long run before we get all hasty. you start making subforums for this and that, and eventually you've just got a bunch of empty subforums that confuses people who are already intimidated by TC's very esoteric discussions.
I find this to be a reasonable solution. I rarely post, mostly because the main center of discussion is usually heboris and the like, and me with only TDS background, I usually have little to say when it comes down to sheer discussion. But if there were strategy threads, then I think I'd be a bit more active as far as making posts are concerned.
If the reasoning is wanting to see how the records section will do in the long run before making further changes, I can live with that. But with the previous lines of reasoning, I can't help but disagree with.
i envision the records forum being eventually replaced by an actual set of scoreboards with form submission and a comments section for each record. and then we'd be back to one general forum for further discussion. right now we need the records forum because no one has taken it upon themselves to finish building a scoreboard. tetris: strategy discussion is general discussion.
I agree that such a system of records would be a step up. Like how I want an automatic system for sorting videos, replays, game plugins/settings, etc. General Discussion however is a very different beast. It's a vague concept even when constrained within the realm of tetris related discussion. Yes, many things fit under general but is it a good idea to bunch them all together? Strategies, theoretical discussion, gaming news, etc. You're just making it harder to distinguish between one and the other.
I think reasoning for keeping everything "bunched up" is that if we do in fact diversify all threads in the general discussion, then the general discussion will have no meaning, as everything will fit into different categories, and the only thing that will be left in the general discussion will be threads that don't have enough content to have its own sub-category and threads posted by newbs (not noobs, theres a difference) that didn't know where to post. I realize that this is only addressing one new sub-category, but I think that this will become a trend, to neatly organize everything.
Yes, definitely. We're afraid of spreading everything too thin. But have we considered that we might be thinner as a direct result of not spreading out?
