Have all the "Official X Threads" hurt forum participation?

[dsheinem]

I’d just point out that when political discussion was allowed the forums were doing just fine. Some of those threads that casterofdreams posted in that little fit of drama had scores and scores of pages of discussion/debate with a lot of different people chiming in. That kind of discussion - specifically the way that we could typically engage in politics in a productive way - was a draw of these forums and an advantage that they had over other competitors at the time.

I don’t think the ban on politics has been the only/main cause of a decline in forum participation, but it does correlate with it.

[MrPopo]

So there are issues I see.
2. Clicking on New Posts does not show new posts. It constantly clears itself and says, "There are no new posts" or shows 1 or 2 posts before going back to there being no new posts.

Unfortunately, the button is working.

[BogusMeatFactory]

So there are issues I see.
2. Clicking on New Posts does not show new posts. It constantly clears itself and says, "There are no new posts" or shows 1 or 2 posts before going back to there being no new posts.

Unfortunately, the button is working.

But I'll see new posts there one minute and not the next is it based on a timer? Like if no new posts are done in the last hour nothing shows up?

[MrPopo]

As far as I'm aware, when you hit new posts it flags those threads as "user is aware there were new posts", then they get cleared from new posts on a timer. Otherwise, if there's a thread that has new posts that you don't visit it would clog up that view forever.

[marurun]

I use View Unread, because I read everything. And it remembers.

[Gunstar Green]

Slack, the chat app the forum uses to communicate, turned into something utterly unbearable. I’m not here to mention names, but I don’t understand how one minute we talk about some new release of a game, for example, and the next we have a particular individual or two drop the “fuck Trump” comment just like that. This has taken place in the topic marked as “General,” not the one marked “politics.” Why? How do we go from point A to point B in a matter of seconds? I had to delete the app.

People who chat almost literally every day are going to end up veering off into tangents and get into arguments or discuss current events. There have been a few times in Slack where even I've had to say "maybe this should be in the politics channel" but sometimes shit happens. I'd say I'm sorry you found it unbearable and if I played any part in that I apologize, but it really doesn't matter. I would never blame anyone for avoiding something that pisses them off.

[pierrot]

I don't think that many were "chased off due to the politics thread". But there was a chunk who left because we kept having the temerity to mix in retro game talk with modern game talk.

Unfortunately, I think they were both somewhat equally damaging, and also mildly interconnected. I also feel that a number of members began retreating into the Slack around a similar time period, and I think that's pretty much where we are now.

I don't think it really gets much more complicated than that, other than that a lot of the remaining members don't have as much free time, and have been through the 500 previous conversations about The Legend of Zelda, or Sonic the Hedgehog. I don't feel like my personal posting habits have necessarily changed too dramatically--I feel like I've always been a bit of a sporadic participant--but there are likely a lot more family men here than there used to be, and a lot less of anything else. It probably does end up being a fair amount of shouting into the void, because what else is there to say about the classics other than one's personal experiences with them, for the first time, or more likely the tenth time. That might even be why conversations now seem to stray more towards modern games; They're at least more fresh, and maybe more fertile grounds for conversation. I'm even kind of tired of denouncing the SNES RPG library, at this point, even though Earthbound is one of the worst games I've ever played in my life, and doesn't have a single redeeming quality.

If you asked me, caster--which you didn't, but if you did--I don't see any reason you couldn't still hang out around here. It's your life, though. Do what you want. I have to say that Luke's, and caster's posts probably highlight why I never spent a great deal of time in the off-topic section of the forum. All that aside, "Covfefe" is one of the greatest memes of the last decade, and I will not allow anyone to insinuate otherwise. It's up there with a certain someone having a dude's shoes thrown at him.

[Nintendork666]

Racketboy legit has 32 sub-forums.

Do we even have 32 active members?

[Ziggy]

We lost a lot of regulars due to hurt feelings and disagreements. But this much we already knew. The purpose of this thread was to point out something that wasn't obvious. And, moreover, to do something about it. To say, "That's just the way it is," is to say, "I'm OK with it." Well, I'm not OK with it. I want to see this forum be more active again.

Take the time out to compliment folks, bring them up instead of tearing them down. It isn't always about debate and intellectual discourse. That stuff is exhausting and comes off as combative in the end. Sure, those things are important to have, but it seems like any actual talk we have is a debate and two sides just saying their opinion over and over again. It is never about active engagement with each other. It is just people talking to the void.

I'm quoting this in large text because I feel strongly that it's such a great point.

[marurun]

I will open a new thread sometime today in the Racketboy suggestions forum about changing the sub-forum structure. We can try to come up with a good proposal and submit it to
RB for consideration.

Now, this is a big change, because it will also involve merging existing sub forums, so nobody should expect anything overnight. But we can at least start talking about what we want to see.