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The only worry I have is in creating divisions within the HG community by having subfora for some authors but not for others.

This was done already within the CoG structure by giving early titles (Choice of the Vampire/Dragon) and Hero’s Rise their own subforum - so, would this mean every author should get a sub-forum of their own?

Edit:

I apologize for taking things wrong then; I thought that directed to me, since I was the only one seemingly to disagree with the decision who was posting.

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I like to believe I’d be extra clear if I was referring to you as an individual, in topics like these I will generally argue with the collective “you”.

If at any point I’m am not clear I’ll be happy to clarify either way.

There’d have to be hard-and-fast criteria for who qualifies and who doesn’t (a WIP or published work with a main thread longer than 10k posts, for example), although those would have their own issues.

It’s still something I’d rather have than a setup like serial threads, which combine most of the disadvantages of the single monster thread (difficulty of navigation, the confusion of having multiple discussions in the same thread and so on) with a few new ones (the search function becomes less useful when you have to search multiple serial threads, for example).

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It sounds like you need a wiki…?

I have a wiki already.

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I don’t mind with this, actually.
If authors need their own sub-forum, that means their story universe is big enough that it deserves its own sub-forum to make discussion easier to manage.

But I’m speaking for myself, here. Take it with a dose of salt.

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I tend to dislike live chatrooms, they only enable me to “chat” with people in my own time zone, or those with divergent schedules, people often type fast and sloppy and use incomprehensible acronyms in those, making it more difficult to read and when I am caught up I often discover that…ping, ping, ping the discussion has now moved on they’re discussing something else and my chance to speak up has passed.
That said for really one on one online conversations they have their uses (assuming it is a conversation whose contents you wouldn’t like to link back to at some point in the future) but when it is four or more people it can all become a bit chaotic and not-fun for me.
For something like Guns of Infinity having to take most of the discussion to a chatroom would be a nightmare for me, so I’d simply stop participating altogether.

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I don’t dislike live chatrooms but I do I agree with you. It is quite off-putting that there’s a topic you want to join in but upon discovering that everybody has already moved on from the topic makes me seems out of place. DX And with the timezone difference makes it more harder to connect with the rest.

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The issue for me is communication. At my job we build databases for researchers. If we plan to change any configuration, we notify our clients and help them determine impact, no matter how small or how large the client. If a client voiced their opinion that the change doesn’t work for them, it becomes a discussion. Discourse did not seem to do that.

It makes me worried they may do it again. Maybe next time the names of our threads are too long or too similar. Or maybe we have too many concurrent threads. Or our font is too Arial. Who knows?

A thread like mine or Cataphrak’s takes time to manage and recreate. It’s not terribly time consuming but it’s one more thing to do.

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I feel like they’re not ideal for “broad” communities with a lot of uniquely different people with different skills and interests across different time-zones. I certainly loved it when some of my college professors used to use them for “digital question hour”. But then it was for tightly regulated topics with people who all use the same acronyms and know what they mean. I wouldn’t like to subject you to streams of incomprehensible Dutch legal acronyms for example and there would be a very real barrier for me to jump into a chatroom of classic car restoration enthusiasts who all type fast and sloppy and use their own incomprehensible (to me) “professional” acronyms.
Like I said I mostly tend to use them if I want to talk to one, at most two other persons who are online at the same time as me and when the subject is too light or inconsequential to take it to email.

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Aw, you missed a great chance to say “Discourse don’t engage in that kind of discourse…” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Is that right? It’s not at all clear to me that megatopics are more inviting to new users than rebooted topics, especially if the rebooted topics start with a summary.

I should point out that the Discourse team advised me that authors should lock and reboot their thread on every major content update, e.g. when a new chapter is out, etc. precisely to make it easier for new users to engage, to say “you don’t have to read all of the stuff in that old thread; you can just engage here with the current content in the current thread.”

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A few of y’all have said nice things about the idea of having a sub category for each of the megatopic games, but expressed concern about how we would make that fair. (Who’s allowed to have a sub category? Just anybody with a WIP? Everybody with a finished game?)

An obvious answer would be to say “if your game thread gets to be larger than X posts, then your game gets its own sub category.” I think there’s some risk that this encourages gaming the system, for fans of the game to deliberately fill the thread with low-quality posts just to earn their own category as a badge of honor.

My intuition, if we go with sub categories, is something like: “if you’ve shipped a game, reboot your WIP thread as a finished-game thread. If that thread gets to be larger than X posts, where X is not that big, like, 500 posts, you get the option of having a sub-category.”

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Seeing as we have no choice, I think at least the thread continuation could be automated…

  1. Auto-close
  2. Auto-create
  3. Post “Continue discussion [here]” link to original thread
  4. Post blank [summary] post for author or mod to summarize the new thread

Sub forums are a good idea, though I agree the criteria to qualify has to be solid/agreeable.

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If you do go with this, would it also apply retroactively? For example, the Sabres of Infinity thread I posted post release has about 2000 posts in it, and maybe 65% of the Guns of Infinity megathread consists of posts made after release.

I think so? For series, it seems plausible to have one category for the series, so we’d move the Sabres thread into the “Inifinity” category and probably lock it…?

If possible, I think a subforum for the entire Dragoon Saga would be ideal, since I’ll have to put up new threads for Lords of Infinity in a few months anyhow.

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At the very least subcategories would allow for wikis/faqs to be stickied at the top, hopefully reducing the amount of redundant questions you receive @Cataphrak.

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This would work for the Zombie Exodus series as well.

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More sub-forums can have the effect of creating “tribes” on the forum though, particularly if it closes people off to seeing new WIP’s the main strength of this forum. I mean if it was just for say Cataphrak’s works I would have no objection to just joining new forums at Cataphrak.com . The drawback is Cata would have to manage them somehow and they’d have an even more limited reach. But like I said game specific forums and both Obscurasoft (coming out on top) and Aly of Seven Kingdoms fame have gone the route of having their own forums as well as at least two other visual novel game I’ve backed in the past and it seems to be a popular tactic for visual novel creators for fan/backer outreach.

On the other hand the main advantage here is that at the moment (almost) all Choice games have a forum presence here, which is something the visual novel games world very much lacks.

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