TT Forum Features
I was just wondering something... I heard there was once upon a time, when I wasnt on these forums yet, a dislike option... I'm surely glad that's gone, but i've been thinking about something that I thought would be really cool... Why donesn't someone, whoever's doing the website design and all that stuff, add a 'add friends' option... Nothin original, but I think it'd be pretty cewl... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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If I recall correctly, there was once a friendship system (or something similar). Don't quote me on that though.
There was friends on the old vBulletin boards but there hasn't been anything similar since they updated to the current Vanilla forum.
Around September 2013 (like a few months before Wolf and Dead Season 2), the first iteration of this current forum was released and a downvoting system was indeed one of the features. However, people mostly abused it and it caused lots of threads to be derailed when people would literally create several alternate accounts just to downvote random posts to irritate people (and back then, we didn't have the tools we have now to track alternate accounts). Whenever somebody defended an opinion of theirs that wasn't held by the majority, people accused them of only being mad and defensive because they got downvoted. On top of that, it also led to a few instances of people spamming gifs to "combat" downvotes. In one thread on the Walking Dead forums, I remember people ended up posting two to three entire pages consisting of literally nothing else but gifs about "fighting off" downvotes.
It also didn't help that people couldn't agree on when to downvote a post. Some people downvoted if you were being a troll or spamming, others downvoted if they didn't personally like what someone said, while others downvoted if you posted incorrect information. Needless to say, it led to a bunch of confusion when people had different standards, and it was especially annoying when people derailed an actual discussion to talk about downvotes. I think they ended up being removed around last Summer before one of the last two episodes of Wolf.
In the previous forum software, there was a "friend" feature, but it didn't do much. It showed everyone who your "friends" were, it put a "+" sign by their name in the list of online users, and later, when they were running an experiment, it showed when your friends were currently playing a Telltale game and what they were playing.
If a new friends feature were installed on these forums, I imagine one thing they could do is create another type of event feed that simply showed all of the posts your friends made, so you could see if they were involved in some discussion you haven't been reading (but should).
(And while they're creating new event feeds, they should separate the private messages out of the main one....)
Goddamn
I remember when I joined that's when downvotes went away, I remember seeing a ton of post saying "They wished the downvotes were back" and I was just here like
There were down votes once. The reason they were disabled was because people were spamming the hell out of them. I couldn't be more glad that they were gone.
best thing they could have done
Hehe, I remember that. Sorry for causing you a headache back then.
I think a progression system would be cool, kind of like the Activision forums. As you get 'likes', make discussions, post comments (and in their forums get answers marked correct or helpful), you earn 'experience' or 'points' and level up through time. It encourages discussion and for people to provide well intended/helpful answers. As well as this, you get a fancy number or even badge (well...not so fancy if you just joined up), to show how much you contribute to the forum community...and even long term forum users/vets, a sense of respect.
That's kinda cool.
I hope you're reading this, Telltale. It sounds pretty cool.
That sounds pretty awesome
Progressive rank systems are pretty cool. Double Fine has one too, and theirs is fun because the ranks are humorous, and it's fun to see what the different ranks are as people climb up them.
Back in the early 2000's, I had a friend that wrote forum software that also had ranks, but the ranks were accompanied by little animated gifs that represented the rank. His forum had ranks that corresponded to enemy characters from the Super Mario series, and I set up a forum using his software that represented ranks with Sonic enemies instead.
If Telltale could set something like that up here, that would be a lot of fun. Although it might be harder for them to do, as they have had to remove the art for Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures from that forum when they lost the rights, so if they lost the rights for any of the characters, they'd have to legally remove them from the forum too. They could keep it to just their original characters though, as it seems they retain rights to those (Reginald Van Wilson from Tales of Monkey Island and Monty Muzzle from Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures showed up in Poker Night at the Inventory, and Doug and the Save Lot Bandits showed up in Poker Night 2).
Huh, I never knew that. I picked Wallace before they lost the rights and it never changed. I guess my account is unique lol.
Yeah. The Wallace & Gromit forum art wasn't up for very long, so it's not a surprise that it wasn't noticed by most people.
This is what the Wallace & Gromit forum header looked like before they lost the rights:
This is what the Wallace & Gromit forum header looks like now:
And this was the forum background before they lost the rights. Now the background is just blank.
I had always wondered why that was the only section that had nothing on top of it.
When you make a thread to bring back downvotes and a year later half the forum doesn't even know they existed. Honestly I didn't see much harm in it, I understand where the mods were coming from but people can use fake accounts to upvote and if there's no negativity then I'd rather just get rid of the positivity and have no voting system at all. If you like a post then comment on why, if you don't like it comment on why. Simple as that. Or if you're lazy bring back the downvotes so you can express opinion by pressing a button and adding to the like/dislike number which no one should take seriously. Also according to the poll in the thread the majority wanted it back, but that was a year ago so the results may not be the same now unfortunately.
So I'm pretty much the guy behind the door when I asked for downvotes back.
As for the friends idea. Why not just get Steam, there's a lot of people from the forum on it and there's even a Telltale Forum Group. Just a suggestion.
We also had the problem with people using downvoting as a means of internet activism. They were protesting the system by using it against Telltale staff, by downvoting every post that they made, regardless of content. The fact that they were openly admitting to downvoting this way made things chaos, as people were panicking because they knew that there were people deliberately downvoting specific people for any post that they made, without any regard as to the content of the post they were downvoting.
There was no system in place for the moderators, or even Telltale staff, to check and see that these people really were only downvoting Telltale staff. Because of the lack of tools to keep track of downvotes, we couldn't calm the worries of the people who were nervous about the people bragging about downvote protesting. It was impossible to tell people that that any downvoting protests weren't being targeted at anyone other than the Telltale staff, and that people weren't downvote trolling regular users in this way, since we couldn't be sure of it ourselves.
It was an environment of chaos and panic, and because of that, the forum wasn't fun for most people. I'm really glad they are gone. The downsides of the downvote system far outweighed the good.
I don't see how it matters though. Nobody is getting hurt. If people are overreacting and panicking because of people pressing a button then people need a reality check. If it really was that much of an issue then a system should have been put in place to ban those who incited this chaos via downvotes. I disagree in allowing letting a few bad apples remove the option to downvote for the whole community, but that's just my opinion and it's gone now so I apologize for bringing up that in which cannot be brought back.
I agree that people shouldn't be worried about such a thing. The fact of the matter is, a lot of people were, and that panicking just wasn't going away with time no matter how much the moderators and other people told the people panicking not to worry about it. It wasn't just teething pains with a new system either, as they had well over a year to get used to it, but they never did. In the end, any change in the forum has to make the forum enjoyable for everyone. There were a lot of changes in the forum that people didn't like at first, but the Telltale team gave all of the changes well over a year to test before they made changes.
The most controversial change in the forums was the threaded post system, and over time, people became used to it, and now some people even prefer it over the regular system (I hated it at first, but I'm pretty much neutral about it now. The only thing I don't like about it is that it has some problems on the moderation side regarding issues with the flagging system, but for posting it does it's job relatively well - especially now that they have an autoquote system in place in the classic, unthreaded conversations that were created in the old forum).
After giving the other controversial change over a year to test out though, the chaos didn't die down. The majority of people still panicked about the downvote system, and, as was pointed out above, there were times when a whole page, or more, of a thread consisted of nothing but people worrying about the downvotes. That made the forum tedious, and not fun, for both the people who were worrying about the downvotes, and those who didn't care, since those who didn't care had to go into a forum that consisted of nothing but people worrying about the downvotes. Since the forum wasn't fun for anyone, and the situation was given a long time for people to get used to it, but they never did, removing the downvote feature was the right thing to do. The downvote feature just didn't jive well with the majority of the Telltale fanbase, and after the lengthy testing period, it was clear that it never would.
In addition to what Jennifer said, people could never agree on what down voting a post meant. Because people had different standards, most people took it personally if they were downvoted by others who went by their own standards. It had too vague of a meaning on whether people should down vote because they disagreed with you, because you posted incorrect information, because you were trolling, or because they personally did not like what you said. For all the trouble it brought, I don't think it's worth the time to dwell on how it could be improved if it was brought back - even if tools were added to prevent abuse.
Not to mention - in the absence of down voting, you actually have to explain and clarify to someone that you disagree with them/they are trolling/you personally disagree with them/they posted incorrect information. The ambiguity is gone and it actually adds to the conversation.
That moment when I realize I've been here since 2012
I hope they sort out the distribution rights one day. Its a great game and its a real shame that you can't buy it from Steam or GOG or something. I know that you can find it on Amazon or ebay for cheap, but still.
As an aside, the CSI forum also has just a text header with no graphics, but this one's a bit strange as it's actually not shown in the forum list. However, it actually is still active, unlike the King's Quest forum which is closed to new threads (since Telltale lost the rights to that franchise before they could release their King's Quest game).