General "State of the Forum"/Self aware Discussion about the Community
Blind Sniper
Moderator
Hey guys! I'm trying out something new. Just to be clear, this is only my own personal thread I made as a volunteer Moderator - this is not an official thread from Telltale. That being said, this thread is for self aware/"meta" discussion about the forums in general, and is a place where we can hopefully spitball ideas with each other to make discussions on the forum more interesting to participate in. This thread is not for discussion about particular moderation choices in specific threads, or complaints about specific users/threads/etc. Please keep discussion focused on things about the forums in general.
As community moderators for Telltale, there are certain things we cannot disclose for privacy reasons, but despite that, we are open to feedback for various things.
Potential ideas for discussion:
- Ideas on how to make a push for more interesting discussions in the community
- Discussion about various community trends on the forums
- Report any potential errors on the forums
- Asking for clarification on certain forum rules/how to go about doing something on the forums
- Suggestions for new/updated Forum Guidelines
- Ideas and feedback for new forum changes/updates we can potentially send as feedback
- Introduce any new moderators we get in the future
The rules:
- Do not use this thread to complain about specific threads/users/moderators/staff members/etc. This thread is for general discussion on things like improving the forums on the community side of things, as opposed to the technical side of things.
- Do not use this thread to "report" specific users/threads that need attention. If something needs attention, please flag those posts or send a Private Discussion to a volunteer Moderator. This thread is not for alerting moderators to specific situations. Flagging posts and/or sending Private Discussions is the most helpful way to get our attention.
- This thread is not for commentary or inquiries on (specific) moderation choices, such as asking why a user was banned, or why threads were locked/sunk/merged/etc. As community moderators for Telltale, there are certain things we cannot disclose for privacy reasons. This thread is for discussing the state of the forums in general - it is not for inquiring why users were banned or why a thread was locked.
[We may update this thread with more topics in the future, but feel free to offer feedback or start a conversation on some other forum trend...]
Comments
We want your input on a few things...
Ideas for encouraging more interesting discussions on the forums
As of late, some have noticed that other users aren't really focusing as much on actual discussions as they had before. There's been more of a push towards meme responses/gifs/videos/etc in place of normal discussion, and larger threads like shipping threads can sometimes eclipse normal threads. What would you guys like to see us do as moderators to make an effort to push towards more actual discussions in place of people focusing mainly on jokes/memes/etc? Just to be clear, posting memes/etc is OK and we aren't going to ban memes, we just want to make more of a push for people to have normal discussions first. Do you want us to flag certain types of posts for not contributing to actual discussion? Do you want us to ask people to stay on topic more? Have any other ideas in general? We are open to feedback.
Pre-Season News threads versus Waiting Threads
In the past, we've tried a few different things with waiting threads.
Currently, I don't intend to go back to making general waiting threads like we had for Season 3 as I feel that it was too early (and users had agreed). But, my current idea was to make news threads before the Season premieres. These are similar to waiting threads, but they are locked so that people can make their own threads to discuss news instead of having one large thread with filler discussion about waiting for the game a long time before it premieres. Do you guys like this idea, or would you rather have the pre-season news threads be open, but with some extra rules to keep thread discussion focused than a waiting thread?
Encouraging more civil debates for social issues/etc on the Forums
A while back, Jennifer wrote up a "Telltale Community Guide to Decency" to be used for threads discussing social issues or other similar threads. The Community Guide is not an official part of the Forum Guidelines, but rather, they are our own pointers on how to have civil discussions that allow you guys to share constructive criticisms on ideas in a respectful way that still follows the Forum Guidelines. How would you guys recommend that we implement the Community Guide to Decency in threads that discuss social issues, the news, etc? Should we post it as a stickied thread?
I kinda feel like everyone stopped actually discussing Telltale during the break between Minecraft ep 4 to Michonne, and it became a habit because there wasn't anything happening or to talk about. So, I guess until something happens that will spark more discussion about an actual Telltale episode, there's not much anyone can do to make people focus about the game. Although the random threads that are made that seem to be some joke/not a very serious question/ get derailed is seeming to happen alot around here.
Yeah. I think Batman and Season 3 will help with that. Even so, though, I'm just throwing this thread out as a way for you guys to give idea, feedback, etc we could potentially use for the future.
So, I'll go out of my way to give my opinion on this matter:
In my opinion, you should leave the people be. Yes I know that shipping/meme/joking threads can get annoying from time to time, but enforcing more rules won't really help anything. It's better if you just let the people be.
However, I think you should still take an action in case of a thread getting derailed, drama happening, filler comments... etc. This would still help us have better discussions.
Also, I've had a new idea recently, you'll have to contact Telltale themselves about it though. It goes like this:
I've noticed lately that threads with a large following (kinda like a cult) tend to get derailed very often that it actually overshadows other interesting posts, so how about this?
How about making the creators of large threads like this moderate their own threads? Basically they could have all the privileges that an actual mod has (except for banning users), but they can only do this in their own threads. If you remember, we had something similar to this in the "Rhyiona" thread a while back where the thread just became a big chatbox with nothing useful to discuss, so we had to get you and @InGen_Nate_Kenny to moderate the thread for us for a while until things calmed down. So why not make Green do it himself and control the thread? Think about it and tell me.
I actually like this idea, a sticky news thread that can only be edited by a mod, so people would have to make their own discussion threads to talk about it. I can get behind this.
I've already been doing it with Batman, and I retroactively changed Game of Throne's Season 2 Waiting Thread to a general discussion thread while making a separate News thread too. I'm trying that out for the next few games, and another mod or I can make the normal Episode 1 waiting thread a month or two before launch as we did before.
Nice! I wanna see how this works out. It should significantly reduce the amount of useless comments.. hopefully.
I would recommend the sticky.
If someone gets out of line, a mod could refer them to that post while, or instead of deleting a comment.
I don't think that would be possible with the forum software. Even if it was, it probably would not be a very good idea as I can imagine some small niche of people would try to find ways to exploit that small amount of power, and it would confuse some users due to potentially conflicting messages between actual mods and thread owners. I've already encourage Green13 to flag posts whenever they need to, and I think that currently works out fine.
EDIT:
Yeah, I wanted to avoid doing anything excessive or heavy handed that forced people to do anything. Rather, I was wanting to do something a little more cooperative where we just found ways to make people want to have more discussions on their own if that makes sense? I'm not a fan of being heavy handed and I definitely don't want to dictate how people have conversations - I just wanted to know if there were ways we could push for better discussions rather than force better discussions. I'm fine with memes/shipping threads/etc as long as they are in the right place at the right time.
Yeah, hopefully! I wanted to do the same with Walking Dead: Season 3, but I might just leave that thread alone as it's probably too late at this point for a separate news thread to be effective.
Oh, that' fine then. It's a cool thought though.
I would also recommend this sticky. It's always a shame to see a potential interesting debate go down the drain because some folks get heated or offensive.
For truly unique threads, have a feature where they could get temporarily pinned to the top of forum sections for a certain amount of time (in order to see if more users will partake in the various discussions) and not get buried by roleplay, meme, or basic question threads.
Moderators can do that, we usually pin the forum guidelines, FAQ, and other important threads about the game.
I'm not entirely sure about doing it on non-information threads though, since there's only so many things we can pin.
Those types of threads are usually on top for good, though. I'm talking about temporary pins (perhaps a week or two) for one or two discussions that are truly unique.
For example, fan art threads can maybe be put on top for each of the forum sections.
The only thing that i think should be added is the ability to revert merged threads back to normal.
I agree. There have been a couple very regrettable merges lately.
maybe a suggestion would be some kind of game/episode tag for topics, i can understand why the michonne game doesn't have its own forum, but perhaps a way to sort or distinguish it from the other TWD games may be good, because maybe topics get lost in all the other discussions. and also if i wanted to sort by episode/game that would be helpful.
so for example when you make a topic you could select from a dropdown menu (like the spoiler one) and select a game or a specific episode that the discussion was about, and then maybe that would appear on the title on the main area eg:
and maybe there could be a sort button for episodes/games that you could click on at the bottom of the page
I haven't seen that many meme or shipping threads lately, but the easiest solution to an abundance of said threads might be to just have one official thread for each topic (for instance, the 'Whatever makes you laugh' thread). Although quite frankly, there's probably a billion different ways you could organize the forum, so there's no way to satisfy everyone.
We used to pin fan art threads and such, but the problem with that is with the new software, pinned threads don't show in the main forum list. They only show in the subforum itself, so you won't see them until you go to the subforum directly.
The best thing to do with your favorite thread is to post a constructive post to bring it back up to the top of that subforum - that way it will show up as having a new post in the main forum list.
Threads are merged when they contain the same content (as it's harder to take part a conversation when the same topic is happening in the same place). There's often a bunch of times where the same person posts nearly the same thing in both threads (it's happened a lot - as can often be seen once the two threads are merged - as there are two nearly identical posts posted right after each other).
None of the posts in the merged threads are lost, so you can still read and reply to them. It just makes it so that two identical conversations aren't happening at the same time on the forums.
That, and the forum display width is not as wide as the previous site, so we can only have three or four stickied threads before the forums look crowded.