Forums » Suggestions
Threaded replies in suggestion forums
I know you guys are busy, but is there a chance we could get threaded replies in the suggestion forums?
That way the primary discussion will be flat, but back and forth conversation will end up in its own thread/tree branch. This would result in a better organized thread.
That way the primary discussion will be flat, but back and forth conversation will end up in its own thread/tree branch. This would result in a better organized thread.
I'm generally in favor, but want to ponder some possible cons. There are definitely a lot of topics that get way off topic by people getting into debates about minutiae, and this would contain this scenario well. However, I could also theoretically see threads burying useful ideas or info, threads causing debates to be more heated because there's less interjection, or the depth making the forums a little harder to moderate. I'm not sure how likely those scenarios are, but just brainstorming potential cons.
+1 for a modern forum software
➡➡➡ the depth making the forums a little harder to moderate ⬅⬅⬅
Exact same reason we have threads disabled on the discord server.
Exact same reason we have threads disabled on the discord server.
Modern forum software would make the flow of ideas so much better and clearer. This is the only website where I have to open a second tab to see what I am replying to on a multi page thread. Wonder where it is on the devs priorities just for curiosity.
Just make it 4chan style thread. Easy to follow around.
First of all, I definitely would like to improve on some forum usability issues, like how "reply" tends to show the thread's first-page, and so on.
I'm also not against adding some optional "visualization" methods at some point, that did not alter the main usage model of the forum. But, at the moment, I don't think we actually store data on which post was "replied".
Overall, however, I am generally not a fan of threaded forums, and I don't think they would be an improvement here.
Response-threads have a long history of being used on lightly-moderated, free-for-all forums as a method of more easily "folding" and concealing rambling off-topic nonsense.
But, they make genuine linear discussion more convoluted to follow, because there's often a loss of context. Seeing relative timing of posts is important. Just because someone clicked "reply" on a particular post to continue a chain doesn't mean they did or did-not see something somewhere else on the thread, and any given chain is unlikely to be a cohesive picture of the discussion (especially for a complex topic, like game development).
As people have said here, they also tend to "bury" content, and are more difficult to moderate.
The point of Suggestions is linear discussion of a single idea. An idea is proposed, people read the content and comment specifically about it. Problems like "off-topic" responses or other issues, we would rather handle behaviorally by training the userbase, as opposed to just "hiding-the-mess" in some collapsed thread.
With threaded-replies, people would likely also "TL; DR" even more than they already do, and avoid reading earlier content, losing even more discussion-context.
If you want to look at it another way, replies that go so far as to really benefit from "threading" should probably be in a completely different Suggestions Post anyway. So, in a sense, the forum is "threaded", it's more of just behavioral training and enforcement issue.
The historical cases (specific discussions) that immediately come to mind, for me, where threading would have been of value, are actually representative of people failing to follow the Rules of Suggestions in the first place. Threading, in a sense, would be more like accepting that behaviour as "inevitable", instead of actively preventing it and improving the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the forum.
The goal is for Suggestions to have a minimum number of high-value responses. If they get too chaotic and rambling, their value (to me) drops significantly, and I stop reading. As soon as I stop reading, to be blunt, none of it really matters anymore.
Again, I don't have problems with other theoretical improvements or changes. Like I see value in this like giving people the ability to thumbs-up a particular reply, which could change its color or something, that kind of stuff. But "threaded replies" does not seem like a "win" to me.
Wonder where it is on the devs priorities just for curiosity.
Tinkering with the forums is a pretty low priority compared to game development.
+1 for a modern forum software
The VO forums are custom built by us, and will never be replaced by "other software". We may expand on them, or improve them, or tweak them, but we will continue to use what we wrote.. for a wide variety of reasons (performance, scale, security, etc). We've talked about this many times, in many other historical threads.
I'm also not against adding some optional "visualization" methods at some point, that did not alter the main usage model of the forum. But, at the moment, I don't think we actually store data on which post was "replied".
Overall, however, I am generally not a fan of threaded forums, and I don't think they would be an improvement here.
Response-threads have a long history of being used on lightly-moderated, free-for-all forums as a method of more easily "folding" and concealing rambling off-topic nonsense.
But, they make genuine linear discussion more convoluted to follow, because there's often a loss of context. Seeing relative timing of posts is important. Just because someone clicked "reply" on a particular post to continue a chain doesn't mean they did or did-not see something somewhere else on the thread, and any given chain is unlikely to be a cohesive picture of the discussion (especially for a complex topic, like game development).
As people have said here, they also tend to "bury" content, and are more difficult to moderate.
The point of Suggestions is linear discussion of a single idea. An idea is proposed, people read the content and comment specifically about it. Problems like "off-topic" responses or other issues, we would rather handle behaviorally by training the userbase, as opposed to just "hiding-the-mess" in some collapsed thread.
With threaded-replies, people would likely also "TL; DR" even more than they already do, and avoid reading earlier content, losing even more discussion-context.
If you want to look at it another way, replies that go so far as to really benefit from "threading" should probably be in a completely different Suggestions Post anyway. So, in a sense, the forum is "threaded", it's more of just behavioral training and enforcement issue.
The historical cases (specific discussions) that immediately come to mind, for me, where threading would have been of value, are actually representative of people failing to follow the Rules of Suggestions in the first place. Threading, in a sense, would be more like accepting that behaviour as "inevitable", instead of actively preventing it and improving the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the forum.
The goal is for Suggestions to have a minimum number of high-value responses. If they get too chaotic and rambling, their value (to me) drops significantly, and I stop reading. As soon as I stop reading, to be blunt, none of it really matters anymore.
Again, I don't have problems with other theoretical improvements or changes. Like I see value in this like giving people the ability to thumbs-up a particular reply, which could change its color or something, that kind of stuff. But "threaded replies" does not seem like a "win" to me.
Wonder where it is on the devs priorities just for curiosity.
Tinkering with the forums is a pretty low priority compared to game development.
+1 for a modern forum software
The VO forums are custom built by us, and will never be replaced by "other software". We may expand on them, or improve them, or tweak them, but we will continue to use what we wrote.. for a wide variety of reasons (performance, scale, security, etc). We've talked about this many times, in many other historical threads.
> The VO forums are custom built by us, and will never be replaced by "other software". [...] We've talked about this many times, in many other historical threads.
I am not familiar with the history, my comment was purely based on the complete lack of may of the most basic features even, which a simple replacement of the software would solve, whereas improving the existing software is realistically not worth anyone's time at this point. Anyway, thx for making it clear.
I am not familiar with the history, my comment was purely based on the complete lack of may of the most basic features even, which a simple replacement of the software would solve, whereas improving the existing software is realistically not worth anyone's time at this point. Anyway, thx for making it clear.
I am not familiar with the history, my comment was purely based on the complete lack of may of the most basic features even, which a simple replacement of the software would solve, whereas improving the existing software is realistically not worth anyone's time at this point. Anyway, thx for making it clear.
I mean, we do improve the forums periodically. We've added a lot of administration and management features this year, in fact (reducing forum spammers and other challenging situations).
The notion of "the most basic features" is subjective. We aim to support features we consider relevant to our audience and use case. For instance, we don't care about wide selections of wacky emojis (again, people have considered a varied list of features to be "basic" and "important" over the years).
Conversely, our forums are tightly integrated with the actual game, much like the (custom) forums at Blizzard and other MMO shops. We don't presently offer any character-data display type options, but we do have that possibility.
All of this (administration and account-data tie-ins and general game awareness) is part of what makes the idea of "replacing" the forums into a non-trivial venture. We would have to extensively modify any other forum software.. basically a major re-write to achieve the selection of necessary "features" we already have (again, our administrative features are not going to be what you find in your average phpBB or Vanilla).
So "replacing" the forums with a third-party solution is not some kind of time-savings over modifying what we already have.
But, aside from all of that, if you look at the security history of most publicly-available forum software, it's pretty appalling. Avoiding that particular "issue" is pretty high on my priority list, relatively speaking.
So, anyway, we are interested in feedback on improvements, I'm open to listening to that, as I do with anything else in the game. We'll blend those suggestions into future decisions about what works best for our particular situation and time availability.
I just wanted to make it clear that "replacement" is not something we're going to do, it's not a useful direction for us.
I mean, we do improve the forums periodically. We've added a lot of administration and management features this year, in fact (reducing forum spammers and other challenging situations).
The notion of "the most basic features" is subjective. We aim to support features we consider relevant to our audience and use case. For instance, we don't care about wide selections of wacky emojis (again, people have considered a varied list of features to be "basic" and "important" over the years).
Conversely, our forums are tightly integrated with the actual game, much like the (custom) forums at Blizzard and other MMO shops. We don't presently offer any character-data display type options, but we do have that possibility.
All of this (administration and account-data tie-ins and general game awareness) is part of what makes the idea of "replacing" the forums into a non-trivial venture. We would have to extensively modify any other forum software.. basically a major re-write to achieve the selection of necessary "features" we already have (again, our administrative features are not going to be what you find in your average phpBB or Vanilla).
So "replacing" the forums with a third-party solution is not some kind of time-savings over modifying what we already have.
But, aside from all of that, if you look at the security history of most publicly-available forum software, it's pretty appalling. Avoiding that particular "issue" is pretty high on my priority list, relatively speaking.
So, anyway, we are interested in feedback on improvements, I'm open to listening to that, as I do with anything else in the game. We'll blend those suggestions into future decisions about what works best for our particular situation and time availability.
I just wanted to make it clear that "replacement" is not something we're going to do, it's not a useful direction for us.