Dramborn
Redoing the Forums
Okay, I thought about this all day, because it just wasn't sitting right with me. I think about things like this a lot actually, and is one of the reasons I am pursuing a degree in education. I could have just as easily been a librarian. Let's see if I can describe it succinctly.
Before I started this cleanup, the forums were a sort of hodgepodge. A lot of times, forums get this way, and groups start to sticky well-written and important topics until there are pages and pages of them before anything new. So my idea was to avoid the forum bloat by converting forum posts into wiki articles, mostly those that detail kin protocol or game guides. Sounds good so far, other than the amount of translation work that needs to be done. No worries, it's just work.
So I committed to making this idea work; however, the next question became "What do I do with the rest of the forums?" All the cool stuff will go into the wiki, where it should be cataloged and read, but how do we encourage people to use the forums. Forums should be like a discussion anyways, where the amount of information might not take up as much space as I like to use. They should be lean, since they were designed more to coordinate things asynchronously than to store information.
The issue rests with the structure of the forums. Right now, the forums are organized by topic, which is not how people congregate; people participate based upon their desired level of immersion. So my suggestion is to organize the forums by audiences, not by the subjects being discussed. Forums should be where we communicate when we cannot communicate directly, synchronously, such as in-game or through a voice chat service like Vent. These forum things really just exist to allow people to talk to one another. So we should let them.
Here's one example of a forum arrangement:
= CASUAL
== Greetings and Departures
== Prancing Pony (OOC Chatter)
== Kinship Announcements
= DEDICATED
== Questions and Guidance (person to person assistance)
== Crafter's Hall (requests for items)
== Writer's Desk (Roleplay and Blogs, single author threads)
= SERIOUS
== Event Coordination (larger scale, non-raid)
== Greycloaks (raid)
== Officers
= ALLIANCE
== Star Wars: TOR
== Vilya Sister Kin
by Dramborn on 2012-02-10 04:21:45
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