It seems the forums are kinda dead, but then again, perhaps everything is happening on the secondary (non-notable) forum thread.

I think this has the secondary affect of having less people contribute to the non-notable threads because they aren't visible.

Any thoughts?

Yes I agree that notable threads are messing up the popularity of the forums.

On the front page, the notable posts thing shows posts from like a week ago, which makes it appear dead. So I'd suggest that not enough posts are being shown as notable. The non-notable section isn't dead, but it's like 90% garbage.

X, I hope you see the contradiction in your post. You say there needs to be more notable posts but at the same time admit that the vast majority of them are garbage. Just how do you force pointless posts into being notable?

The concept of notable posts certainly has minimized the visibility of the frequent pointlessly stupid posts (jazz music, fav rapper, fav car etc.) but has also weakened the responses to worthy posts. Hell, there have been some legitimate posts asking questions or seeking advice that were left to be ignored by the general public due to not being notable for whatever reason.

Actually it's not a contradiction. He says 90% of the non-notable posts is garbage, maybe he wants that 10% to be notable as well.

There are other threads like Noob School which are going to get inactive but need to be notable at all times, or people will miss out. I will say, good job so far on throwing my streamed live events off the notable page as soon as the event finishes.

as an example, this post is discussing the current state of the forum, and it does'nt appear as relevant.... to the question on the relevance of moderator criteriums the moderator answers: absent

If the forum dies i will revive it.bmnnmmmmmmmm

Thanks Lolowut I completely agree. I made a post about this in a similar thread that has died off now, possibly due in part to the concerns raised here. As Changed name noted there was no response from our mysterious mods.

I do hope it is only teething problems as I find myself posting on warlight so much less these days. Not so much due to the changes more because I cannot find the threads worth commenting on or they died so quickly.

For prosperity my post in the now quickly deceased thread:

"The forums have went from inane to boring. But it should sort itself out when the mysterious mods work out what is actually notable and what isn't. Too many pointless threads are marked as noteworthy whilst more interesting ones languish in the darkness. One possibility for improvement is dropping the mandatory 1 week rule. If a thread is notable it should surely be notable until the interest in it ceases, having a mandatory cut-off forces interesting threads to be consigned to the 'rubbish bin' of non-notable threads with the side effect that pointless threads have to be made notable simply so that the dashboard seems to have activity.

If the mysterious powers that be are open to change then this should simply be a teething problem, if they are not and are set in their ways or following unchangeable guidelines then it will continue to be a problem."

I do think some way of pushing trashy threads away from the dashboard is a sincere attempt to improve the forums. I also know that other forums use either 'stickys' which 'stick' a useful thread to the top of the list because it is useful for the entire community or use an algorithm measuring views and posts to determine the rank of a thread (or both) and maybe they should be looked into as well. At the minute we have what I would call 'Sticky lite' where a thread is noteable until the regulations say it is un-notable which smacks a little too much of bureaucracy and a not enough of common sense. But I am sure the anonymous mods will quickly learn. At least I hooe they do.

all post should default to "Notable"

Yeah, Moros said what I was going to (but more succinctly).

Maybe notability could be controlled as a group. Vote a thread up or down, if they get above a certain number then they become notable.

i agree with x's proposal

Hey, I'm trying to keep the forums fresh with new ideas.

I'd love to see a better forum setup, but that may not really be an option given the engine. I have experience running phpp and vBulletin boards, but those were just forum sites. Can we get that type of setup here? I wouldn't even mind ads on it if that was needed. We had just a simple google ad on the bottom of ours and a few of us just clicked it a few times a day. It paid for all the hosting fees for the entire site.

X, I disagree since my concern would be that a pointless thread could be bumped up by fake accounts or a small subset of trolls who just want to mess with others. If you have a foolish clan flame-war post, all the clanmember votes would likely be sufficient to undeservedly make it notable

It is better to have a mod sticky things IMO. These forums just aren't set up for much administration. There is no way to edit your posts, formatting (like quoting) has to be done manually so most people don't bother (or just use " ") and you have a hard time telling who people are responding to.

I'm not blaming Fizzer...I suspect there was very little traffic on the forums to start. Hopefully it evolves. If he needs help, I am willing to chip in some time. Like I said I have been an administrator on two prominent sports forums, so I have some experience with structuring and modding forums. If not, no hard feelings. The game interface being great is way more important than forums, which is why I volunteer my help with them (since they are lower on his list of many things he probably wants to do).

Those free boards don't offer the level of control you get when working with phpbb* and IPB. However, Fizzer has coded these forums himself, and probably doesn't intend to buy a license in order to utilize it. Quite obviously, maximum level of control comes when you code the board yourself. Although, even the best games/companies seem to use phpbb* and IPB because of how convenient it is. (It would take possibly years of devotion to get forum software up to snuff with phpbb*, let alone IPB.)

I have experience as a Head Moderator for a game called Battle Dawn for 5 years. That game had comparatively more players than Warlight does currently, and I've been a Community Manager for game projects which don't exist anymore due to budget issues. (Bah.)

My opinion is this: First of all, "mystery" forces don't work. I don't want to push mob mentality into pressuring these "mystery" workers to reveal themselves if they don't want to, but I have yet to see this process work. I suggest giving yourself a public face, then creating a 2nd account of which you can use to do anonymous duties. Public appearance means something.

Second of all, I do like the idea of "Notable" topics. It's kind of a way for the topics to be "temporarily stickied." The system doesn't work though, because you're not presented the forum before the notable topics. IE: Move notable topics into the forum itself as a sidebar, but force the player to actually access the forum directly first. I think the "overview page" is great for blogposts, twitter feeds, and perhaps even facebook posts. I mean, eventually the game is going to be bigger and Fizzer won't be the only one maintaining a blog/twitter feed.

Third of all, the forums are kind've.. bland. Perhaps it's my perception because the community is small? (Idk the exact figures of active players atm). However, most people are content playing the game without ever getting connected. It's important to connect players to the community, because players connected with the community are typically part of the "permanent" playerbase (Permanent in this case meaning playing for longer periods of time, minimum would be 6 months to fall under this category). I would start by creating slightly more boards, that way if I feel like talking about rainbow unicorn riding dinosaurs who shoot lazers out of their eyes and sing opera, I can put that in some spam board instead of putting it under general.

Those are changes I think would be beneficial to be made soon, but there's not really a huge panic to get those done, the current system isn't too detrimental because the game isn't that big in terms of permanent playerbase yet.

As for future ideas?

Think about IPB. phpbb is less expensive, but is buggy and hard to manage. It's kind've archaic and doesn't keep up with the amount of social media today, so I'm not quite sure it's worth the investment.

IPB is more expensive, yet has little to no bugs, and makes me feel warm fuzzy panda feelings on the inside. It's easy to integrate twitter/facebook/blogs/everything into it, already has a "notable post" function and a "recent post" function, as well as a chatbox that can integrate IRC. Basically, it could combine the dashboard, forum, and chat into 1 page. There are hundreds of plugins, some of which will become a necessity to a growing/large community, such as an incentive system. (awarding points for activity/posting/winning tournaments possibly?) I could gush about this for another 3 pages...

Also, I would take a look at www.conquerclub.com The game is utter crap, those of you complaining of luck right now would suicide due to this game. However, the community-base is pretty fantastic. I don't even think they use IPB, but that's what a year or so of devotion to the forum/community can do.

/2 cents

+1

I think having notable threads on a left hand column, and then other sections on the right, where you can see which ones.

Also maybe have your own favorite threads, so you can always have them in their own seperate column? just an idea

That would be good; a button perhaps saying-add to favourite posts.

Can you not already do that by putting the link of the thread in favorites? That's what I do for threads I need to check at least every 2 days.