After a grueling selection process remniscent of the Navy SEALs' Hell Week, the new forums moderators have been selected, and a private moderation forum has been setup to get them up to speed. The new mods are svero, princec, gilzu, Dan MacDonald, and Nick Bischoff. Dan MacDonald almost broke a record (and a leg, but it wasn't his) in the obstacle course portion of the testing. :)

Soon this current forum will be split into five separate forums:
1) Game Development & Technology (programming, art, design, music, sound fx, web scripting, hardware, etc)
2) Indie Business (sales, marketing, serving customers, legal issues, search engines, download sites, web hosts & bandwidth providers)
3) Announcements & Feedback Requests (news items, alpha/beta versions of games to test, web site review requests, new releases)
4) General Chat (off topic discussions, anything that doesn't fit cleanly into other groups, socialize with other members, similar to the ASP's schmooze group)
5) Indie Life (motivation, time management, working from home, quitting the day job, organizing, personal effectiveness, living the indie lifestyle)

Where will you put all the "old" posts?

If you put them all in one subforum you may get a problem with newbies because they think "oh, we can put everything in this subforum".

Or will you keep this forum as it is and close it for further posting, so that people will have to link or re-post if they want to continue?

Or is the moderators first assignment to sort all the old threads? ;)

Congrats to those selected. Great choices Steve. :)

We're discussing what to do with the old threads now. There are a lot of threads, but it would be possible to mass-move them into new forums. Another option is to archive and lock the original forum after moving all the currently active discussions to their new homes.

It really was a tough choice picking mods. There were easily 3x as many great candidates as needed. I'm sorry to those who weren't selected. All of those who were selected are Senior Members (i.e. 100+ posts), average at least two posts per week, and joined the first week the board was launched (September 2002). So they've all been around for 11 months. Also, I opted for a mixture of of different time zones and continents: Thailand, United Kingdom, Israel, South Africa, and USA. Lastly, three of the five mods have had previous moderating experience.

While I have nothing against the new mods, I have a feeling that splitting up the forums isn't going to turn out too good... Man, I have trouble enough as it is, keeping up with various forums, and now I have to keep up with 5 times as many new forums...

Keith

Splitting the forums is something I had always wished Dexterity would do, it keeps everything nice and tidy :)

When this is done I will no longer have to sift through 5 "Check outm y demo!" topics to get the topic I'm looking for (not that I mind "Check out my demo!", but you get my point ;) ).

To put it simply, "YAY! :D".

There was no way to please everyone with the forum split, but after much debate and discussion, I think these new subforums will work well for the majority of members. It's easy enough to make adjustments and tweaks as needed. While some members here read every post, many don't have the time to do so and want a convenient way to see only the threads most relevant to their particular focus.

It would be cool if, in this process, you could add an active threads page (like on gamedev.net) so that those of us who visit every day and like to read all the posts can get our fix in one shot instead of having to look through each of the forums.


hmm - maybe the view new posts link will work for that... Too bad it doesn't seem to be available for use only on the developer forums.

yay for the new moderators


boo for the forum splitting

Well.. I guess if the forum split doesn't work out too well we can always unsplit?

As for the old posts I'd really like to see them split up into the various categories if it's not too much work and it's doable.

- S

As for the old posts I'd really like to see them split up into the various categories if it's not too much work and it's doable.
I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel!
But it was just some bastard with a torch coming to give me more work!

I reckon just freezing the old forum and making it available under a seperate topic, Old Forum Archive, is the way to go, in terms of effort expended to usefulness achieved.

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec
I reckon just freezing the old forum and making it available under a separate topic, Old Forum Archive, is the way to go, in terms of effort expended to usefulness achieved.
But what about the threads that are currently active? You can't just lock those down. Or will you personally post the definitive final post to wrap up each thread? :) Besides that, you can't even just move the active threads and lock the old threads, because every now and then someone likes to resurrect an old thread with some new ideas or post a followup on something they said the would do.

I think the right approach is to sort the threads and move them (if moving is possible to do with the forum software). I know it seems like a lot of work. Perhaps the best way to do it would be to distribute the workload. If a bunch of us could volunteer to sort 10 or 20 threads each, it would make the load a lot lighter (and there's only 450 threads in the indie forum). We could classify the threads, then have each moderator do a scan of what is supposed to belong to their forum to make sure they agree.

To divvy them up, everyone who wants to help could just post to a thread "give me 5" or "give me 30". If steve could then just do a dump from the database of what threadIDs belong to the indie forum, he could edit each post and paste in the threadIDs being assigned to that person.

I really don't think it would end up being a whole lot of work, and it is the right thing to do.

Congrats to the new Moderators!
I think the forum split is a good idea - looking forward to seeing it.

sounds verry good - both moderators and subforums. nice job :D

ps. I'd suggest putting old threads into 6th "archive" forum and then use some man power to move them into appropriate forums at least the newest ones...

Originally posted by Morphecy
sounds verry good - both moderators and subforums. nice job :D

ps. I'd suggest putting old threads into 6th "archive" forum and then use some man power to move them into appropriate forums at least the newest ones...

I don't mind spending an hr or so moving threads. I think between us various mods it should be pretty quick. Just leave them in a 6th thing and we can move them slowly starting with the newest ones. In a couple of days they'll all be sorted.

- S

They don't need moving!

In fact if we actually understand what we're doing we should automatically archive threads in the separated topics into one big archive every month.

You see - the purpose of separating threads up in the first place is for realtime human categorization. It's so we can pick what we want to read easily, not so we can forever keep them there.

After a certain age a thread in a forum becomes generally meaningless. It is then best archived somewhere where it can be easily found. Its context will largely be irrelevant to someone performing a search; it's the content that counts.

So let's just use our godlike powers, draw a line under all current threads, archive them now, and then anyone who wants to restart a thread just needs to repost it. There will be 2 days of grumbling and teeth gnashing then everyone will forget about it.

Trust me, I've been doing this for years :)

Cas :)

Sorry Cas, but I don't think that's the right way. When I started getting close to releasing my first game, I started thinking about all the things I should do to market my game. To that end, I jumped into the Business forum at gamedev.net and read (or at least scanned) just about every thread in the history of that forum. I wanted to soak up every bit of marketing info I had missed out on. Having only business posts in that forum, it was very easy to do. However, had gamedev archived everything into another forum, there would be no way I could easily browse the history. Sure, I could search for topics I was interested in. But if there was something I had never even thought of (like maybe an uninstall questionaire), there would be no way for me to find it without looking at 20 posts on programming/graphics/BS for every 1 I was interested in.

What you have there is actually an archive technology problem.
Basically the archive needs full text indexing and search facilities. They are far, far, more effective than manually searching thread subjects. And I know this for a fact, because I've written news archive & retrieval systems for a profession, and I've had to work with a lot of journalists who use the system for their research.

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec
What you have there is actually an archive technology problem.
But in my case, I didn't know what I was looking for. I was looking for everything that had to do with business and marketing. I can't very well search for what I don't even know exists, no matter what the technology. I didn't want to seach! I wanted to browse a particular broad subject.

Think smarter :) You could have saved yourself a lot of time browsing by searching for 'marketing' and 'business' in thread titles, or the body text. That's how the journos do their job - otherwise they simply can't find what they're looking for fast enough. They're very adept at thinking laterally like that. The search engines they use have a lot of clever bits in too that allow them to specify word proximities, fuzzy matches, and boolean operations but most of them don't even need that sort of facility (except when searching for stories about Gadaffi who has about 20 different spellings of his name).

And if you're content to just browse - well, you know how even with moderation threads can wander off topic somewhat. A useful thread title in the correct category might yield very little useful discussion.

Which brings me to another point... thread rating. It might be useful for archival purposes if moderators could rate threads by relevance or quality. Or indeed if anyone could. Is there an addon for the board to do this?

Cas :)

Cas, surely you must realize that not every thread that has something pertinent to business and marketing contains the words business or marketing. There is no realistic way to filter this stuff by search terms. To properly filter this stuff, you need a human brain, and that is exactly what was used (hopefully :) ) when a thread is posted to a particular forum. No matter how many search terms I add, there would be plenty of threads that would slip through the search filter which might have some good info.

Also, if I do a search for "business", it's going to pull up every thread that goes "Hi, I want to start my own business developing games, and I was wondering what language I should use to program in."

Yes, threads do go off topic, and someone might post a good business thread in the non business forum. But generally, the way to get the least false negatives AND the least false positives is to rely upon the human brain to have picked the right forum to post in.

Ah, but if there's one thing we've learned from writing news archive systems and watching Google evolve it's that a) you're actually making an assumption on your own heuristics rather than providing experimental or actual anecdotal evidence; it is almost 99.99% unlikely that a search for "business" and "marketing" will not produce all threads relevant because if the terms do not appear in the thread it is almost certainly off-topic; and b) that machines really do seem to know best when it comes to searching - but interpreting the results is your job, not theirs.

In other words: you're making an assumption rather than collecting evidence! With a full-text retrieval on a giant thread archive my money's on the machine doing a much better job of it than us categorizing and people browsing combined based on past experience and evidence.

There are hundreds of threads that cover every one of our respective moderatorial areas, and hundreds more that cover more than one moderatorial area. They are by definition unclassifiable and need to go in an unclassified section, in which case any human searching for stuff has to search nearly all the topics anyway for a reliable search.

Cas :)

I agree with a previous poster that it'd be good to have an 'all' forum that just displays all the new posts like it does now. You could also see how many people prefer to do it like that and how many only go for specific topics. I personally don't think there's enough traffic to warrent a 5 way split, but it could be cool if we had both.

Originally posted by princec
it is almost 99.99% unlikely that a search for "business" and "marketing" will not produce all threads relevant because if the terms do not appear in the thread it is almost certainly off-topic
Rally. I just decided to pick a thread at the top of the list. Thread 1156 looked good: "Feedback form on Maybe Later button". As of right now, the words market and business are nowhere to be found in that thread, yet it looks pretty marketing relevant.

Searching with any search engine is nowhere near what the human mind can do by classifying the threads when they are posted. And presumably, if a thread is posted in a wrong forum, a moderator will move it to the correct place. If a thread goes off topic, the moderator will close it or post a warning to get everyone back on topic. Nothing is perfect, but I think having them in separate forums is the best bet.

Perhaps when a moderator archives a post, they can edit the title to
title - forum it was in

Yes it would be more work, but I think it would be the best of both worlds.

or indeed, like my Opera mail client, it can be tagged with any relevant keywords the moderator thinks are relevant to the thread. Opera automatically copies every email message I get into all sorts of different classifications depending on a set of rules. Anything mentioning Alien Flux anywhere in it for example goes into an Alien Flux folder; anything with Review in the subject goes in the Reviews folder.

Cas :)

I have to agree with LordKronos here. When browsing a broad subject keeping the forums separate is a good idea. I really can't see a good reason to combine the threads into one forum after previously being split. Especially if the search feature can search by a specific forum or by all forums.

That said, I really would like to see the ability to see all the currently active threads without having to resort to the "view new posts" search (which might become my new best friend after the forum split). The ability to only see threads from certain forums would also be very nice with all the off-topic posts recently. Then again, I might just have to resort to checking the forums less frequently so I don't have to make as many passes through the forums.

Congrats on your new positions guys. Do a good job or we'll spam ya. ;) j/k