Since this indie forum is now averaging about 100 new posts per day and still growing rapidly, it won't be long before it reaches the point where I can no longer moderate it myself... especially given that my wife is 39 weeks pregnant.

So I'll soon be splitting this forum into a few subforums, and I'm looking for members interested in becoming moderators. This is a purely volunteer position, but of course you'll have all the glory and appreciation I can bestow upon you. The forum software makes moderation fairly easy, so it isn't a lot of work. So far it's only been about once or twice a month that I've had to do any moderation at all, but that may increase as the board becomes more popular.

In order to be a moderator, you'd need to regularly check the forums (daily if possible), and have used the forums for at least a couple months. Please send me a Private Message by clicking the PM button below if you're interested.

I've since received PMs from about 20 members interested in moderating. I only need about five or six moderators, unless we have two or more moderators per forum, which could be interesting since then we could have moderators from different time zones. I think it's best to have just one moderator per forum though, so the mods don't step on each other's toes.

I'll be PMing each volunteer to ask some follow up questions. Some things I'll consider in selecting volunteers would be date of joining the board, post count, and obviously familiarity with indie development.

>I think it's best to have just one moderator per forum though,
>so the mods don't step on each other's toes.

Having several mods is usually a good thing - and sometimes necessary. I'm a mod on the biggest german q3 board (general discussion, cfg, dm17 and retro) therefore I think that I know what I'm talking about.

Well... this board is different and most of the guys'n'gals are pretty nice... but you never know... keep in mind that most people have hollidays every now and then ;)

So... I think 2-3 mods are ok. Btw I think servo would be a good one.

Oh and setup a mod-only forum (password protected) - it's really usefull ;)

Two words:
"Dan MacDonald"
!

yeah, dan macdonald would be a good moderator.

That would slow him down a little. Not a bad idea! :)

Looks like some would-be mods already have their own campaign managers. :)

How about if I just post a poll with 20 options and the top 5-6 members with the most votes can become moderators? :) j/k

Funny, I was going to suggest Dan as well but I wasn't sure how cool that would be. Anyway, I think he actually lives on here so he would be keeping an eye on his own house.

Shhhhh you're all going to jinx my application ;)

I vote for Dan too, because that way you all can keep him busy while I close in on his number of posts. Maybe we could make it so every post he deletes subtracts one from his count?

Dan, you're #2 now.......slacker! And don't even give me any whining about "oh, but the hard drive crashed and..." :)

I would have volunteered for the fame and fortune myself. Unfortunately, between my own development, coordinating the local IGDA chapter, and trying to keep up with the growing number of posts here, I don't think I'd have the time to do a good job moderating. However, I think Dan, Steve V, Mike, Hanford, and/or Kai-Peter would all be good choices (whichever of them volunteered).

Steve P: Any decisions on how you'll make the forum split?

I haven't decided the exact subforum breakdown yet, but it will be something along these lines:

- general chat
- announcements & review requests (web sites & products)
- programming/technical
- business/marketing/sales
- game ideas & design
- psychology/motivation/personal mangagement

The last category might seem odd, but many members have suggested it, and since most indies are only one person, personal efficiency issues can have a huge impact on an indie business, so I think it's reasonable.

You can also see an old thread that discussed some subforum ideas here:
http://www.dexterity.com/forums/sho...php?threadid=23

I hope to have the subforum split done and the moderators selected within about a week.

If anyone has other ideas for subforums, I'm still open to suggestions. I reviewed many of the recent threads, and most seem to fall fairly cleanly into one of the groups above.

@Dexterity: that last link isn't working... I suppose it should be:
http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23 :)

I thought we should need a help wanted, with all those requests we get every now and then about that.

Dexterity
- game ideas & design


I guess this is the one that all the people coming from gamedev.net will use... ;)

To be serious I still think that there is to few posts to split it up in so many subforums. So I have a question.
Is their anyway to have an active topics page (like gamedev.net)?
It would be even better if I could choose which subforums to see in my active topics page.

I check dexteritys forum quite a few times a day and it´s probably because it´s so easy to do, one page, not to many posts.

Without an active topics page, I´ll probably bookmark 1 or 2 of the subforums and ignore the rest unless their is something I need to find out.

Offtopic: Why is this TextArea only about 36 characters in width? Or is it only on Mozilla?
EDIT: "this TextArea" = the one I´m writing my reply in. :)

I agree that splitting it up into more than three forums would probably be far more annoying than useful. I think the good approach would be to make a forum or two to separate out the specific type of threads that many people aren't interested in-- those being the release and review topics and programming/technical topics.

Personal experience with using and administering other forums gives me the distinct impression that game design/idea forums are notoriously under-used and pretty much ineffective as a whole. Many of the would-be topics for such a forum are often better suited for the technical or game_review forums. And the remaining topics are fairly similar in nature-- many of our discussions on good business/marketing frequently spread over into the realm of motivation/personal management and vice versa.

So yeah, that would leave a 'main forum' for all the business, phychological, and marketing chatter + polls and other various misc topics... and would separate the technical topics and the reviews and annoucements. Given the large number of reviews and annoucements I think that would make a substantial difference in the # of new threads in the main group.

But if you feel that isn't enough, splitting the main forum into a general chat and a business/marketing/motivation/management forum might be a good idea then. That should give four distinct forums with little or no accidental "cross-over" in topic material.

Help wanted could be a bad idea.. like people said, you get the gamedev ignorants ;) how about a Help offered, or my services are available for free or for a fee etc etc..

just a thought.

I'm not excited about the prospective "design" forum. At gamedev.net this the place for all the non-programmers, non-proffessionals to go and gripe about how their "new" rpg ideas would be better than anything that's ever existed. It gets very fatiquing.

When I first got into the gamedev.net crowd I thought those guys on the design forum were cool because they had some interesting ideas, and seemed to have a real passion for making good and original games. But if you actually ever do any programming, then eventually you'll get past the design stages and wonder how to make a buck from you work.. so I got to where I only ever visited the business forums. I found that there were folks making real money with their games, and I knew that was who I needed to be communicating with. Cliffski would always give details of real sales experience (thanks man!), it was very motivating . That's where I found Dexterity.

So now, 3 years after finding gamedev.net, I'm finally making a little bit of money, while those same guys are STILL in the design forum debating "murder-based experience" systems and how their game "doesn't fit into any real genre".

I shouldn't generalize, but I fear that a "design" forum would draw, and retain, and lot more non-proffessional discussion. As long as they keep all their often pointless discussion in their own forum, then that's fine, I'll just stay out of it, but I'd hate for it to dilute the proffessional demographic of the boards here.

However I would like to encourage more discussion on the general board. Gamedev.net's lounge often has interesting discussions about geek-heavy topics (time travel, number theory)that I find really interesting.

I agree with APE on the design forum issue. The GameDev forum is filled with people who have no idea how development works. They post ideas that they think would make good games without working out why they would be good, what would be bad about them and/or if there is even a computer likely to be created any time soon that would actually be able to run the game.

Endless discussions by people who have no knowledge/understanding of AI on how NPC characters should be able to discuss human emotions soon become numbingly pointless.

To me that sonds like too many sections for the number of post here. However, I think a Help Wanted/Offered section would be a good idea.

I would also like to see the forum stay "flat" like it is now and not have sub-sections.

The way it is now, it's easy for me to stay up to date which is one of the reasons I keep coming back.
-Scorpio

Heres my view on what the topics will be really about


- general chat [yo momma jokes]
- announcements & review requests (web sites & products) [everyone post, almost noone replies]
- programming/technical [we don't get many of these, but I bet we will end up having people asking how to code quake 4 in a weekend]
- business/marketing/sales [probably the most used and serious forum, aka, what it is now]
- game ideas & design [I have a new idea for a mmorpg with vampires and orcs which is played in a first person view and you can travel all around the world and everything will be different]
- psychology/motivation/personal mangagement [no idea, and i doubt ill visit it, motivation is a personall thing i guess]

I like the forums as they are now, to be honest, if they split, ill just stick with the one i like and ignore all the rest.

Originally posted by Morphecy
@Dexterity: that last link isn't working... I suppose it should be:
http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23 :)

Yes, you're correct. I copied the link incorrectly. Thanks for posting the correct version.

There are some good points about the game design subforum. An alternative I'm considering is to combine game design with programming/technical to have a Game Development forum that would cover all aspects of product creation: programming, design, art, music, sound fx, etc. This might work better, since indies are often involved in all aspects of development.

Some other comments:

- General Chat: In the ASP members-only newsgroups, we have a couple groups called asp.schmooze and asp.soapbox. I was an ASP officer when these groups were created and supported their creation. These are basically chat forums where people can discuss anything they'd like, no matter how off topic, such as posting links to cat pictures. They've worked out nicely in that they keep all the other groups on topic. I don't subscribe to the chat forums there, so it saves me a lot of time because I never have to see those messages. Similarly, I think a general chat forum is a great way for developers to socialize without throwing the other forums off topic.

- Announcements & Review Requests: There's been a heavy volume of such posts, so I think it helps to have a forum where people can announce their new releases, beta versions, web sites, etc and solicit feedback. I might change the title of this to "Announcements and Feedback Requests." Many people don't want to read such posts, especially when they're in a hurry. If putting these into a separate subforum kills the response rate to these posts, I can consider re-incorporating it into another forum. But I honestly don't expect that will happen.

- Programming/Technical: Obviously needed. Again, it may be good to merge this with game design and simply have a Game Development subforum. This probably makes good sense from an indie perspective, since indie programmers and designers are often the same person.

- Business/Marketing/Sales: It seems there's a pretty clear need for this, as it covers the desire to make money as an indie.

- Psychology/Motivational: I need a better name for this forum, but it's actually the most-requested subforum of all. I think this may be largely due to the fact that my articles are what draw many people here. I think there's enough interest here to warrant a separate subforum for this topic, but if it fails to generate much traffic, I can easily merge it into General Chat. The basic idea of this forum is to cover the personal side of being an indie: personal productivity, time management, overcoming procrastination, staying motivated through a product that takes longer than expected, balancing work and personal/family time, having a life, etc. "Indie Life" might be another name for this forum. I think anyone who's been a full-time entrepreneur for a while knows that there are personal and psychological challenges entrepreneurs experience that you just don't encounter as an employee. A couple threads from this week that would fit here would the discussion of the Masters of Doom book and the Time Logger thread.

- Help Wanted: I think having a separate forum for this would be a bad idea. It's likely to attract lots of people who aren't really indies in a business sense but who are trying to put together yet another mega-team working for free to create the ultimate MMOG, more out of passion than entreneurial drive. At least this is what I see on GameDev.net. This topic can be handled by the Announcements and Feedback Requests subforum or the Business subforum anyway.

Regarding the difficulty of keeping up on multiple subforums vs. just a single forum: It really isn't difficult if you use the board a certain way. If you just click the "View New Posts" link in the upper right on each visit here, you'll see a list of all the new posts from every forum in a single list. You'll still see posts from the Player Forums that way, but those get a much lower volume of posts, so they're easy to ignore if you're only here for the indie discussion.

While some members visit the forums many times per day, most don't, and not everyone has time to keep up on almost 3000 new messages per month. Many members have told me that subforums would make the board faster and easier to use. For instance, if you're just developing your first product, you may not care to read about marketing and sales threads just yet. Also, some developers prefer not to see the review requests (which have been fairly voluminous some weeks).

Additionally, this board is still growing rapidly -- increasing from 2GB/month to 12GB/month in the past five months. So I'm aiming to anticipate where things might be a few months from now. If the new subforums don't work out, there's still time to tweak and change them before the traffic levels force a change, ready or not.

Ok.. i havn't read steves post because I was typing mine... let's hope I dont duplicate/contradict anything he's said...

My first reaction to the forum split suggestion was “man it’s about time”. However after seeing all the objections I began to re-think my evaluation. During my commute to work I thought about all the forums I’ve visited in the past and how splitting the forums affected their communities. I love to be out there interacting with other indies but I just can’t bring myself to get involved on the GarageGames forums (though I have a number of friends in that community). In my opinion they have far too many sub forums, keeping up with all of the activity in each forum would be a full time job, even for me it seems hugely overwhelming, so I don’t read/post there very often.

I am also a member of a pixel-art message board and about 6 months ago they separated their forum into two sections, a serious critique section and a general pixel-art section. Since then the serious section has gradually got less and less traffic, people tend to post in the general section since that’s the one most people read.

Gamedev.net was one of the first forum communities that I frequented heavily. They have a pretty good sub forum split, however as some have suggested here. Most people just pick a forum they are interested in and never visit any of the others. It’s interesting to note however that little communities seem to pop up in the various forums.

Another forum I read when dexterity isn’t getting much activity is the “Quarter To Three” forum. They have a number of forums, religion/politics, movies, book TV, and games. Now I never frequent anything but the games forum, but it is rather nice to have just one place to go and get games related information.

In thinking about these different examples I’m starting to believe that the most important aspect of any forum is community, a place where you know all/most the other members and interact with them on a regular basis. Splitting the forums tends to create a number of sub communities. If you have as many members as gamedev.net then this is a requirement, a single forum would explode with activity and become useless. But in smaller more specific communities, what tends to happen when a forum splits is people wait to see where the “pillars of the community” are going to be posting and they post there as well. The topics people discuss aren’t as important to them as the people they discuss it with.

One of the great strengths of the dexterity forums is the sense of community that exsists here. Once you’ve been here a month or two you get to know people and appreciate the quality of the forum. I’ve never seen a community where the members were so dedicated to preserving forum quality. I can only attribute this to the fact that for the most part everyone here knows everyone else, a by product of only having one sub forum. People want to continue to be able to interact with all the other active members of the community and are willing to sacrifice a more organized forum structure in order to preserve the sense of community. Or at the very least, they aren’t very willing to risk loosing it.


In the end, I don’t thing people are resisting organizing the forums as much as they are trying to preserve the unified community.

When I see people posting about the forum split, there seems to be an underlying assumption that such a split will lead to a massive influx of inexperienced/immature posters from gamedev.net. I would probably rate this Fear #1 for members of this community. :)

However this does present a problem, how do you preserve the sense of a unified community where everyone knows everyone else and sustain the growth rate that the dexterity forums have experienced? The problem is, you can’t. There are two choices that I can see, limit the growth of the community in some way (shadows of the subscription model) or subdivide the forums in some way. If the forum does split into a number of sub forums, I think what will be seen is most everyone will post in the biz/marketing forums, and the other forums will have similar amounts of activity to the other two sub forums that dexterity has. New users will post in the other forums at first until the realize where the bulk of the community activity is, and then they will relegate their comments to integrate in with that community. Eventually the otherh forums may develop their own sub communities, however I don't think there will be enough members foro that to occure for some while. Also without a unified community it becomes the exercise of the moderators to preserve the quality of the forums. As it stands right now, members seem to take this role very seriously. Im worried that if several sub communites form, this motivation to preserve the community would be lost, since if a member got tired of one, they could just hop over to one of the others.

IN CONCLUSION (<- for all the people who don’t want to read the whole thing)

A unified community seems to be the highest priority for dexterity forum members. People are worried that creating sub forums will break up the community and they resist that. However we are presented with a problem, the forums are continuing to grow, past a certain point it becomes impossible to maintain the community as a single entity. We aren’t there yet, but we are accelerating towards that point. The choice we will have to make is to split into some smaller topic based sub communities, or limit the growth of the community.

One suggestion would to create some very specific topical sub forums. A specific, “request for feedback on my game” forum for instance, where all the developers seeking feedback on the games could post and get feedback. I don’t think this would present as big a threat to breaking up the community since it would exist for a very specific purpose. The main forum would still exist but it would be free from the “feedback” threads that some people enjoy, and others consider noisy. This isn’t a scaleable solution to the growing community problem, but it would be a quick fix for keeping the main forum relevant for a little while longer.

do you know Maxforums (http://www.maxforums.org/) 's forum system?

when you enter the forum, you see all the messages, but you can choose the classification of Art/Technical/OT and screen the forum messages into these 3 different forums.

just a thought.

A lot of people see to dislike the "What do you think of my game?" threads. But, I think I have learned the most from these posts. I read the suggestions and comments that are made (both good and bad) and then relate those ideas to my game so I can learn from the mistakes and genius of others. I also hope that when my game is complete some people will be willing to give me feedback. I think feedback given to me when I release my game will save me from making some fatal mistakes. I hope others will read the thread and never have to make those mistakes themselves. Reading “feedback request” forums has all ready saved my game from being a flop.

I hope, subforums or no subforums, these threads will continue to get replies. If they can survive in their own subforum then that is great. However, if people stop replying to these post when they are moved to a different subforum, then they should be moved into a more active forum so we don’t lose this resource.

I think there is no way around it. Eventually the high traffic will dictate the need for sub-forms.

The way to avoid the "Amateur" user and keep the quality community feel, is to make the forms subscription based.

Personally I don't have a problem with "Amateur" developers. It's the people who can't be bothered to solve their own problems that bug me. (That encompasses only a small fraction of the population around here - but they stand out.)

Can we add a "Before you ask a question" section to the Indie FAQ?

Steps to take before posting:

1. Search on Google (http://www.google.com) with relevant search terms. Learn to use Boolean logic in your searches. If it's a windows related technical problem check out MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com).

2. Search the forms on this site specifically.

3. Consider going to Amazon and looking for a book on the subject. (Or your local library!)

4. Post a question here - with as much information as possible, a clear problem definition and the solutions you've already tried (so we don't have to suggest them).

The difference between the professional and the amateur in any process is not the amount of work down, the quality of work done, or the attitude with which the work is done. Rather, it is that the professional does all the work that needs to be done. The amateur does only the work he wants to do.

Michael Sikora
Guardian Light Studios (http://www.guardianlightstudios.com)

It's great to have so many people here who understand the various ways communities can grow (and die). I've been involved in various online communities for over ten years now, even meeting my wife in a chat room on a local BBS, so I'm also very aware of the risks moving ahead.

As I see it, it really isn't possible to maintain a static community once growth reaches a certain point. Either the community has to splinter into sub-communities, or the community loses its identity and becomes impersonal. This isn't just true of online communities. It's true of anything people-related. Many companies, for instance, refuse to let certain divisions grow beyond a certain point. After a division grows to about 1000 people or so, it gets subdivided into smaller, more manageable pieces. The community gets broken, but new sub-communities form, and the company is able to serve more people.

Topical subdivisions aren't the only way to split the forums. But I don't see another way that's reasonable. What other factors can be used? Geographical location of the developer? Age? Years in the industry? Number of completed games? None of these make sense to me.

If we must split, here are the categories that make sense to me. They are very simmilar to the ones origionally proposed by Steve.

Succeeding As An Indie Developer:
Discuss Best practices, time management, motivation, and finances as they relate to Indie game development.

Business & Marketing for Indie game developers.
Discuss business, marketing, and distribution methods for Indie games.

Requests for Feedback
Need feedback on your game, website, or article? Wondering which host, credit card processor, or Indie publisher is the best? Post here.

Technical Considerations
Discuss the details of game implementation, language specifics, system requirements, libraries, and engines.

Dan, you've got my vote for those four sub topics. Excellent descriptions too.

Michael Sikora
Guardian Light Studios (http://www.guardianlightstudios.com)

I'm a little reticent to see a split. I don't think that the volume of posts will really support too many specific categories. I think if it must split it should split as flat as possible. I think Dan's suggested split is pretty good although I might be inclined to merge business and marketing with succeeding. Having a separate area for announcements and feedback requests seems ok because of the nature of those threads. Same with tech feedback. I think the tech forum on ASP worked really well. I expect it would here too. So I'd probably go with..

(1) General Discussion

(2) Announcements & Feedback

(3) Programming & Technical

And look at adding new categories later when and if the volume of posts warrants it.

- Steve

I agree with Svero, 3 subforums is enough for the moment.

I thought about making just 3 forums in the way you describe, but the problem I couldn't get around was that the "Business, marketing, best practices, psychology" forum wouldn't be any different the current forum we have now. It would also be much heavier (frequently visited and posted on) because of the broad nature of the topic. In the end, this really would only delay the current growth problem another couple of months before that forum would need to be split into two or more distinct forums, as it's not really a scaleable solution.

In the end, though I prefer less subforums, I believe attempting to split the forum's by topics that will result in several similarly sized forums is better in the long run then splitting them into several forums with one forum bearing the brunt of the traffic.

I agree with Dan. In a situation where one or two forums are by far the most popular, the smaller forums actually lose traffic overtime (they get frequented for a while then people go to where the party is happening at). Much like in many other things, a forum seems to need a certain threshold of traffic in order to grow instead of dying. Keeping the topic popularity balanced between the forums would sprout new growth. Previously all personal development discussion got lumped into a few large threads. With a dedicated forum, people would be more encouraged to spread the discussion into more specific threads instead of keeping it all together in fear of polluting the one and only forum that has to take everyone's abuse. It also has the potential to make the load easier on the server but that depends what people's forum browsing habits end up becoming with this split.

Nice breakdown of the various segments of indie gaming. The marketing/sales one sounds like my cup o' tea.

I'm not sure I understand what would change if this forum was split into several sub forums... Casual readers would only read one of these sub forums, which would reduce the BW usage ? I know I would keep on reading everything (like on flipcode); it would just be a little bit more annoying than if there was a single forum.
(I don't mean _really_ read everything, but browse all subject lines and read the probably interesting posts)

Maybe a stupid idea, but... in order to maintain a community feeling, maybe there could be several forums that everyone could read, but people could only write into when they have been using this forum long enough. The "amount of time spent using these forums" could be the number of days someone accessed the forum (reading or writing).

Ok, I'm almost sure this has already been discussed... :-}

The thought just occured to me... I think Steve mentioned he was going to have 1 moderator per forum. I think it's best to have at least 2 moderators per forum. The reason is that people go on vacation, they get sick, they run into a deadline at work, they go to a trade show etc... It's probably best to have a few people who can handle the moderation duties day to day.

Originally posted by svero
(1) General Discussion

(2) Announcements & Feedback

(3) Programming & Technical

3 seems like a good number but I don't think "General Discussion" is a good name. Dexterity already has such a forum that recieves little or no traffic. Such forums are generally used for off-topic posts and there aren't many of those here.

I think it should use the current forum name of "Indie Game Dev" or something like "Indie Business & People" (or anything better that someone can suggest) which indicates that the forum has a particular subject range.

It might also be worth considering the order of the thread. 2 & 3 above both have very clear topics while 1 is basically "everything else". Might be a good idea to order them 2, 3 & 1 so that people scan over "Announcements & Feedback" and " Programming & Technical" first before getting to the more general forum. That might help to keep the threads on topic as people are less likely (if only slightly) to just post in the first (general) thread.