Super Forum Maker 2: Restructuring Sandbox

[Marina]

Hey shapeshifters and timetravellers!

It's been an age, but I'm back with an announcement/poll/discussion thread regarding the Sandbox forums.
Some of you will have noticed that I celebrated my reinstation as admin by locking and archiving a few threads. While I love playing the villain, there's a more sophisticated reason than me hating free speech, which is that we're restructuring and streamlining the Sandbox subforum.

If you've ever looked at Sandbox and thought "wow this kind of looks messy" you're completely right and I will promote you to admin next.

But on a more serious note, the Sandbox forum has been long overdue for a makeover. We're currently envisioning a system where threads are more focused towards topics that are more general than "tell us about the last thing you ate during a full moon" but still specific enough to enable structured discussion pertaining to certain subjects like music or youtube videos or lifestyle talk. We're also considering changing the name of the Sandbox forum to something like "Community" subforum, which we think could provide a more aimed focus in thread creation.

So this is where you guys come in. I'd like to hear what topics you deem important enough that they have a place in this streamlined Sandbox utopia of Aristo's dreams. And even more so, do you think a specific area of interest warrants getting its own subforum akin to the video games and the artboard subforums? Or do you think the Sandbox forum is super outdated and we should just move all off-topic talk over to the Discord?

I'm looking forward to hearing your opinions on the matter. Now that I'm back I want to shake things up and clean up the community a bit.

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As for the current state of matters partaining to politics, unpopular opinions and free speech threads:

I want to be frank here in that I'm personally of the opinion that having threads which invite the spread of misinformation and fearmongering among the community is not a task our staff is equipped for, nor should we be responsible for it. There are many places on the internet which provide a proper space for the discussion and debate of controversial subjects, but I don't see a gaming community with a large demographic of minors as its userbase being one of those spaces. I don't feel comfortable seeing users continuously promote conspiratory and factually ambiguous content and I'm planning to take care of this matter, which is the prime reason I came out of retirement. It feels irresponsible to me to even enable the spread of this kind of content in the first place, so for now I'm putting a cork in it. I understand that many of you seek an outlet to share your opinions online, it's not the utopian solution I was hoping for either. I view this not as an effort to shut down the discussion of certain topics on the forums, but as an attempt to curate the community.

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That was awfully depressing to write, so now back to the matter at hand: Sandbox what do?

[Valentine]

wow this kind of looks messy

[Cedur]

If you want to separate discussion threads from banter threads, why not finally introduce a Forum Games subforum with disabled postcount.

Regarding politics, the right-wing agitation should have been punished long ago ngl and that would have saved a lot of bitter words

[aero]

Forum games will never happen.

[Marina]

Forum Games would invite the same kind of behavior I just said I was trying to get rid of.

[FireyPaperMario]

Here's my 1 and only suggestion for the "Reconstruction of the Sandbox Forums" topic:

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Can we add a few separate sub-forums in the sandbox forums, each with a different theme (Excluding forums game, Fuck them!). Lemme list some samples for this idea:

• Real Life Discussion*

• Literature Discussion

• Hobby Discussion

• Sports/Completive Stuff

• Non-Video Games Games

• Television/Movies/Videos

• Food Discussion

etc.

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Hope y'all Admins & Mods are okay with this suggestion! ^^"


*Got the idea from being a member of the VG Resource forums, as they HAVE a real life discussion forums on the site

[aero]

I could go for a Hobby subforum and maybe a Literature one too but idk about the activity for that.

[Taycamgame]

First of all, nice to see you back, Aristo!

There's just one point that I wanted to bring up (because nothing else really affects me directly);

We're also considering changing the name of the Sandbox forum to something like "Community" subforum, which we think could provide a more aimed focus in thread creation.

Why rename it to the "Community" subforum if there's barely any active community? If anything it should probably be renamed to the "Off-topic" subforum (which is already in the subforum description).

[Fuyu]

So if I get this right the main goal is to narrow down the number of threads that are made in the Sandbox subforum that end up forgotten and are a one-time gig which is 90% of threads made there at this point. Going by that logic any thread made there should pass through the watchful eyes of the moderating team and decide whether it goes or goes back to the drawing board of do-not-sugest-something-that-redundant-again-why-even copyright pending. If not that, which I can't really blame y'all ain't nobody got time for that, that leaves us with a system akin to what we used to have, where threads that don't meet certain requirements are immediately locked.

To be honest, topics that are worthwhile keeping record in threads are so far in-between that I'd rather take the whole subforum to discord. Most of what's in there is idle chitchat anyway.

[aero]

We're also considering changing the name of the Sandbox forum to something like "Community" subforum, which we think could provide a more aimed focus in thread creation.

Why rename it to the "Community" subforum if there's barely any active community? If anything it should probably be renamed to the "Off-topic" subforum (which is already in the subforum description).

Renaming it "off-topic" misses the point.

[Marina]

So if I get this right the main goal is to narrow down the number of threads that are made in the Sandbox subforum that end up forgotten and are a one-time gig which is 90% of threads made there at this point. Going by that logic any thread made there should pass through the watchful eyes of the moderating team and decide whether it goes or goes back to the drawing board of do-not-sugest-something-that-redundant-again-why-even copyright pending. If not that, which I can't really blame y'all ain't nobody got time for that, that leaves us with a system akin to what we used to have, where threads that don't meet certain requirements are immediately locked.

To be honest, topics that are worthwhile keeping record in threads are so far in-between that I'd rather take the whole subforum to discord. Most of what's in there is idle chitchat anyway.

The goal would be not to block all threads that don't fit a certain requirement but rather to paint in broader strokes so that any post can be attributed to a bigger thread, like "Music Discussion" or "Sports Discussion".

[RudeGuy]

Can we add a few separate sub-forums in the sandbox forums, each with a different theme (Excluding forums game, Fuck them!). Lemme list some samples for this idea:

How about just sticky topics for these? Making a subforum seems a bit too overkill.

[Uranus]

I could see a few subforums like a Hobby Subforum like Aero suggested and along with that, maybe a Life subforum where we can talk about our lives and what is happening around the world.

I was sad to see Political Discussion go seeing as I had put a g00d chink of my posts there although I understand the reasons.

[Emral]

Looking around to other communities' general discussion forums, threads in them all seem either twittery (random minor topics), discordy (things that can be talked about within a couple minutes and then it's done, or which ask for quick responses on a topic) or shitposty (if you found out your ceiling was munchers how would you react) in nature. Or all three at once.
These forums are bound to become messy because people only talk about their opinions and experiences one post at a time on ALL non-smbx subjects condensed into a single category. I don't think there's any point in trying to clean that up. The closest solutions I can think of are
- embracing the shitposts and spreading it out even further, recognizing most threads to have a short lifetime and the forum existing for people to post stuff that's just on their mind and they need input on for some reason
- removing it and delegating the currently-allowed subjects of discussion to discord, a platform better suited for most content that currently occupies the sandbox and video games forums

for some perspective: talkhaus basically has two threads that pretty much cover 90% of the purpose of those 2 forums, too. They are...
- the "what game are you playing"-thread, where people post about games they're playing https://talkhaus.raocow.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=732
- the twitter thread, where people post what's on their minds https://talkhaus.raocow.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=467
most of the rest of sandbox conversation there is in form of the birthday, meta (site discussion forum) and introductions threads

[Marina]

Looking around to other communities' general discussion forums, threads in them all seem either twittery (random minor topics), discordy (things that can be talked about within a couple minutes and then it's done, or which ask for quick responses on a topic) or shitposty (if you found out your ceiling was munchers how would you react) in nature. Or all three at once.
These forums are bound to become messy because people only talk about their opinions and experiences one post at a time on ALL non-smbx subjects condensed into a single category. I don't think there's any point in trying to clean that up. The closest solutions I can think of are
- embracing the shitposts and spreading it out even further, recognizing most threads to have a short lifetime and the forum existing for people to post stuff that's just on their mind and they need input on for some reason
- removing it and delegating the currently-allowed subjects of discussion to discord, a platform better suited for most content that currently occupies the sandbox and video games forums

for some perspective: talkhaus basically has two threads that pretty much cover 90% of the purpose of those 2 forums, too. They are...
- the "what game are you playing"-thread, where people post about games they're playing https://talkhaus.raocow.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=732
- the twitter thread, where people post what's on their minds https://talkhaus.raocow.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=467
most of the rest of sandbox conversation there is in form of the birthday, meta (site discussion forum) and introductions threads

Yeah those categories are also the ones I've identified and the talkhaus approach is basically what I had in mind.

[krakin]

I could go for a Hobby subforum and maybe a Literature one too but idk about the activity for that.

Yeah, I don't really read books all time like I used to anymore. Hobbies wouldn't be much for me to talk about either, since my only current hobby is playing video games.

[Knux]

just leave sandbox as it is, but add subforums Serious Discussion and Forum Games (disable post count for FG)

[ElectriKong]

Forum Games

Has already been confirmed that it isn't happening

[krakin]

Forum Games

Has already been confirmed that it isn't happening

if by some chance forum games became a subforum and post count was disabled for it, it would still encourage spam and low effort posts

[Fuyu]

Couldn't such games be reporpused for Discord to begin with?