Forum Modification Wishlist

Fucking typical. Blah.

Today I was searching for Spain here, and found there appear to be a lot of spam accounts that make no posts, but include links in the their profile. E.g. http://brokenforum.com/index.php?members/lubabell666.4176/.

This isn't a big problem, but it does make searching for keywords more difficult.

They're trying to up the webranking of their stupid shill sites. They just assume everyone running the forums are using follow links and are Google-indexed, and they write one script that can create this en masse on hundreds of forums easily. Even if only a couple of them are shittily managed enough to allow their scheme to work, it makes them money in the end.

SELECT * FROM users WHERE LENGTH(homepage) > 35 AND posts=0

Restricting the ability to post anything in the homepage field to people with a tleats one post ought to be possible, right?

A quick Google found this.

FATHERLY LEADER uses On-The-Spot Guidance!

It's Super Effective!!

Ah, I was wondering what had happened to tweets. Also, in a brief bit of irony, the server died for a moment just as I was about to post this. Thanks for doing so much work on our behalf, Lum.

A simple wish: I wish the quoted texts were not italicized. It helps when quoting something that uses italicization for emphasis and that emphasis is important to this post, or when the quote is pulled from somewhere out of the current thread.

It's working now, and looks good!

I do wish, though, that we had a suitable thread in order to recruit players for forum games hosted in the League of Dead and Dying Gameplayers. That place hardly sees the light of day, much less fresh air. Is it really a surprise that people host their forum games outside of the subforum?

Maybe put an announcement/recruitment thread in January and game and commentary threads in League?

I'd rather have my game and sign-up/commentary threads in the same subforum so it's easier for players to switch between the two.

I'm saying make an announcement/signup thread in January and when the game is full, commentary and game threads in League. The January announcement thread would fall off of the page pretty quickly once the game filled up.

Can posts older than x months be locked so no more likes/edits can be applied? I might be asking because Soli-chan found the League of Legends thread and is liking things I posted back in April.

Oh, sorry! Um, I'll just put down the likes while I continue to browse then. Trying to figure out how to play LoL before I dive in. ^^;;

Everyone else who posted in the LoL thread can now proceed to hate on chequers.

I didn't even post in the LoL thread, can I still spread hate?

Haha no it's okay, it's a bit off because this forum has metamorphilised or whatever from where it was awhile ago so reminders are odd un. And eh, hyperliking habits aside continuing on for so many alerts might well be distracting so~! No hard feelings guys.

It's not causing me heartburn :P I just approach Likes differently -- for me they're something to be given only contemporaneously with the posting. Liking an old post makes me feel as bad as if I was editing an old one of my own.

I'm probably an extreme example of this against-historical-revisionism position, but I'll note Reddit 'archives' posts after six months, preserving old threads in amber for eternity.

When I woke up this morning (10 mins ago) I was all like 'let the games complete in January and then shift them to the League as an archive'. Then I read the 'Let's all play the nonary game' thread and my inner grognard was released and I was all like 'get this rubbish out of my forum!' So in conclusion, I agree with Raife.

No, just like it's not really a surprise when people at Wal Mart leave their shopping carts in a parking space instead of walking them to the cart corral.

I like, like to like some, like, really old posts, sometimes.

Hey, you too? I just installed it last week and have been playing a few AI matches so far.

I totally agree with this. Going off Raife's idea, maybe a single sticky thread somewhere (probably January) for forum game announcements? I know it may be slightly less convenient for the forum gamers, but continuing to keep all the threads in January is going to be inconvenient for everybody on the forum.

Hmm, I do like the idea of having a thread for forum game announcements in January, but I'm not sure if it should be stickied. It'll float up to the top of the forum anyway whenever somebody announces a game.

...maybe it'd be a good idea if that thread was reserved for game announcements and nothing else. That would keep it from cluttering up January, probably.

In any case, what with the recent explosion of forum games compared to the total inactivity before, and with multiple people announcing their intent to host more games in the Light's Glory thread, I'm thinking that yeah, keeping everything in the League is for the best. Maybe what we need is just more forum games on a more regular basis to keep activity in that subforum up.

Good point. It may be that leaving it unstickied would actually provide better notification. And of course everyone interested in forum games would want to mark this thread as "Watched" so they'll get alerts whenever there's a new post. I agree the announce thread would be most effective if used only for announcements (paired with links to signups in the League subforum), so those alerts would be most useful. One thread isn't going to clutter up January, but if it's used for lots of chatter, the notifications become less meaningful for those interested.

I don't know that activity just for the sake of activity is a goal in and of itself, but it sounds like there's lately a lot of interest in new forum games so I'd expect it'll just happen organically. The more people that play those games and get interested in them, the larger the pool of potential participants and game....runner... people.

Activity only for the sake of activity is dumb. (I think I've told middle managers that before. They never liked hearing it!)

My inner grognard questions even the need for an announcement thread. A very brief rulesish stickied post stating that January's for miscellaneous stuff, usual tyrannical prerogative applies, that lots of people enjoy forum games and that those go into the League would be fine. Traffic there would increase when there's games that really catch wider interest and as awareness spreads through events like people changing their avatars to superheroes or suspicious-looking ocelots or whatever and the Avatars thread lights up with "why is everyone suddenly using Pumaman avatars?" activities.

As I see it, there's no real downside to having a single announcement thread in January from a broad usability standpoint. I think having it would strike a good balance between the forum gamers' desire to get the word out in a high-traffic area of the forum and everyone else's desire to browse January without a lot of potential clutter. It'd take advantage of the notification features and serve as a single point for distributing the information, and wouldn't interfere with anyone who isn't interested since it's a single thread which is easy to avoid clicking. If threads regarding forum games are only allowed in the League subforum, they may never get to catch wider interest in the first place, and doing so leaves those interested in the games without much recourse to get the word out.

Yeah, well, the only reason I brought that up was because roBurky posted his game in January precisely because there was no activity in League whatsoever, hence nobody would see his thread, hence nobody would sign-up/watch/comment. Having more forum games in the League on a more regular basis (which seems like it's going to happen anyway because of increased interest - my intention wasn't to say that we should host forum games JUST to increase activity) means that there will be more eyes on that subforum, which means that the games will pick up more participants/spectators, which will make posting games/announcements in January unnecessary. Which hopefully should make everybody happy.

EDIT: Also, I'll start up the announcement thread at some point unless people are really against it.

In the meantime, can Elyscape or Neopythia move the Nonary game to the appropriate forum? Kekeke.

We don't have a KILL IT WITH FIRE forum, Jerri.

Easy, Nute - we don't want to go full grognard.

Against the forces of PRISONER DILEMMA-CHAN KAWAII DESUUUUUUUU!!! you can never go too grognard.