The Tavern

For the sake of clarity, would such a change make threads like viewtopic.php?f=17&t=21745 , viewtopic.php?f=17&t=21753 and viewtopic.php?f=17&t=20375 illegal?

All of those seem fine, and even things that are slightly more tangential, like the jokey lawyer thread don't bother me. I think the forum would benefit from a slightly tighter focus on Crawl and the community, however, a limit we don't really enforce in CYC right now.

See, this is exactly what I meant by a joke forum. The threads Shtopit referenced clearly don't fit in a "general crawl discussion" thread. They aren't serious threads about crawl. They're jokes.

Those threads do fit in a "general crawl discussion" forum. They don't belong mixed in with advice or design discussion forums.

I might even go so far as to suggest we find quaint Crawl-themed names for all the forums (with the description saying what they're for), and I think the general discussion works well as Crazy Yiuf's Corner.

If the limit is "you may only joke about Crawl rather than about anything", it's OK for me. It wasn't clear to me if you wanted to limit general discussion to only serious topics.

CIP could be called "The Fleshworks".

CYC is like the only subforum here worth a damn

DCA: everybody asks for advice, nobody listens. Exists mostly so mods can smugly dump any complaints about game balance there, aka "git gud"
YAVP/YSD/CIP: wow, you won a game of Crawl! Good job! Want a cookie?
Dart Board: for people who are so bored of Crawl they have to make up some weird challenges to even touch it
Game Design Discussion: the only board where actual discussion of game design is forbidden and gets shafted either in CYC or DCA. Also known as "food proposals"
Other boards: nobody ever reads them

What would you suggest to fix that, Sar?

e: also, do you feel that making CYC into a "General Crawl Discussion" board would ruin it? Are you suggesting that, by changing it, we'll just be making the entire board useless instead of all but a corner of it?

CIP is also where you actually go to get Dungeon Crawling Advice.

Well, if my post was more than something that I thought would be funny before hitting "Submit", the message probably would be "don't mess with CYC too much", and making it strictly a forum about "Crawl jokes" would probably be a bit too much messing.

Edit:

so you can actually ignore it again

CIP overlaps with DCA, little doubt in that. One subforum could be exclusive of YASD/YAVP, DCA could absorb CIP. Actually, there could just be one section for CIP YASD YAVP and DCA ("Advice").

The Dart Board probably has no reason to exist, its content could go into CYC. The Courtyard also could be thrown into CYC, it's not like it's overtaken with activity and general discussion belongs to CYC anyway.

The Bulletin Board could be put higher in the page, so that new contents are easily visible to all.

Ah, sorry Sar, thought you were being serious. For what it's worth, the only real change I see happening to CYC/GCD (or whatever we call it) in particular is a tighter focus on Crawl.

Shtopit, the plan as I understand it is to remove CIP/Alphabet Soup and merge it with DCA, yes. Otherwise, as you'll see if you look at the discussion from earlier this year on the first page, the Dart Board has many fans, so we'll keep it around. The Courtyard, on the other hand, has only had a handful of posts in the entire time I've been on the Tavern, and none of the moderators can even moderate the content, so it'll be cut entirely. These changes should make it so that none of the forum is "below the fold" on most desktop browsers, though that's not our goal.