Proposal: Tavern Reorganization

[njvack]

Hi all,

The idea for a "General Crawl Discussion" subforum has been banging around in archaeo and my heads for a while (thanks Blade!), and we have, I think, a tentative proposal for a wider reorganization. Before hashing things with the other mods in too great detail, I'd like to hear if there are strong objections from y'all, since this would be a fairly large change and affect the community more than the mods, honestly. So here's the proposed structure:

• The Tavern
  
  • General Crawl Discussion ("For victory celebrations, character funerals, casual tournaments, and conversation about the game and its design.")
  • Dungeon Crawling Advice ("Ask fellow adventurers how to stay alive in the deep, dark, dangerous dungeon below, or share your own accumulated wisdom.")
  • Crazy Yiuf's Corner ("If it doesn't fit anywhere else, it belongs here. Also, come here if you just need to get hammered maced." Include new CYC guidelines, "What CYC Is Not," including "CYC is not a general discussion forum.")
  • Announcements, Suggestions & Criticism ("The metaforum for discussing the Tavern itself.")
• The Back Room
  
  • Proposals & Contributions ("A subforum for finished or nearly finished ideas and patches; see the P&C Guidelines for more information.")
  • Technical Support ("Questions and answers for technical problems for players and coders alike.")

I'd propose moving content as follows:

• Everything in YAVP/YASD/CIP -> Discussion (yeah, I know CIP threads in the future would mostly land in Advice, but there is zero chance I'm going to try and weed through that)
• Some Advice threads ("Has anyone gotten Sturdy Frame yet?") -> Discussion
• Some CYC threads (Best/Worst Artefacts, Blade's "Crawl Legends", early feature ideas) -> Discussion
• The Dart Board -> Discussion. Possibly a sticky for a current casual tournament, or maybe those threads are active for a bit and die out.
• GDD -> Proposals & Contributions (Maybe with a different name? Maybe keep GDD's name?)
• Contributions -> Proposals & Contributions
• Coding -> Technical Support
• Wanderer's Courtyard -> Discussion
• The Bulletin Board -> Announcements, Suggestions, & Criticism

The clearest concrete problem I think this addresses is the "hey where do I get help" thing -- I occasionally see people post char dumps to Advice and get told to go to CIP, or have more general questions in CIP and get told to go to Advice. There might still be a bit of that (hey I died what should I have done?) but the guideline would be "Are you asking for advice? Post in advice. Are you just pissed off? Discussion."

Otherwise, it's mainly tightening up a lot of forums that don't see much traffic, and having a clear purpose for CYC (jokes and non-Crawl content) "3000 Thanks Quest" and "I had a dream..." and "here are these funny pictures" and such.

This gets rid of some of the top-level forums ("The Annex" and "The Bar" get the axe here) but those don't, as far as I can tell, serve any actual function. We could have different mods and permissions for different top-level forums, but we don't and I suspect we never will. Honestly, we could probably do away with the distinction between The Tavern and The Back Room, but we can't lose all the flavor, can we?

More creative names for the forums might be a nice thing, but one topic at at time

Anyhow! Does this seem clear? One result of this is that there would be fewer forums, most of which would have more traffic (CYC would have less, probably). That sounds like a good result to me. To others, as well?

[Siegurt]

I would personally like this change, except I enjoy having a dedicated area for challenges/competitions/etc, I would put casual tourneys and stuff like "give the person above you a combo to play" type of threads, as well as stuff like specific challenges like the "only use a spear" and "apocolypse damage only" theoretical challenges, as well as formal tournament annoucements and news.

The reason I would like that is that I feel like general discussion/CYC will be too fast-moving (with really only more recent posts being in the first page or two) and specific challenges like that are things that are likely to be enjoyed long after they're posted.

So I would like it if we retained 'the dart board' more or less intact.

[archaeo]

Except The Dart Board has had 88 topics in 2 years, and even if you threw in the non-proposal GDD posts, active competitions would still stay on the front page of The Tavern without any trouble. The argument for retaining The Dart Board for organizational purposes is stronger, but ignores the fact that CYC already contains a bunch of challenges and tournament-related content from before and after The Dart Board.

e: not that I feel incredibly strongly about this or anything; if the community really wants a separate challenge/tournament forum that's fine, I just think the evidence suggests that the popular posts would survive without it and the community otherwise hasn't expressed much interest in it since it was created.

[crate]

Dart board should be separate imo.

The low number of topics is actually probably an argument for separation, not against it, since it makes people who are actually interested in the content of the dart board able to access it (compared to not able to access it at all if you merge it with another board).

(no, having to search is not an acceptable alternative)

If you want to remove Tavern supporting competitions (removing dart board) that is ok, but I don't see the cost or downside to keeping it separate and there is a clear upside.

I mean alternatively you could pin the currently active competitions or something in cyc, but this is much more mod work (have to pin and unpin ~weekly) and CYC including even more topics is not an improvement.

edit: Maybe I should clarify this, but I assume that CYC's goal is to be an off-topic forum. If this is the case, you should try very hard to not have discussion related to actually playing crawl (or any serious discussion of anything like crawl design) belong in CYC. The alternative is the current situation, where I would like to ignore CYC because I don't care much about off-topic discussions, but I also sort of can't because it's not actually the off-topic forum.

edit2: I will have some more comments in a separate post later.

[WalkerBoh]

I also like the reorganization, and would recommend keeping the Dart Board separate for the reasons crate mentioned above.

[Sprucery]

I also like the reorganization, and would recommend keeping the Dart Board separate for the reasons crate mentioned above.

Me too.

[crate]

OK I did some thinking and here is what I came up with:

To begin with you have to acknowledge what the reasons for having different sections of a forum are. There are two main reasons for sectioning off a forum:

1) Keep related topics together
2) Keep unrelated topics separate

These two goals make it easy for forum-users to find the content for which they are looking.

I am also making an assumption, which is that the purpose of Tavern is for crawl players to discuss crawl among themselves. This is important, because it means the purpose is not to try to get changes actually made to crawl. This is related to my discussion of GDD below. If you feel that "this change should be made to crawl and here is my argument for it" belongs on Tavern directly then it deserves a separate subforum. Personally I think keeping that discussion to other places like ##crawl-dev is acceptable, but I will leave the decision up to other people without saying any more, since really it's up to the devs what should happen here.

It is as important to do 2) as it is to do 1). Note that nowhere does this mention forum activity; subsections that get little activity are actually perfectly fine and possibly even desirable, if the content within is content that makes Tavern better. For an example related to current Tavern, the non-English discussions clearly deserve their own forum section if they are to stay: I only speak English so seeing non-English topics is just clutter that makes the forum worse for me, and similarly anyone who comes here to discuss crawl in, say, French, does not want to have to wade through the tons of English-language topics to find the French language discussion. Possibly you feel that non-English discussions do not add to Tavern; in that case, remove them entirely.

Therefore, low-activity subsections that actually are desirable content and are distinct from other forum sections (Dart Board, Wanderer's Courtyard, Bulletin Board, Forum Suggestions) should remain, unless you think their content should not exist on Tavern at all. Keeping them separate allows their content to be accessible to people seeking the content, without cluttering up other forum sections.

---

I actually think the current setup is mostly good, with probably two exceptions.
1) Advice for characters-in-progress belongs in the general advice section, not in the YAVP section. Victory posts do not belong in the advice section, so if you think victory posts deserve a place on Tavern then there should be a separate "talk about my character" section for victory/death/CIP posts not actually asking for advice.

2) I have no idea what CYC is supposed to be, or really what GDD is supposed to be. My assumption, and where I would go with any forum reform, is that CYC is a place for off-topic discussion or anything that is completely not serious. If you have a serious suggestion or discussion related to crawl design, it belongs in GDD. But for some reason roughly half of those topics get shoved into CYC and thus both CYC and GDD are broken forums. GDD is broken because not all of the related content is in one place (a lot of actually serious game design discussion threads get shunted into CYC), and CYC is broken because unrelated content is shoved together (off-topic along with design discussion). The subforum that Blade- has pushed for actually already exists, and it is GDD; it is discussing the design of crawl.

Relatedly, I do not think that shoving "serious but not high quality" suggestions into a separate forum is good for Tavern, particularly if the goal is actually to act as a discussion forum among players. I sort of understand why it happened, but I think it made Tavern worse in the long run. If you want to create a separate section of Tavern for "this particular change should actually go into DCSS and I am going to tell the devs why" topics, then that is okay. You end up violating rule 1) above, but you do it because that particular section of the forum has an entirely different goal from the rest of Tavern; it is not a discussion among players, but rather a location for player feedback to devs. You should check with the devs before you create this forum section, if you do, because its entire goal is player-dev interaction, and if the devs do not want to support that section of the forum then it is obviously useless. If this section is created, then moving topics out of this section and into the among-players discussion section based on quality is fine, because it lives outside rules 1) and 2) because of its different goal.

I would probably suggest keeping general design discussion (i.e. Blade-'s suggested forum) in the same forum as "I think these changes should happen" discussion among players, because they're intimately related and so by rule 1) should remain together.

--

Anyway with this posted, then I guess this would be my suggested forum setup, with the asterisked forums optional depending on Tavern's goals:

1) Tavern
a) Crawl advice
b) Talk about my character (YAVP section)
c) Dart Board

2) The Back Room
a) Game design discussion (see above for what I mean here; this is NOT current GDD)
b) Technical support
c) Player-dev interaction forum*

3) Non-crawl-playing/non-crawl-design discussion
a) CYC (includes things like crawl related artwork, or complete joke suggestions about crawl changes, etc.)
b) Off-topic (non-crawl-related) discussion*
c) Announcements
d) Forum suggestions

4) Non-English discussion*
(doesn't need further subdivision)

---

Move topics as follows:
DCA -> 1a
YAVP -> 1b
CYC -> 3a (can't solve that CYC is multiple separate sections)
Dart Board -> 1c

GDD -> 2a (even though current GDD is sort of treated as a hybrid of 2a and 2c this is probably better)
Tech support -> 2b
Contributions -> I'm not sure. Possibly 2c?
Coding -> 2b or 3b, depending on what you decide

Wanderer's Courtyard -> 4

Bulletin board -> 3c
Suggestions -> 3d

[dowan]

I think I totally agree with Crate. His proposal has the most important part of this, which is a separate design discussion forum, which is neither the tightly moderated current GDD, nor is it the joke and spam ridden CYC.

[archaeo]

A few points in response to crate:

Wanderer's Courtyard is more or less unmoderated and has virtually no traffic. I don't think we really have much interest in maintaining it, though I think we'd all be happy to provide a sticky post/sidebar on the main CDO site with links to forums in other languages.

Your musings on the topic of the GDD/CYC divide is already reflected in the new reorg, as far as I can tell. I think it's still valuable to keep a "propose finished/almost finished ideas to the devs" subforum (and presumably so do the devs who continue to participate and post there), which is what most of GDD tends to be, and what P&C is supposed to be; that narrower focus should make things less puzzling. Otherwise, we simply place all serious on-topic Crawl discussion in a single forum. CYC would simply become an "off-topic-with-some-limits" subforum.

The Bulletin Board doesn't need to be its own thing. According to your rules, crate, I'd say that it's more useful if the forum keeps "meta" posts in one place, which means that Tavern-centric announcements probably should be with Tavern discussion. Everything else in that forum belongs somewhere else; the devs have their own website to announce things to players, and everybody else will get more attention by bringing up new forks or whatever in the general discussion forum.

Personally, I tend to think splitting the YAVP subforum between the general forum and DCA is a good thing, and likewise with moving The Dart Board into the general. I tend to think those topics would get more attention as part of a better trafficked board, and we're a discussion forum, not a repository of character dumps or challenge conducts. I understand the point of your forum management rules crate, but I don't think accessibility is massively damaged by folding these forums together. Clearly, I'm in the minority w/r/t The Dart Board.

[njvack]

I could go either way on The Dart Board. I kind of imagine regular tournament talk would go in Discussion, but the other stuff... maybe it's good that all that content hangs out together? At least it has a cute name.

The current Bulletin Board is really bad. It's a mix of things like meta announcements (which belong in S&C) and server announcements (which, if they really belong on Tavern, probably deserve a sticky thread in Discussion or something) and a random smattering of version announcements (-> Discussion).

[crate]

Announcements are not the same thing as forum meta-discussion; in fact the announcements subforum (if it will remain, it is possible to just remove it if you don't think Tavern needs announcements, though I would keep it) should not even be a subforum where general members can post topics (and arguably general posters should not be able to even post there at all, so that any new post in the subforum is an announcement). It should be only for mods/devs/admins to make announcements. Players giving feedback to the forum management is a separate category of topics, and of course that subforum is one where non-forum-management must be able to make topics and posts, therefore it must be separate.

I don't see where njvack's suggested reorganization handles game design discussion among players. It is not good to lump it in with advice or other player-focused discussion; there is an important divide between thinking of crawl from a player's perspective and thinking of crawl from a designer's perspective. So lumping design discussion in the same forum as advice is pretty bad, because it's not the same thing at all (this is the reason Blade- wanted a separate subforum instead of just posting topics in DCA or something). It should be in the same subsection as proposals, imo.

edit: I would in fact merge advice with general crawl discussion; they seem pretty similar to me, and often bleed into each other. But thinking-as-a-player does not overlap with thinking-as-a-dev as much, imo, so you should keep those separate. In fact, this is the divide between Tavern and the Back Room in my forum structure. (Perhaps tech support could actually move to the same section as CYC, it's not clear where it fits.) Perhaps a good way to think about this: my suggested design forum is the place you would discuss things like the merits of persistent levels in roguelikes, or similar "what if crawl did x instead of y" posts. Clearly that does not belong in a player-dev interaction forum, since Crawl will always have persistent levels. But it also doesn't belong in an advice subforum, because it has little to do with actually playing crawl. I would suggest (from Blade-'s posts about getting a subforum like this) that there is demand for this subforum.

I think the Dart Board would be pretty hurt by merging with another forum, particularly since the forum search is so bad. It would be very difficult to look through past challenges, whereas the current setup makes this very easy (and yes, this is important for people actually suggesting challenges). And the topics are pretty clearly their own category. I'm not sure that more visibility is an advantage, either. But if you think that challenges do not belong on Tavern, then fine; I've said my piece at this point.

[njvack]

Most game design discussion would go in Discussion. Basically, Discussion would be "the actual Crawl discussion that happens in CYC right now."

Announcements would probably be handles as stickies, unless someone wants to shepherd things like version and server announcements comprehensively enough to put them in their own forum. <subtly puts thumb on edge of table>

"Hey X is now a moderator" kinds of announcements would go in meta. Maybe a sticky there for current mods, with separate announcement posts.

[crate]

Most game design discussion would go in Discussion. Basically, Discussion would be "the actual Crawl discussion that happens in CYC right now."

("For victory celebrations, character funerals, casual tournaments, and conversation about the game and its design.")

These two statements are not consistent with each other, unless you are purposely trying to make new-discussion a failure like current CYC is by lumping unrelated content together. Anyway, I think I've said my piece (the two different ways of thinking about crawl is a very important distinction to me personally, though perhaps it is not so for other forum members). The forum is your to manage, but I would like to have useful forum subsections instead of current CYC so I can avoid having to wade through content that does not interest me (the current non-design-related CYC content) to get at the content that does interest me (the design content that gets shoved into current CYC).

[ydeve]

I don't see where njvack's suggested reorganization handles game design discussion among players. It is not good to lump it in with advice or other player-focused discussion; there is an important divide between thinking of crawl from a player's perspective and thinking of crawl from a designer's perspective. So lumping design discussion in the same forum as advice is pretty bad, because it's not the same thing at all (this is the reason Blade- wanted a separate subforum instead of just posting topics in DCA or something). It should be in the same subsection as proposals, imo.

edit: I would in fact merge advice with general crawl discussion; they seem pretty similar to me, and often bleed into each other. But thinking-as-a-player does not overlap with thinking-as-a-dev as much, imo, so you should keep those separate. In fact, this is the divide between Tavern and the Back Room in my forum structure. (Perhaps tech support could actually move to the same section as CYC, it's not clear where it fits.) Perhaps a good way to think about this: my suggested design forum is the place you would discuss things like the merits of persistent levels in roguelikes, or similar "what if crawl did x instead of y" posts. Clearly that does not belong in a player-dev interaction forum, since Crawl will always have persistent levels. But it also doesn't belong in an advice subforum, because it has little to do with actually playing crawl. I would suggest (from Blade-'s posts about getting a subforum like this) that there is demand for this subforum.

I think the Dart Board would be pretty hurt by merging with another forum, particularly since the forum search is so bad. It would be very difficult to look through past challenges, whereas the current setup makes this very easy (and yes, this is important for people actually suggesting challenges). And the topics are pretty clearly their own category. I'm not sure that more visibility is an advantage, either. But if you think that challenges do not belong on Tavern, then fine; I've said my piece at this point.

I agree with all of these. I particularly think discussing game design would be hurt by combining it with gameplay advice

[archaeo]

"Wade through" makes it sound like there's this deluge of posts you'd have to make it through, when in reality the Tavern's traffic is pretty sedate and even if we only had a single subforum it would hardly be overwhelming. If you haven't, I suggest using the link to "The Tavern" on the board index to see how this would generally look, with the addition of a few topics that are currently posted to GDD and the removal of unserious CYC threads. It's really not an organizational nightmare, and I tend to think it would bring attention to some of the low-traffic topics and reduce confusion about where conversation is supposed to happen. If there really was so much activity that "wade" became an appropriate verb to describe navigating it, we could split it up again, but "victory celebrations, character funerals, casual tournaments, and conversations about the game and its design" combined ends up being a totally manageable front page, with a good mix of new content and continued discussion.

All that said, that "statement" is just what I wrote off the top of my head when I was describing my idea to njvack. I'd welcome more discussion about what exactly is "on-topic" for these suggested subforums.

ydeve: If it's not clear, Dungeon Crawling Advice remains essentially unchanged. It would still be a separate subforum.

[njvack]

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for catching the description text there, that was an oversight and lack of total consonance between me and archaeo. I definitely agree that mixing design and advice would be bad.

What I want to get away from is the current:
* GDD (some game design discussion)
* CYC (more game design discussion, plus a lot of other stuff)

There's always a dedicated place for design stuff (P&C in the new order, probably GDD is better for history if nothing else) but the bigger question is, I think, what to do with the half-baked proposals and thought experiments. Should they stay in GDD? Should they be in Discussion? Should there be a dedicated "GDD-Lite" forum ("The Proving Ground"?)

Basically, I want to keep GDD's signal to noise as high as reasonable, but provide an outlet for non-devs to contribute.

[archaeo]

FWIW, I decided on "Proposals & Contributions" by accepting that the only way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high in a "design forum" would be to have a fairly narrow scope. Half-baked proposals, thought experiments, and basically everything short of a "finished proposal" can go to the Discussion forum, as can proposals that might need a second look; since we're separating "Crawl Discussion" from "anything-goes CYC," I assume that people will be less bummed about getting "GCD'd" instead of "CYC'd," just as I assume that more devs might be inclined to participate in a "General Crawl Discussion" instead of what CYC tends to be.

On a related note, the forum has an average of 9.85 topics and 135.93 posts per day. That's not even a particularly active subreddit, much less a forum that requires nearly a dozen separate subforums.

[all before]

I'm undecided about this proposal, but I wanted to point out that this change isn't really about organization but moderation. Prior to this thread, I've never seen anyone complain about the tavern's organization making it difficult to find posts they're interested in. I've instead seen two kinds of complaints related to the tav's organization: 1) GDD posts getting shunted to CYC, and 2) people getting unwanted advice when they wanted to brag/complain about a character's success/failure. Both of these have to do with what makes for an acceptable post or reply in different subforums. Standards of moderation are different depending on where in the tav you post.

I don't think that kind of variation is good. I'm with crate, splitting design posts across two different subforums just results in a lot of weird and seemingly arbitrary rules. I don't think a space where people are protected from advice really makes any sense either. And I really think the existence of CYC is bad because people mistakenly think it's an "anything goes" area where mods shouldn't intervene.

[dowan]

Basically, it'd be nice if there were a place where I could create a post called "Trying to create a god based on rewarding player carelessness", where a Dev isn't going to see my half baked ideas, declare it to be a "not do" and have the mods close the thread(GDD). At the same time, I don't want a fellow poster to come in, see my half baked ideas, and decide to spam the thread with meme gifs and poetry(CYC). I just want to have a place to brainstorm, have other people throw in their suggestions, and if anything actually starts seeming reasonably implementable, then we'd make a new thread in GDD to propose it, and if there's something that strikes another poster as really funny about my idea, they can post a topic in CYC to laugh at it.

It'd also be nice if there were a place where I could create a post called "trying to win a 3 rune game with firestorm, glaciate, and tornado at max power", where it's clear I don't want the advice that it's obviously a horrible idea for trying to win the game consistently, where it's also clear new players shouldn't be taking my crazy ideas as advice, and once again, where I have some protection from being spammed into oblivion.

It's fine with me if those are both the same sub-forum, although there's probably a reasonable argument for having them be two separate sub-forums.

[dpeg]

There should be no presumptions that sufficiently well written tavern proposals will make it to Crawl, regardless of where they are posted. That said, I think it is a good idea to have a serious design-related discussion place. There is a huge difference between (a) suggestions that are one-off ideas and/or one-linears, and (b) proposals that even if short, explain where they come from and what follow-up changes they'd cause. Since there are a number of Crawl players who have a very good understanding of Crawl design, this division is really worthwhile, in my opinion.

I can also understand the desire to separate CYC into its two main classes (nonsense vs more freeform design/gameplay discussion). But I am less affected by this, except for when I take random CYC rants too seriously.

[dowan]

Yeah, obviously no matter how freely you're allowed to come up with and refine crazy proposals, it still has to pass GDD muster to even be considered. I don't see why anyone would think otherwise though.

[triorph]

None of this makes a difference to me. I always just go to "view active topics" and as people have said, its not a deluge of activity that makes it hard to find what you're looking for. The only reason I even had to learn the distinction was when I started making my own posts for the casual league. Current tournament ideas are usually pretty infrequent, so a sticky post wouldn't be too much of a hassle for players there either.

[njvack]

IMO, it would be good if "Game Design Discussion" were a place where, y'know, game design might be discussed. If ideas are shit, maybe that's OK, people can discuss the shittiness of them (or decide not to). There are ideas that are clearly jokes which belong in CYC, but I've come around to thinking that Yiufing GDD topics is antisocial. If people are being a problem in the forum, it's better to talk to them than be passive-aggressive and move the topic. Yes, I know I've moved a lot of them.

The idea that things can go in GDD, pass muster, and make it into Crawl is absolutely not correct. Maybe this should be Official Policy. If you have a bug or misfeature, report it on Mantis. If you're actually looking to implement a feature, you're going to need to talk to the dev team through other channels.

[njvack]

Or, another way: GDD is one of our more active forums, but even it is not exactly a content firehose. If people post ill-thought-out things, it's fine to say "dude you haven't thought about this enough to have a reasonable conversation about it" and lock the thread, or just let the thread die on the vine.

[edgefigaro]

A crawl discussion forum gives a mechanism for weeding GDD. Many GDD posts shouldn't be there, but there isn't really a place for them to go.

Instead of locking threads, you just move threads into General Crawl Discussion under a 'not well thought out' tag, and then (1) people can still talk about it outside of an actual proposal and (2) learn to respect the rules and intent of GDD.

I really want a person who wants a lava yaktaur hybrid race and uses his first ever post on the forum to talk about his lava yaktaur race and why its the greatest idea ever to be welcome on the crawl forums. Pollen Golem started here that way. This(overhaul of Mahkleb, Pakellas, and Nemelex was his 4th post.), and it was fun to watch him grow as a player and poster. The goal is to move his post out of GDD as gently as possible.

Also, pointing to good proposals that never made it into crawl (specifically, species/god proposals) is something that can be done. From the previous thread:

Spoiler: show

This thread is a good god proposal. Gods are non trivial to implement, and there is a good chance the proposal still won't make it into testing. I don't know if anyone ever put any follow through behind the god.

In comparison, this thread is a good unique proposal thread. The first response?

+1 for taking the time to code it.

This was (is?) tested on trunk at some point in time.

Other Thought
Please keep the dart board. It is the forum that truly functions as intended. Comborobin specifically was able to stay at the top of the front page without bumps or shitposts for the duration because the board is slow, and that thread was a tremendous win for the players and community.

[duvessa]

CYC was supposed to be general Crawl discussion from the start, with a rule against non-Crawl-related posts. It hasn't ever been enforced very well, but if you look at the first page there are exactly two topics unrelated to crawl, one of which is about the forum itself and the other one of which was posted by a moderator.
By adding an explicit off-topic forum you invite off-topic discussion that is practically nonexistent right now. CYC is not even especially filled with shitposts, it's mostly bad or misplaced proposals (which you are suggesting to put in general crawl discussion anyway!) and general crawl discussion (which you are also suggesting to put in general crawl discussion).
The replies to design threads are pretty much always people making fun of the OP, regardless of which subforum it's in. I doubt moving them to another subforum will change this.

[njvack]

... so, duvessa, is your thesis 'dude things are as good as they're going to get right now, moving stuff is just work for work's sake'?

[njvack]

By adding an explicit off-topic forum you invite off-topic discussion that is practically nonexistent right now. CYC is not even especially filled with shitposts

On further reflection: I actually think off-topic discussion and shitposts are good*. I want to invite it, but I don't want it to overwhelm other kinds of content.

* 3000 Thanks Quest was awesome. It was totally off-topic.

[duvessa]

... so, duvessa, is your thesis 'dude things are as good as they're going to get right now, moving stuff is just work for work's sake'?

No, it's that the proposed "General Crawl Discussion" forum would be pretty much the same as CYC is now. crate's reorganization makes more sense to me, though I am not convinced it would change much.

I assume the goal is to get rid of perceived public dissatisfaction, and I'm pretty sure the easiest way to do that would be to stop moving and locking on-topic GDD posts, because if the current policy had any consistency, then about 99% of current GDD posts would be moved to CYC because they don't follow the guidelines.

Also, I have always felt the YAVP/YASD/CiP forum should be removed. Nobody cares about them unless they involve something totally wacky (in which case they can go in CYC) or they're CiPs eliciting advice (in which case they should be in the advice forum). The subforum is basically 100 pages of spam that makes the forum look more active than it actually is.

[njvack]

Also, I have always felt the YAVP/YASD/CiP forum should be removed.

On this, we are agreed

[Sprucery]

Also, I have always felt the YAVP/YASD/CiP forum should be removed.

On the contrary. If only one forum should stay, that would be it. It has the best content-to-noise ratio and the tags make it easy to skip whatever you're not interested in reading.

[dowan]

It's fun to sometimes post a winning/dead/in progress character and see what you should have done differently, but I suppose the advice forum covers that too. Then again, I do kind of like having a general advice forum separate from a specific character advice forum, where one is more theory, and the other more practical.

I don't see how its existence causes any problems though.

[edgefigaro]

CIP is the best part of YAVP/YASD/CIP forums, and gets mashed up with advice frequently.

YAVP/YASD posts generally don't do alot for the forum, content-wise, but I think certain posts (megazig/tournament challenge completion posts/ any exceptionally odd runs (OCPA Irridate Ghoul) have merit.

Also, "My First Win" posts are great for the community IMO, even if they don't really add content to the forum. I really think there should be a place for these posts specifically. So many times I see a user with <10 posts put up their first win, and it a great way to entice people to participate in the forum.

I would be sad to see YAVP/YASD go, but would also be sad to see them rolled into Advice or discussion, since the actual content added is minimal. CIP should be rolled into advice.

I guess I'm advocating for:
Two high traffic boards: Advice, Discussion
Two Low Traffic Boards: YASD/YAVP, Dart Board

With Comborobin being over, I think there may be a market for community games. I'm tempted to propose such an experiment as YASD/YAVP/Community. That may be too experimental an idea for the reorganization.

[njvack]

I advocate YASD/YAVP going into discussion. If there's a forum just for those and no reason for "tavern regulars" to ever look at those posts, they'll just be bitbucketed. Posting a first victory and getting no views would be disheartening.

[amaril]

This has kind of already been said, but I think it is important that there is a distinction between "Game Design Discussion" and "Gameplay Discussion." Many YASD/YAVP posts belong in Gameplay discussion, but definitely not in Design discussion. That being said there will inevitably be some overlap between forums: conversations can follow tangents and end up serious/not serious or design/gameplay oriented regardless of where they began, and I don't think it is a bad thing that this is the case, even if it makes forum organization difficult.

[Brannock]

Did this proposal for change get forgotten? I think a Tavern cleanup would do wonders for the health of the forum.

[njvack]

Pretty much I lost all tavern mod energy :/

[Brannock]

Pretty much I lost all tavern mod energy :/

What's involved in the cleanup? Just moving threads and creating/renaming subforums, or is there more complicated stuff that needs to be done? I'm willing to do the reorganization myself, it shouldn't take too long.

[archaeo]

That was not the only reason, Brannock. The mod team also couldn't agree on a reorganization scheme, and there is no obvious "popular" choice from the users. Since no one on the Tavern has anything approaching executive authority (except for napkin, the forum administrator, who is too busy to spend time babysitting video game discussions at this point in his life), things reached a deadlock.

[ydeve]

Please just split CYC into a "General Crawl Discussion" forum and a "Jokes" forum.

[dowan]

Yeah, that's the biggest thing. CYC posts can be vulnerable to being 'joked' out of existence sometimes, yet new posters who post in GDD often get chided and moved to CYC. I know sometimes people will post "serious" or whatever in their CYC post, but it would be a lot better if there weren't silly joke threads and people's serious (if sometimes flawed) ideas mixed together in one subforum.

[Brannock]

Please just split CYC into a "General Crawl Discussion" forum and a "Jokes" forum.

That's the biggest thing, I think... merging CYC and DCA into a general discussion forum, moving the "advice" part of DCA into CIP, and having an actual, legitimate jokes forum that'd still be named CYC.

[archaeo]

Whatever else is true about tavern reorganization, there has been no interest among the mods for a "jokes forum." As noted in the OP of this thread, even our original reorganization plan would have turned CYC into an explicitly crawl-focused subforum (or back into one, according to duvessa). I think any sort of "General Crawl Discussion" subforum will still welcome humor, both in the form of OPs and replies, but if we're going to reorganize, it'll probably be around the principle of refocusing discussion here on Crawl. For other topics, the rest of the Internet exists, and for off-topic camaraderie among Crawlers, tileschat and IRC seem like better bets anyway.

It seems like discussion has started back up amongst the mods about this, however, so stay tuned.

[duvessa]

How is CYC not already a crawl-focused subforum? Right now every topic on its first page is either directly DCSS-related or about something closely tied with DCSS (Tavern signatures, ##crawl bot spam...)

[archaeo]

Because plenty of CYC posts start at Crawl and end with the mods locking threads/deleting posts because part of the forum isn't mature enough to discuss girls? I mean, sure, whatever, noted -- the problem isn't that bad -- but I think the other mods and I are generally in favor of focusing the forum more tightly on the topic of Crawl.

[dowan]

Uhh... what problem exactly are you trying to solve by forbidding jokes? I don't think anyone has asked for that, and to change the tavern structure to make moderation simpler seems... backward.

[archaeo]

Nobody's forbidding jokes. The primary motivation (or even secondary or tertiary motivation) for reorganization is not to make moderation simpler. I doubt very much that we'll make it explicitly against the rules to make non-Crawl jokes.

[njvack]

Whatever else is true about tavern reorganization, there has been no interest among the mods for a "jokes forum."

I like the idea of giving silliness its own home.

[njvack]

ok I looked harder in my brain and I don't want a jokes forum, I just really like the name Crazy Yiuf's Corner.

[duvessa]

change CYC's description to say "for miscellaneous Crawl-related discussion" or something instead of implying it's an off-topic forum