Simplify

the RMRK 7 thread has me thinking, why do we here at rmrk do things the way we do them? not that our ways are bad. far from it. just WHY do we do them that way?

Were I a mod, I'd post this in the mod hut but I feel like the boards have gotten super disorganized just from general usage over the years and could use some reorganizing.

Stuff like, why the heck do we have General Chat and Community when we use it for the exact same type of threads. it just splits up our activity needlessly and makes it harder to find relevant threads.

Why have elitist debate and in the news be two separate things when they end up being the same kind of discussions?

Why have Entertainment and Video games be separate things when we hardly ever have posts in there to begin with and it could all go under like a Media Forum, and the important community building shit like gamer tags and steam handles could go under community.

I mean it's not like we have to change things, but why not simplify our forum instead of fragmenting everything into its own little corner.

To be fair this would be a long process that would need to be discussed at length and agreed upon but I think it could help inspire some activity. I just wanna get some input from everyone.

I agree with all of the above. As you said, it will take a ton of discussion. I'm posting here right now so I can keep up with this thread when I come up with something more useful to say than "I agree".

Agreed. This is how I think I'd do it:

General Chat - Merged from: General Chat, In The News, Elitist Debate, Community, Ask a Stereotype, Forum Games
Sub Forums: Welcome, Bean Bags

Entertainment - Merged from: Entertainment, Video Games

Other Game Making Programs - Merged from: Other Game Making Programs, Game Maker

Yeah, am rmrk, but somedays wonder, why am rmrk? Is there more than rmrk?


in all seriousness I agree, our smaller community warrants smaller boards. If activity is to continue growing (which it actually is a little right now) we can put in more boards, but Irock's suggestion seems pretty good to me. If we get more conversation on this i'll do the merging around once a consensus is reached.

Makes sense to me.

The creativity boards haven't gotten that much activity for a while. Maybe we could merge those together as one big general creativity board, with a child board for music or art if needed.

Huh, everything has gotten really cluttered, hasn't it? I always thought Entertainment and Video Games should be merged. The In The News subforum never made sense to me, and once we added Community, no one has ever been sure what goes there and what goes in General Chat. We could definitely do some cleaning up.

The creativity boards haven't gotten that much activity for a while. Maybe we could merge those together as one big general creativity board, with a child board for music or art if needed.

I think the creativity board is fine because they all have and serve a specific/simple purpose.

The only board I think we should make a sub board instead of removing is Elitist Debate, so that we can keep things like that in their own area on the off chance that they get heated.  I think that should be a sub board of Community, while the rest of Irock's suggestion works pretty well.

I feel like community is a better forum title than general chat. maybe we could rename it community chat.

I agree that elitist debate should be nested under something else.

The creativity boards haven't gotten that much activity for a while. Maybe we could merge those together as one big general creativity board, with a child board for music or art if needed.

I think the creativity board is fine because they all have and serve a specific/simple purpose.

What if we made the "anything else" board the main creativity board with child boards for art, music, and literature? As it is right now it just feels silly to have a whole creativity category when there's barely a page of new posts between them.

The creativity boards haven't gotten that much activity for a while. Maybe we could merge those together as one big general creativity board, with a child board for music or art if needed.

I think the creativity board is fine because they all have and serve a specific/simple purpose.

What if we made the "anything else" board the main creativity board with child boards for art, music, and literature? As it is right now it just feels silly to have a whole creativity category when there's barely a page of new posts between them.

They do serve a purpose though.

I did consider recommending merging the creativity boards, but I think being able to browse categorically in this case is more important. I don't like the idea of having them made into subforums of Everything Else either, because that understates the significance of the child boards and arbitrarily gives Everything Else more priority.

The creativity boards haven't gotten that much activity for a while. Maybe we could merge those together as one big general creativity board, with a child board for music or art if needed.

I think the creativity board is fine because they all have and serve a specific/simple purpose.

I agree with this. Even though those boards don't get a lot of activity having them separate makes it easier for me to find say M00s' writings or Halo's music quickly. 

I did consider recommending merging the creativity boards, but I think being able to browse categorically in this case is more important. I don't like the idea of having them made into subforums of Everything Else either, because that understates the significance of the child boards and arbitrarily gives Everything Else more priority.

It doesn't mean it has more priority, it just means it's nonspecific. Look at the Scripts board. The child boards for different script databases are arguably more important, but they're all underneath the Scripts board, which is just a place to request a script or compatibility fix. They'd still be categorized.


Edit: Let me clarify that by "make 'everything else' the main board", I meant that it would be a general creativity board with the everything else category absorbed into it.

I did consider recommending merging the creativity boards, but I think being able to browse categorically in this case is more important. I don't like the idea of having them made into subforums of Everything Else either, because that understates the significance of the child boards and arbitrarily gives Everything Else more priority.

It doesn't mean it has more priority, it just means it's nonspecific. Look at the Scripts board. The child boards for different script databases are arguably more important, but they're all underneath the Scripts board, which is just a place to request a script or compatibility fix. They'd still be categorized.


Edit: Let me clarify that by "make 'everything else' the main board", I meant that it would be a general creativity board with the everything else category absorbed into it.

Parent boards do have priority in the interface over child boards; they're larger and more prominent.

The Scripts board is kind of strange to me, and it's not immediately obvious what the parent board is actually for. However, it's not nearly as bad because the Scripts parent board doesn't serve a comparable purpose to its child boards. If you have a Creativity board that serves the purpose of posting content that doesn't fall into the categories of Music, Visual Art or Literature, then there's a weird unbalance where one of the content boards is given more prominence than the others. A film director would get to post his stuff in the distinguished parent board while musicians, painters and poets would have to post in the less noticeable subforums.

Irock has a point, I maintain that we should keep them the same as they are now.

The Everything Else board being the parent board would just end up being like the RMRK Trading board, whenever people post topics there that belong in the child boards anyway and so it never really serves a purpose.

Speaking of, I always thought it was silly to have all those child boards for Trading, since it never got much activity and almost never gets any activity at all now. I would actually say the Trading boards are borderline pointless these days.

Agreed. This is how I think I'd do it:

General Chat - Merged from: General Chat, In The News, Elitist Debate, Community, Ask a Stereotype, Forum Games
Sub Forums: Welcome, Bean Bags

Mm, I don't think a single board should be used for such a wide variety of potential topics.

General Chat and Community can be easily merged, as can Elitist Debate and In The News. Child boards are a bit more difficult to place, but Introduction and Bean Bags wouldn't fit anywhere else other than in the General Chat board.

Agreed. This is how I think I'd do it:

General Chat - Merged from: General Chat, In The News, Elitist Debate, Community, Ask a Stereotype, Forum Games
Sub Forums: Welcome, Bean Bags

Mm, I don't think a single board should be used for such a wide variety of potential topics.

General Chat and Community can be easily merged, as can Elitist Debate and In The News. Child boards are a bit more difficult to place, but Introduction and Bean Bags wouldn't fit anywhere else other than in the General Chat board.

Why not? Having one broad General board works for forums way more active than RMRK, such as TIGSource (which only has General and Video Games for non-gamedev discussion).

To be honest, I wouldn't be totally opposed to merging The Sewers with General Chat since there's so much overlap as it is.

I think The Sewers should be separate from General.

I think The Sewers should be separate from General.

My objections to it are more about maintaining tradition than anything else. I don't care either way and I think most people would be in favor of keeping it.

I don't mind nixxing The Sewers, I just don't think many of the posts, if any of them, should be outside The Sewers.

After doing a little local mod cleaning, I came up with a small list of proposed changes. I still think a little simplifying might help. =o Anything not listed is a no change. Thoughts?

Spoiler for Copy of my notes:

==FORUM ANNOUNCEMENTS & Stuff==
(no change)

==RMRK GENERAL==
-Community (merge with General Chat)
   >Elitist Debate

-Entertainment
   >Video Games
   >Computing and Technology

-Creativity (added to general instead of being its own section)
   >The Auditorium
   >Gallery
   >The Librarium
   >Everything else

==PRIVATE BOARDS==
-(Mod stuff)
-RMRK Advanced
-Extra Access
(etc ;o)

(I think it'd be a good idea to keep private boards separate for some reason. Maybe that's just me, though.)

edit: or keep the private ones at the very, very bottom. =o

I don't like it. Creativity should still be separate like it is. Having a parent board for those just results in an empty parent board. I also don't think Video Games needs to be a child board of Entertainment so much as it should just be merged with it. RMRK Advanced makes more sense where it is too since it's RPG Maker-related. Going off of that there's no need for a Private Boards group but I guess it'd be fine to just throw our miscellanea there if everyone else likes it.

I don't like it. Creativity should still be separate like it is. Having a parent board for those just results in an empty parent board. I also don't think Video Games needs to be a child board of Entertainment so much as it should just be merged with it. RMRK Advanced makes more sense where it is too since it's RPG Maker-related. Going off of that there's no need for a Private Boards group but I guess it'd be fine to just throw our miscellanea there if everyone else likes it.

Hmmmm...you have a point. It would be a bit of an empty parent board. Unless "Everything Else" became the parent board, but that would probably be tacky.

I'd be down for merging video games and entertainment (and computing/technology?). B)

Whenever I first got into EA it kinda threw me off that it was randomly thrown in the middle of the General Section. However, it's easy to find the awesome greek team game because it's at the bottom.