Since it seems like everyone seems to have an opinion on the matter, how would you reorganize the forums if you were in charge of them?

I was thinking that at least combining the JK editing forum and the cog forum would be beneficial, it would allow for one forum with a higher rate of traffic and possibly renewed interest in it. I was thinking that all of the editing forums could be combined, but the JO forum still seems to get some traffic, and I wouldn't want things to be confusing.

There's also something to be said for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" though.

What would you guys like to see done?

Disclaimer 1: I did not consult the other admins before making this thread, I'm just curious as to what people would like to see done. This isn't a guarantee or a statement that changes will be made.

Disclaimer 2: Anyone who mentions the Insanity Ward without making a well thought out serious post about why they did or did not agree with it's creation or removal will be banned. The admins reserve the right to determine what is a well thought out serious post. Don't even bother mentioning it if you aren't going to take the time and effort to do this. Don't even refer to it without actually stating the name of the forum if you aren't going to take the time and effort to do this. Don't even mention it as a joke. You have been warned. If you do get banned and you complain about it, you will just be directed to this post so that you can read this part that you obviously missed.

Under my iron grip, the forums would ascend to a time of peace, prosperity, and fellowship never before imagined... until now.

The name "Massassi" is SO 90s. Grismassi is something we can all get behind; a nerdy Star Wars site for the 00s, and into the 10s!

Our fora (we won't be making any grammatical blunders with the "forums" nonsense anymore!) will include:

Doctor Massassi
From broken ankles to a broken-out face, Doctor Massassi is the first place members should consult about all medical ailments! Who needs a PhD, when you've got the wisdom of the interwebs?

Religous Discussion Forum
Let's dust off and bring back this gem from the past! I'm sure we could rope back in former forumers with lively and courteous chats on matters theological and superstitious.

Forum of Love
Not sure whether to break up or get back together with the girl who tried to kill you and set your cat on fire? Ask the experts! We know the mysteries of romance as if they were the tufty backs of our neckbeards!

Pugler's Place
Fun for the whole family, from the child at heart, to the child at mind! I envision "Puglers Place" as a free-form, light-hearted space to just be you.

Life of Grismath Fan Club
When's the next one coming out again? Ivan Boomfingers is having an affair with WHO? Did you record voices for this before you hit puberty? Come here to discuss the hotly-anticipated third installment of this award-winning franchise!

Asheron's Call Forum
You know you want it back.

The Pillory
The world isn't a perfect place: sometimes we act out and misbehave. This is where ridicule and ostracism can be happily re-married to the concept of getting banned!

At first thought, I would take out the Music Forum and replace it with a Technology Forum. Music can go into Main Discussion, and the tech stuff can be assessed without bogging down or being bogged down with what's happening here.

I would delete them.

Heh, we used to have a Tech Forum and it got merged with the discussion forum.

I'm not opposed to reorganizing the forums, but it's rather insignificant overall. The Ward was probably the best attempt at changing the forums up without too much effort otherwise.

I can't be sure if he's being serious or not. Is Cool Matty going to get banned?

I think the objection most of us had with 'The Ward' was the unilateral exercise of power to correct a problem nobody saw but you. And, our universal objection to it and demand for it's destruction clearly demonstrates that we liked our insanity right where it was. Massassi simply does not have enough activity to need things split off like that.

I would suggest instead dissolving the NES and showcase forums. This would give the threads there much needed exposure.

And you can just kill the editing forums entirely.

Yeah, I remember the old tech forum. It didn't get much activity but it was a semi-successful repository of tech-related issues and solutions. But it probably get more action than the Music Forum these days.

I do wish you keep the JA/JO forums separate for JK though. Time to time, a question comes in. They are entirely different engines.

There would only be the ISB, of course. It'll come, just you wait...

JM: While I'd certainly desire more traffic on the NeS, I don't think it'd really work to bring it back into the Discussion Forum, and I'd actually appreciate the ISB having more content OTHER than NeS as well. Personally, I'd like to rework the ISB to be more something along a story-and-game forum, where it'd also include non-interactive prose and poetry (which seems to be put in the showcase because OMG IT'S NOT INTERACTIVE) and games (like the ones I've run and Mafia and role-playing and whatnot). Thing is, I dunno what such a board would be called.

Seriously, though, if I were in charge of the Massassi Forums, I probably wouldn't change much, if anything. If I ran some other boards, it'd depend on what the boards were for I suppose.

I think I'd be more interested in getting more people to join to have more great topics, and opening up the community to other games for moding.

Editing websites that cover numerous games and various engines often wind-up incredibly empty. That's because people who edit for a certain game tend to gravitate to websites that specialize in that particular game modding (i.e. people who want to edit Source go to Source-editing sites because that's where the Source-editing action is.)

And you have to have people who edit and know much about those games be there to "plant the seeds" for any growth. Otherwise, why bother ask a Source-engine related question when no one here really knows the game engine well enough, or if not at all, to attract any sort of community. I mean, I'm always here to answer JO/JA editing questions (...alone) so there is SOME support for editing those games.... But what about the Doom3 engine, Crytek, Unreal 3, etc? I don't think it would work at all.

I would start off by having as few moderators as possible, and not allow them to arbitrarily make up censorship rules.

I'd bring back Religious Discussion and install a bot that bans every user in there for X days, X being the number of characters in their posts. Naturally with a "no religious discussion" rule on every other forum. Gracious!

That and bringing back hanging. Tech Forum.

I agree with you. By which I mean you agree with me. Because this was my idea first.

After that, my suggestions would be to ditch the music forum or swap it for tech discussion (IIRC it was only created so Flexor could be a mod). The game room is also kind of useless. Also the stickies you made in most of the forums are a bit irrelevant at this point (sorry).

No subforums, no admins, plain text only, final destination.

No items, no fun, fox only, final destination.

The Insanity Ward was my idea, not CM's. On top of that, it was a topic that was discussed by several of the admins prior to it's creation. I suggested it, we discussed it, and he implemented it. Cool Matty did not just create it on a whim, it was not a "unilateral exercise of power."

I was getting frustrated by people trying to start serious threads and those threads getting hijacked by other people making random, senseless posts lacking any content. The goal was to create a place for people to be able to have serious discussions without having to deal with "joke" responses, not to create a place that was solely for those joke responses.

However, that being said, I also feel that the IW was a failure. I didnt intend for it to be as wacky and contentless as it turned out being. It was not supposed to be a FYAD for Massassi.

Keep the JK/MotS stuff separate from the JO/JA stuff like people said and fix the goddamned search for the levels.... >.> ..... <.< ......


err that is all..

Yeah I originally got that idea from someone else (probably you). Also yes, I see the stickies and laugh to myself. I just unstickied some of them earlier today, some of them are like 4 years old at this point. I agree that some of those forums are kind of pointless, but it would still be nice for people who want to have a game to have a place to advertise it without it getting lost in the chaos of the discussion board...

Is it possible to move the Game Forum down from the top of the Main Discussion board to the bottom? Makes scrolling on smaller screens easier.

edit: that actually probably defeats the purpose of the game forum.

I'd leave things pretty much as they are (for what it's worth), but I kinda agree about bringing music posts back to the main discussion forum, but I also don't feel we need to alienate tech posts - they'll end up with the lack of exposure the music forum gets now.

I just realized that we have the tags too... if more people were to use those with their posts, we could have a variety of topics in one forum. Also, it would be possible (I think) to implement thread categories within one forum... so we could have tech threads and music threads, and people could search for just those categories.

In which case, I'll have to stop using 'jepman lol' and 'mb is fat' in all my topics <.<

That said, I think the tag system could be a touch more 'overt' if you see what I mean. They tend to be just a punchline on the end of a thread, rather than something that directs you to one at the moment.

But how would that benefit us better than what we have now?

The tag system has been abused much, and taking the effort to write an appropriate tag feels pointless in the grand scope of tag mush.

I would replace the forums with an IRC applet connected to #massassi.

There would be a pre-determined list of topics you could choose from. You would be unable to make up your own.

They would be very general, like "Tech" "Music" "Gaming" "Movies" etc. They could be more or less specific, depending on how we wanted it organized.

I think if we had a column on the discussion forum that allowed the poster to define a topic type when posting it would help a lot and we could merge a lot of things. We could define via a drop down:

General
Music
Tech
Funny
SRSBIZ


So on and so forth. Once defined, the thread could get a SMALL but easily identifiable visual tag in a column before the thread title. We could then implement a filtering system that would only display threads of a given genre as defined by the user.


Edit: I think DS's idea is the same as mine, but I'm going a step further.

I like Yecti's idea. Sorta like labels in Gmail. I'm sure I've seen it on some other forum before too.

I'm not following.

Do you have an example forum that does this?

We have enough threads that the marginal benefit would be tangible. It'd be a really easy way, for instance, to get a list of all forum-game threads or news threads or silly threads or whatnot for someone who's bored and just wants to go thru them and contribute one by one.

But what really are the benefits of that with such a small community, besides easier browsing? And would admins have to go through checking tags (I assume many ones such as "silly thread," "game thread," "current events") to see if people are bothered to select the right, specific one over, currently, just quickly glancing over the threads in the small number of forums?

If we remember...

While I hate to use this example because it's bad enough that half of our emoticons came from there, and I really don't want to see massassi become a clone of another forum, but the something awful forums do this and it works out really well. And no, it doesn't become a huge strain for moderators to check on tags to make sure the right ones are used.

I think easier browsing is the only benefit and also the main reason why I'm advocating it (and how beneficial it is is indepdent of the size of the community ... it'd be beneficial for one person because that one person could browse more easily. There would be no point if we didn't have many threads, but as I mentioned in my last post, we have enough threads for it to be worth it, I think.

Especially if we were to combine forums to give more exposure to threads that normally don't get much views.

Well yeah, but SA is huge. :p I don't think we have enough members to need that level of organization, but it's not my webiste and it's good that people are still trying to run it.

Yeah, I can see it working in a place like SA with thousands upon thousands of members. But I don't think we have a thread-exposure-problem because we get like 5 new threads a day... if its a busy day. :/

i'd keep the editing forums the way they are. it just makes it easier to browse through them.

We should just save a lot of hassle and merge with Something Awful. I'm sure they won't mind. Just imagine the snazzy logo!

I would combine all the forums for those games that no one edits anymore into one forum and call it "**** you, go to the hub."

Delete the ISB, for ****s and giggles.

Leave everything else the same.