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Let's Talk Boards - Improving Boards Culture

ModWuks·5/17/2017, 5:59:27 PM·51 votes·11,495 views

New to the series? Check out our Part 0 - Introduction thread to get a good understanding of what this series is about!

Hey everyone, it's Wuks again, here to continue our discussion from last week on the state of the Boards. Today's emphasis is on looking deeper into the culture of the Boards as a whole, and also going deeper into the culture for each of the respective sub-boards within the Boards. On this topic, we have a lot of different communities to take inspiration from, whether it's the old League of Legends Forums or the Boards from other regions [Europe] [Oceania]. I'll briefly go over some of the differences that I've seen within these communities, some of my thoughts, and then open up the floor to you guys.

The League of Legends Forums (Retired) & General Discussion


The original General Discussion on forums.

The League of Legends Forums were something special, and General Discussion was a large, yet welcoming community that Summoners of various backgrounds didn't hesitate to participate in discussions or generate their own. It offered Chronological View, where comments were shown from earliest to most recent, and posts with new comments were bumped to the top of the forum. This had its upsides and downsides, however.

On one hand, having threads that were bumped exclusively on the basis of new replies affected visibility to new threads. A well thought out, newly posted discussion could potentially be seen by few and lost to the forums because two players are having a casual back and forth between themselves on an older thread. Boards Beta™™™ primarily utilizes Discussion View to facilitate most discussions. Discussion View is where the content with the highest number of upvotes are pushed to the top, while content with lower upvote values end up lower.

I can continue the discussion on the entire upvote/downvote system, but the main question I want to ask is, within the context of General Discussion, do you think there's value in maintaining the current Chronological/Recent-only view, or do you think it should be more like Miscellaneous / the rest of the Boards? What are your thoughts on the separation between General Discussion and Miscellaneous? What can we do to make General Discussion a better environment?

Comparing Notes With Other Regions


A dedicated place for Streams & Videos (EU Boards).

Each region has a lot of freedom to run their respective Boards the way they want to, and these differences shed light on how we, as the North America Boards, can identify what other regions have done successfully and potentially look at whether we can replicate that success here. For instance, Oceania has been running a few FanFiction events to showcase the talented writing community there; this sub-board and these events were part of the rationale behind creating this Boards Community & Moderation sub-board, so we can run future events and announcements through here (on top of gathering consistent feedback from y'all, of course). The European Boards are unique in that they have two separate sub-boards for content creators, one for Streams & Videos and one for Creations & Concepts, and they have a sub-board for new players.

We'd love to hear your opinions! What are some things you like or dislike from other regions, and how can we use this information to refine and improve the culture within the individual sub-boards, and subsequently the entire League of Legends Boards? We look forward to being able to hash out a lot of your ideas, and hopefully get to implement a good number of them!

-- Wuks

286 Comments

HateDaddy5/17/2017, 9:36:09 PM27 votes

Just to kind of add to the list:

I much preferred the old forum style back in the day. I realize that may not be conducive to the operations of all these different sub-boards, however I can't help but feel these atrocious colors can be fixed to be easier on the eyes.

For a popular board like gameplay, I'd also like to suggest a system that prioritizes thread activity over upvotes. Additionally, I feel like something needs to be done about vote jerking on popular boards like gameplay in general. What I mean is that nothing is more frustrating than spending a good deal of time on a well thought out thread that may be against the common grain of thinking and two guys downvote it, sending it to the oblivion to never be seen again. Meanwhile, make your title click-bait or random circle-jerk hive mind and you'll have 100+ votes in a day. This negates productive and constructive discussion. I would go as far as saying removing votes from gameplay in general and having thread activity be the main factor for what makes it to the top but people are probably far too in love with this outdated, nonsensical Reddit-wannabe system. I like objective discussion and that simply doesn't take place on gameplay. It's dominated by the same 5-6 posters - who most of the time are usually right but again, that's not good for objective discussion.

EvilUnicornLord5/17/2017, 6:17:42 PM20 votes

If we want to improve Board culture...

We need to contact a yogurt expert.

######Ok, don't lynch me.

2nd Chance5/17/2017, 9:17:09 PM13 votes

Four things come to mind -

  1. Can you please, please reconsider removing the ability to make political threads in General Discussion once more? Look, I know there's a good chunk of people sick of me talking about it, but it's having a legitimate overall negative effect on the board section. The people who are still abusing it are still being a problem, and the mind-set it brings just isn't healthy, being brought in threads not even related to it. Finally... for every good political thread I've seen, there's a dozen negative ones to squash it out, where some of those negative ones were even intended to be positive turned negative due to that negative mind-set I mentioned earlier.

  2. Tyler1 threads (-- insert meme I post in them here --). I feel these threads cannot exist on any board section ether, or at least need to be moderated much, much more. For as all I can recall, every thread about him I've seen is someone from his 'fan-base' screeching how they think/demand that he should be un-banned. That alone isn't the problem however. The main problem is that they get people from out-side sources such as their Reddit and other groups to skew the up-votes and put in comments to keep their threads up in a extremely board-effecting negative fashion, which is clearly against the Boards universal rules, yet every time it takes the moderation team so long to take care of them (if at all at times).

  3. Streams/Youtube plays threads. While I and others don't have a problem when users that are a part of the community making these threads from time to time, there are random folk who take advantage of this not trying to fit in the community at all but instead just comments within their own threads to bump it back up for any means of advertising themselves as possible. This isn't healthy for the boards, gets them hated, while the people of the community annoyed as well. Back a year or two ago, we had a board section so they could post freely just that, so why not bring it back?

  4. Make upvotes/downvotes only available inside the thread and no longer outside the threads. Straight forward right? It'll take care of the problem of people just doing whatever vote wise without reading the thread and force them to at least enter the thread to do so.

Finally, I think this might help you clean up some things around here board bugs/glitches wise - https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/GD/LvvFVEPQ-itt-post-forum-bugs-that-are-still-plaguing-this-nearly-3-year-old-still-in-beta-boards

Got bored one day and decided to compile what ones I and others knew.

edit: Also yah, what Dusteon said about the Chronological/Recent view, 100% agree with that.

InivtesPreeze5/17/2017, 9:45:03 PM11 votes

The old forums were better.

The Reddit-style upvote farming trash system isn't good for this, as Reddit already exists. (I use Reddit, and it's not trash, but using its methods/style here is trash.)

Vacus5/17/2017, 8:52:33 PM10 votes

There is no value in discussion view IMO.

The OP calls out chronological view as having the possibility to kill recent threads? That's not what chronological does. That's what discussion view does.

Discussion view creates an inherently destructive culture, where only content that is popular gets seen. And new content is not popular yet. In addition to this, it creates a feedback loop where people almost never see things that the zeitgeist disagrees with, because one or two people downvote it early and then it disappears.

Further, the boards mechanically do not work well when people are using both discussion and chronological view on the same board. Some of the bugs with it have been fixed, but it always ends up confusing people; people using discussion view never quote anything or give context to their posts, while people using chronological view end up with repetitive and unnecessary context from the point of view of people using discussion view.

If it were up to me, no board would use discussion view or have it as an option. That ship has sailed, though, so instead I will simply argue against allowing it in GD. If it is allowed, it absolutely should not be the default, and the interactions between the two modes need to be looked into with much more eye to usability than has been done in the past.

jaymc11305/17/2017, 6:03:54 PM8 votes

The whole not having the option of discussion view in GD is confusing to me. I don't know why that board has never had it. I mean... I never USE that view, lol. Chrono view master race. But I feel like some people would prefer to at least have the option to swap between the two based on need or preference.

Oh, and yes to the sub board for new players on na. This board has needed something similar for the longest time.