Boards›[ARCHIVED] Miscellaneous

Boards Org changes + new sub-boards live!

RiotA Small Man··6 votes·10,682 views

The changes detailed in our last post are now live! The full changelist:

New Sub-Boards

  • Player Behavior & Moderation - A dedicated place for discussing behavior measures (both in-game and on the Boards) as well as more easily getting in-touch with Rioters to have conversations about disciplinary actions.
  • Dev Corner - The Gameplay team is piloting a space in which Rioters can kick off set-piece discussions with players around topics past and present. Thread posting is limited to Rioters, so the place is going to be specifically built around designers proactively reaching out to talk about projects they're taking on, state of the game updates, retrospective dev blogs, or even regular 'office hours' to shoot the shit.

Archived Sub-Boards

  • Tips & Tricks (now part of Gameplay)
  • Maps & Modes (now part of Gameplay)
  • Sound & Music (now part of Story, Art, & Sound)
  • Community Creations (now part of Concepts & Creations)
  • League Videos (split between various sub-boards)
  • Fantasy LCS (removed from sidebar, still active / reachable through Fantasy LCS site)
  • Announcements (simply duplicates news content & comments so cleaning up the redundancy)

Renamed Sub-Boards (for clarity / inclusiveness given removals)

  • Gameplay & Balance > Gameplay
  • Story & Art > Story, Art, & Sound
  • Skins & Champion Concepts > Concepts & Creations

As a note, archived boards have simply been locked to new posting and removed from the sideboard, so they still exist at their previous addresses (for now). Feel free to copy any in-progress conversations located on inactive sub-boards over to new locations where desired.

The sidebar has been updated to reflect these changes and group sub-boards a little more clearly into conversation spaces, 'red-zones,' & utility spaces. Finally, we've posted updated Universal Rules (mostly aimed at greater clarity, no significant rule changes) and moved them to the sidebar to free up some sticky space. If you're not familiar with the Rules, now's a great time to check them out and make sure we're all on the same page.

Several members of the Boards team are around to chat about these updates, so feel free to share any thoughts or questions!

23 Comments

Minarde4 votes

Reposting my comment from the last post to hopefully get a response.

The boards still don't have a tagging or filtering system yet, right? Then won't merging the smaller sub-boards into larger ones drown out less popular discussions? You acknowledged "needing better discovery options for finding specific content" before combining sub-boards, yet seem to have immediately disregarded that. Combining less-trafficked boards together is certainly understandable, but without filtering tools, it just becomes that much harder to get niche discussions started.

As a specific example, I frequent Maps & Modes because I'm mainly interested in discussions about non-SR maps. The vast majority of the Gameplay sub-board, however, deals with SR gameplay. It doesn't seem feasible to manually comb through a deluge of topics about SR in search of that one discussion about TT/Dom/ARAM. Could you suggest a solution here? As things stand, I feel like the boards are going to be mostly unusable to me for the foreseeable future.

RiotA Small Man1 votes

Hey Minarde,

Sorry we didn't catch you the first time. This is a pretty nuanced topic, but essentially it comes down to trying to find the right spot on the spectrum between having a single mega-board for all topics and having a ton of of individual sub-boards for each specific topic. In the end, that's very much going to be a matter of personal preference. What's pushing us towards consolidation is the fact that sub-board fragmentation and traffic imbalances between sub-boards are causing a ton of interesting conversations to be all but invisible to the vast majority, and are some of the main issues causing the Boards front page to sometimes appear stagnant. Essentially, we feel the Boards system starts to break down under the weight of too many sub-boards.

Nevertheless, we decided to keep things limited with this batch of changes based on players' prior feedback - all the archived sub-boards suffered from seriously minuscule traffic and (barring League Videos) had pretty natural alternative homes for the content in question. There are certainly still downsides as you pointed out, but the we think they're outweighed by the positives.

Regardless, definitely agree that tagging / filtering is desirable and it's something we very badly want; unfortunately, we don't have a timeline for it right now. It's been difficult to get dev time allocated, but we're actively exploring additional ways to get the work done. We'll be back with details as soon as we have them.

Minarde1 votes

Thanks for the reply.

I definitely agree with the reasoning behind combining the smaller boards. Maps & Modes, for instance, was obviously much, much slower than the more trafficked sub-boards. Consolidating is probably a good thing overall, cleaning up the sidebar while potentially exposing interesting discussions to more eyes.

On the other hand, it's going to be incredibly harder to find or start niche conversations. Given the massive playerbase disparity between SR and the other maps, discussions about alternate maps will naturally be relevant to a notably smaller group of players. Sifting through all the conversations about SR in search of alternate maps discussion has a daunting "needle in a field of haystacks" feel to it. It'd be manageable with a filtering system, but evidently that's not even coming Soon™.

Essentially, I think this batch of changes would be fine eventually, but not yet. I'll certainly give things a try, but at first glance, niche discussions seem like they'll be buried even more than before. They'll still be invisible to the vast majority (because the discussions likely won't be relevant to the average poster), but now also invisible to the players that the niche discussions are relevant to (because the players won't be able to easily find the discussions).

Shíny1 votes

The formatting for the universal rules listing in the sidebar seems sort of "unpolished " (mainly from all that clarity ) , any plans to change it?

RiotA Small Man1 votes

Just wanted to raise some extra visibility right off the bat, might mess around with it in the future. It's actually a normal Boards markdown space, so options are fairly limited. Thanks for the feedback!

Hellioning1 votes

Why'd you move redtracker in comparison to everything else?

I'm used to clicking the bottom link. Now that sends me to service status. I am sad.

Alpaca771 votes

I'm so confused..

this forum's somewhat confusing to me please move my fan art to the right category because I don't know where it belongs now.. http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/fancreations/2iwcjEFK-nami-fan-art

I couldn't even reply to the comments :(

RiotA Small Man1 votes

Hey Xhilia,

Apologies for the confusion. Unfortunately we're unable to move threads, but definitely feel free to start a new thread in the Concepts & Creations sub-board.

Chromatic Eagle3 votes

Are there any plans to eventually enable Riot to just move threads to the appropriate section?

Daen1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Chromatic Eagle,realm=NA,application-id=cIfEodbz,discussion-id=4c93Yn2X,comment-id=000300000000,timestamp=2015-10-28T21:59:10.241+0000)

Are there any plans to eventually enable Riot to just move threads to the appropriate section?

Source: Boards moderation lead

Basically, this is something Riot really wants but I think it's just tough to get the dev resources allocated lately.

Alpaca772 votes

thanks for the reply.

I just don't get why you would disable comments but have the sub-board (community creations) category enabled to be viewed at the same time.. it is even more confusing because when I click Concepts & Creations the guidelines on the left hand side has the link to Community Creations even still. Community creations is where my Nami fanart was posted and still is but the comments are disabled.

Why not just choose either to completely remove the sub-board (Community Creations) or enable the comments?

I know that you are still making changes but you guys definitely need to make the boards more clear

and @CHROMATIC EAGLE yeah I agree with you. Riot staff should be able to move threads or make members able to move their threads freely so that they don't need to re post all over :(

RiotA Small Man2 votes

Hey XHilia (& Chromatic Eagle),

Apologies for the guidelines confusion, still clearing a couple inconsistencies up (just fixed the one you mentioned). We're also leaving the archived boards active for now so people can easily copy-paste their posts in cases like yours.

On the topic of moving threads, that's definitely a feature we'd like to have - it's super basic and we see the pain the lack of it causes you guys all the time. Unfortunately, we don't have a timeline for it right now. It's been difficult to get dev time allocated, but we're actively exploring additional ways to get the work done. We'll be back with details as soon as we have them.

Chromatic Eagle1 votes

Don't you guys have a coding/web design department or something? If not, is it something worth forming?

Hellioning1 votes

Can you change the PBE boards organizer on the left to be more similar to the current boards? Right now, 'red tracker' is in the middle in this board, but on the bottom on PBE boards. It's disconcerting.

Retillin1 votes

Any thoughts on adding a "subscription" to the boards? So when I go to Boards Home I can not see some.

RiotA Small Man1 votes

Yep, one of the things we'd most like to see on Boards. Unfortunately, we've had trouble getting dev time allocated, but we're actively exploring alternative ways to get the work done. We'll be back with details as soon as we have them.

Pryotra1 votes

Is there any plan to change the color scheme for the announcements? It really hurts my eyes to read them in that color scheme, and considering the... treatment... I got from rioters last time I skinned your site, I'd really rather you guys do it.

Until then, I guess i just deserve first degree burns on my retinas... =\

Kholdstare131 votes

So first you nuke the old forumss to give yourselves an excuse to delete the Dominion forum, getting us buried inside the new maps & modes. but that wasn't enough for you, was it? Dominion posts kept slipping through. So now you delete maps & modes too? Fuck you all.

CupcakeTrap1 votes

So does fanfic go under "Concepts & Creations" now?

ModMod Curator1 votes

{quoted}

So does fanfic go under "Concepts & Creations" now?

That is the correct location for fan-made content now.

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