Why our current forum system is fine, and why this new forum layout fixes none of our problems.

Almost every single problem which I've heard has been stated by IS in his recent thread seems to ignore one big point... He is expecting the community to moderate the community... the VERY same community which he directly shunned in GD saying it was "Toxic and horrible." What? You are expecting the very same community you just said was trash, to instead moderate said community? The only reason the Community Beta seems so "tame" as it does is because most of the community hates it with a passion, and until it is required that we go there, we are not. The moment you kill the standard forums, you will transport the entire toxic mass from there to here. Full sale, every single drop of that toxicity will just MOVE ON OVER. And instead of having our current forum system, where the noise eventually is drowned out by being ignored... now you will have all of the same "noise" which spams Reddit Threads spamming the CB threads. The moment the CB turns into GD, is the second the CB turns into GD. You will have nothing changed, except now jerk-circles will be insanely powerful, and any dissenting opinion will be fully and utterly crushed under an iron fist.

The standard vBulletin is fine, just has a few core flaws which are ALL fixable without any serious work...

• Bring in Mods who actually interact with the community and do their job, potentially even outstanding community members like Frosthaven and the people who work on FEK (Oh god we could get into so many discussions on how this would help the forums if this was just implemented whole-sale). Hell, we don't even know who our current mods are, they are faceless, nameless entities that no one likes, that just bring down the hammer on rules... that they decide what and when they make up. They also have a a track record of not doing jack **** about anything problematic, only attacking members of the community who call them out on their lack of actually doing their job with force closed threads and bans. Short of massively spamming porn on the forums, it is nearly impossible to get them to notice anything/one that is really causing problems.

• Higher requirements to post on GD. As is, it is too easy to make a smurf for the forums, and just results in troll spam accounts on the forums that take very little effort to make and have very little attachment to the player. By-product? Trolls run rampant, and there are times where people who get banned for spamming/porn literally have a new account in seconds to keep going.

• Actually linking forum account with League account. Punishments from one should carry over to the other. This will mean that people will be more mindful of the rules on the forums so they don't get their actual accounts banned.

• No way to actually have the community help moderate via reporting post. While this is a feature in the CB, this is something we needed in the normal forums just as much. Honestly, upvotes and downvotes should be used to track how popular an idea is (with a total vote count to say how much discussion said post/thread is getting) and a separate report button to call out bad behavior on the forums to bring a mod's attention directly to the toxic post. Having downvotes pull the exact same functions as a report for closing post only instead brings a mis-communication on what the downvote is actually supposed to be used for. Should it be used to show disagreement with an opinion which differs from yours? Should it be used to call out someone who is breaking the rules? Neither of these are at all like the other, and shouldn't be treated like the other.

Finally, a big part of the reason our community is so toxic is because we feel unmoderated. The mod presence on our forums is nearly non-existent, which results in no one caring, resulting in vitriol spewing from the ***holes who speak too loud and have too few braincells. They are not disappearing when you come over here. And unless you bring a large degree of moderation from the outside (I.E. the first and biggest way I said to fix our CURRENT forum layout) you will have the exact same problems. So please... before you try and throw in the towel on the vBulletin style... give it the goddamn support it needed in the first place to work, that will make the new lay out fail just as hard if not given.

I mean, I can understand that the nested discussion type DOES have it's use, it almost always is destroyed if you bring a large population to the front, while a vBulletin style can handle it much better. In the Nested discussion type, if you are not among the first to post about something, your voice WILL get silenced. And not even by people disagreeing with you. Literally, it will be silenced by the fact not a SINGLE person will be able to see it due to it being a "single point post." Oh yea? And if you get a single downvote while your post is in the middle of a large thread of them right after it was made, before it has had a chance to be upvoted? Bye bye, it is gone, regardless of the points made in it, because now this post has been put in the negatives. Can't even bump it to try and get more people to notice, as you can't bump nested messages at all. Also, another big thing is the fact that a very strong and powerful opinion which was made inside a thread of other ones is ENTIRELY dictated by the "original response" to the poster's upvotes. A powerful idea with a thousand supporters can be silenced if the original post it was responding to/"quoting" is downvoted heavily. Finally, Nested threads SUCK about handling chronological order, due to the fact that it is not based on the order of what is posted, but instead how popular the post was.

What the nested discussion type was meant for was small conversations and AMA style threads, and very centric on the original poster, where responding to each individual idea/question is a more practical idea. The problem is it does not scale up well. The more you try to pump into such a discussion, the longer and harder it is to track. Yes, the Nested discussion CAN silence noise. But it is also prone to silencing a lot more valid opinions as well.

Sorry for the ramble at one point, but it's getting late and my mind is starting to wander.