Explanation missing.

Totally agree here. Some rules are going to be universal and some are going to be narrow and specific.

Generally I think over time we'll have a much greater number of boards (10x, 100x, 1000x++) and the boards will begin to develop more distinct subcultures.

Some rules are universal - some will be highly localized.

That was meant to be sarcasm, to clarify. It's interesting to see how much thought you guys are putting into every little decision while making these new boards. It's a shame you probably won't be doing a devblog type thing for us dorks who are interested in that sort of thing.

Healthy contributor.... I consider myself one of those, so could I get some response on this? http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/site-feedback/5MA20hKF-the-limitations-of-boards

It explains my current problems in regards to a huge post I've made over in the tips and tricks section, as I am trying to transfer a forum post onto the boards.

Edit: Had posted the wrong link.

You really can't expect us to hand-hold you into being a healthy contributor if you have no desire to become one.

Agreed. I totally think you're right here, but the person to which you're replying does have a point in that things really should be intuitive enough that reading general posting guidelines shouldn't be necessary.

I understand the desire to keep the community a bit closer, but a few pretty unrelated things are crammed together in unnatural ways:

• Maps & Modes - Should really be five separate boards, one for each map and a fifth for game mode discussion.
• Skins & Champion Concepts - These concepts don't share the same general forum points; Skins is feedback, current content, and conceptual content, whereas Champion Concepts is only conceptual content. It's a weird mix.
• Story & Art - These categories share almost no content, so it's a mix of two distinctly separate usage cases.
• Community Creations - A catch-all for everything from fan fiction (Story & Art) to ability concepts (uh...Gameplay & Balance?) to even system concepts such as how crit works or why turrets are erratic.

There are also things that are totally absent, such as PvP.net Discussion (literally everything involving the out-of-game experience).

Changes like this would of course make the listings longer and possibly segment the playerbase, but it also facilitates the creation of more focused communities and allows users to immediately identify where their content should go. I shouldn't have to choose between Community Creations and Champion Concepts to know where to post my champion, especially when occasionally content can be removed for that sort of misunderstanding.

The culture which includes posting rules, acceptable content, etc is something that you have to be willing to learn and invest your time and effort into.

Is there any particular reason this needs to be the case? Moreover, is the approach of "moar guidelines" useful in achieving the goal of allowing players to learn said culture?

From my perspective, it's usually pretty clear what a community does or does not accept. Many internet forums share extremely similar rules, and reiteration thereof serves to obfuscate guidelines that might be different or unique to a particular community. I'll use Boards Feedback as an example:

GUIDELINES Culture

This is the place to find news and updates about the community boards, but we also want to hear from you! Have questions, comments or ideas for improvements? Post them here. But please, don’t post League gameplay feedback or bug reports. This isn’t the place for that.

Etiquette

Basically, follow the Universal Rules and keep content focused on appropriate topics for these boards. We want a place for everything, but if we don’t keep things organized, the boards become a lot less useful and a lot more cluttered.

Join the discussions with questions and feedback for the devs. Post ideas for new features or quality-of-life improvements. If you find bugs related to the boards, point ‘em out to us here. And most importantly, always vote for posts based on how valuable you think the content is.

This can be truncated into the following without loss of information:

GUIDELINES Culture

This board is the place to find news & updates about the community boards, ask questions, report Boards bugs, and provide comments and ideas for improvement. Other topics are better suited elsewhere.

Etiquette

Pretty standard forum rules, keep content on topic and within the Universal Rules.

Voting is encouraged, let us know what you really think!

The guidelines have a lot of unnecessary fluff that a user has to read through in order to get to what should actually be posted (and what shouldn't). The personality is great, but simultaneously not wanting players to RTFM and making the rules long-winded kind of defeats the purpose.

{quoted}

You really can't expect us to hand-hold you into being a healthy contributor if you have no desire to become one. There are two really important pieces of any online community platform - one is the platform and technology, and the other is the culture of the community.

The platform needs to be intuitive and easy to use and understand - the culture which includes posting rules, acceptable content, etc is something that you have to be willing to learn and invest your time and effort into.

I'm completely willing to accept that you may not be willing to do that - but then you have to be willing to accept that we're going to spend our effort on other people

Sorry it's taken so long to respond, as I said these forums aren't really worth going to anymore. But to reply what you said, I'm not expecting anybody to hand hold me, but I am expecting you to realize that forums weren't invented in 2014. I've been visiting and posting on forums for over 15 years and if you expect me to read every single guideline and rule for every forum I've posted in then you are crazy.

What we have here is a company that is trying to reinvent the wheel and doing a poor job of it. Like you said, you aren't willing to spend your effort on customers that don't use the tool the way you want them to use it, so why should we spend the effort to build a community out of this? You are trying to invent a new way to socially interact with your customers and your customers are telling you that you have failed.

If you want to experiment with your customer base then that's fine, but don't throw away a community that was alive, fun, and thriving. What you have now is a mess and a company that is more disconnected from it's customers than ever.