Response to "Let's Talk About Boards Orginization", @ADillonMostDirty

Sir ArmaMalum·Jun 18, 2015·9 votes·4,671 views

I see where you're going for this, and as far as very vague direction I think it's good. HOWEVER, I have a few very potent concerns

Don't delete GD. I don't even go to GD often myself, I'm still an outsider, but it is currently one of the only actual functioning (loose term) communities here on the Boards and deleting it would damage relations more than the benefit of better reorganization. Yes, I realize that puts a damper on any progress to be made, but you have to make a better alternative that avid GD'rs can flock to and migrate naturally before forcing (for the second time) somewhere they don't want to go.
If you are truly driven to this form of organization for the love of all things common sense please make sure the tagging system or whatever sub-level organization you are working on is functional, please do not hide behind the beta tag and bring this very broad categorization in without a way to a) differentiate posts AND b) filter by said differentiation.

Functional filter first, then broad categories. This CANNOT be avoided. If the smaller core subjects cannot retain individuality in this broader organization you will kill several niche communities as well as any hope of community structure.

I am seriously concerned for the smaller communities, as you said, like champion concepts, skin concepts, system discussions and different video subjects (guides versus music, etc etc). Most are hanging by a thread already and cannot survive being consolidated and mashed in with other subjects.

As I said in my response thread before, there are a few subjects that are, imho, absolutely required. Again, using tags or another form of filtering is perfectly fine as long as they are functioning before you move to these very broad catagories. But I also want to make sure you are aware of some very vital subjects that you simply cannot overlook without major consequence and/or missed opportunity.

Two major things:

a) Report a Bug and Help and Support can easily be merged with 'Bug' being a tag, provided you follow through with a functional filtering/differentiation system. b) There is no intuitive place to discuss balance and the game itself. As such, I am adding a 'Game State' section to incorporate sections of G&B and others.

Proposed mega-board
- Required core subjects (tags)

Level-up
- Guides, New Player (for questions), Coaching/Teaching, Tip
** League Creations**
- Champion Concepts (BY ITSELF), Skin Concepts (BY ITSELF), Item Concepts (BY ITSELF), Music, Videos, Crafts, Fan Fiction, Cosplay, Social (Groups, events, clubs, etc.)
Game State
- Latest Patch Discussion, Balance (BY ITSELF), Meta-Crafting/Predictions, Analysis/Breakdown (BY ITSELF), [X] Champ
** NA LFG**
- Ranked Team, Casual Team, Pick-up-group, Duo Que, Tournament
All Chat
- Lore (1000% required), E-sports, Random
Riot Plz!
- no tags needed, as it'll hit everything.
Help and Support
- Bug (because it can just be a tag if the filtering is working), Air Client Issue, Game Client Issue, Purchase Issue
Behavior and Discipline
- Appeal (because it'll happen no matter what), Support, Inquiry, Systems, Metrics

To give an example of why I am very, VERY concerned over your success at EVERY stage of any Board re-organization.

I am a very passionate fan of the champion cocnept community, it was a somewhat large and strong community back in the day and I always loved seeing everyone's ideas and submitting my own. Fast forward to the Boards migration and the limited formatting, post burials and the horrendous idea of combining champ and skin concepts together and we have a dying if not comatose community I can barely even recognize. The hilarious thing is that there are still plenty of champ concepts appearing in Community Creations, and they stay over there because a well-made champ concept is always buried by five people pitching a yu-gi-oh TF or asking about DM Swain progress. I am immensely pissed at the current state of the champ concept community and am worried it won't even survive a perfect transition. My favorite group of people here's pasttime have been hurt immensely because of the rushed Boards transition and the frankly awful pace of improvements here.

For this reason I am being very passionate about the emphasis on

#MAKING SURE THAT YOU KNOW THE IMPORTANCE OF MAINTAINING COMMUNITY INDIVIDUALITY.

Without it, these broad categories will collapse and many many people, myself included, will have little to no reason to continue to try and get the Boards into a good place. I am giving you guys a promise. You will immensely regret introducing this idea as it stands now if you do not have a functional way to filter/differentiate the core subjects within these new mega-boards.

I would like to say I have high hopes for how this may pan out, but I am too worried about the execution of the idea to honestly be able to say that. If I am not 10000% clear here at any point please ask, I am being passionate not hateful and will freely discuss possible ideas and concerns I have in however much detail you'd like.

15 Comments

Ticklish TasJun 18, 20155 votes

Save GD

Sir ArmaMalumJun 18, 20152 votes

While I may have my disagreements with GD's majority on specific points I completely admit it is a needed and active community. And in fact our ONLY active community here.

So, in a word, yes.

RiotA Small ManJun 22, 20155 votes

Hey Sir ArmaMalum,

Just wanted to drop in and let you know that I read through your thread on Thursday while parsing through all the feedback from our post. I really appreciated your thoughts and actually brought this post (and your previous one from 2-3 weeks ago) up today in our latest Boards sync. By the end of the week we plan to be back with another post breaking down our takeaways from the boards org discussion so far and the outlook going forward. Thanks for the great feedback!

Sir ArmaMalumJun 22, 20152 votes

{quoted}

Hey Sir ArmaMalum,

Just wanted to drop in and let you know that I read through your thread on Thursday while parsing through all the feedback from our post. I really appreciated your thoughts and actually brought this post (and your previous one from 2-3 weeks ago) up today in our latest Boards sync. By the end of the week we plan to be back with another post breaking down our takeaways from the boards org discussion so far and the outlook going forward. Thanks for the great feedback!

Thank you for the confirmation, I really do appreciate it.

Hyrum GraffJun 26, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Hey Sir ArmaMalum,

Just wanted to drop in and let you know that I read through your thread on Thursday while parsing through all the feedback from our post. I really appreciated your thoughts and actually brought this post (and your previous one from 2-3 weeks ago) up today in our latest Boards sync. By the end of the week we plan to be back with another post breaking down our takeaways from the boards org discussion so far and the outlook going forward. Thanks for the great feedback!

Hi Dillon,

That's great to hear, and I'm excited for the follow-up post. I just wanted to drop in and give some context that I hope will lend some sense of the gravity of the situation: last summer, in the month of July (the one month in which Pen posted some 'leaderboard' stats), Arma and I were the two top posters by a significant margin -- when you have someone who was previously one of the most engaged posters, who's been optimistic about the future of Boards in the face of more angry people than I can count, saying he'd have little reason to get the Boards into a good place... just please, tread carefully.

Ar the same time, I also personally want to see radical changes. I joined the community beta because I think UX, and feature and community development, is awesome, and I'd love to see more experimentation, more features that go out before they're all the way through QA, just so I can test and give feedback (when I have time, curse you rl!). I'm not sure you could do this on Boards right now without pissing too many people off, but it'd be cool if you could either do that on the PBE forums, or create a Boards alpha or nightly build where we can play around and break things.

Thanks for your time, and it's great to have a team to interact with again (miss you, Riot Sweet).

~Hyrum

StarlighteJun 18, 20153 votes

I agree with Arma here... There are several functionality things that MUST be implemented first and foremost, if you insist on following through with this restructure.

I also agree that GD should remain insular. Insularity is not inherently bad, it is only bad when you don't let them police themselves. Downvote to close and community moderation is intrinsic.

Sir ArmaMalumJun 18, 20151 votes

{quoted}

I agree with Arma here... There are several functionality things that MUST be implemented first and foremost, if you insist on following through with this restructure.

I also agree that GD should remain insular. Insularity is not inherently bad, it is only bad when you don't let them police themselves. Downvote to close and community moderation is intrinsic.

There are plenty of other things to improve like chrono-discussion interaction, full-access to markdown formatting among many others but as far as this immediate subject, yes, not much for me to add to this.

DaenJun 18, 20153 votes

I also agree that GD should remain insular. Insularity is not inherently bad, it is only bad when you don't let them police themselves. Downvote to close and community moderation is intrinsic.

While I agree with you for the most part, insularity can indeed be a bad thing. The "you're not a GDer, you wouldn't understand" idea is a bad thing for allowing a community to flourish, but at the same time it's the only tool we as users have to make a community our own.

ThunderkegJun 19, 20151 votes

Its less of a you're not a GDer you wouldn't understand. It's more you won't try to understand and that's why you aren't a GDer. Most people would be perfectly accepted if they posted there but they just think hurr GD is for weebs and shitposting only durr. And Wookee and the Rito death squad and their jackbooted third party mods just love perpetuating that stereotype. Makes it easier to delete GD like they're trying to.

DaenJun 19, 20153 votes

Its less of a you're not a GDer you wouldn't understand. It's more you won't try to understand and that's why you aren't a GDer.

I have championed for GD ever since the move from old forums to new, and I still get people (some of whom are generally well-regarded) telling me that I'm not a GDer so I have no right to comment. I understand that not everyone feels this way, but I don't think it can be argued there is a certain aura of "if you're not part of the club gtfo" in some situations.

Legacy of XionJun 20, 20152 votes

Where would Story fit in? I don't see it under League Creation...

Sir ArmaMalumJun 20, 20151 votes

I have fan fiction under league creations and lore discussion under all chat. All chat I treated as a kind of miscellaneous, and unfortunately lore in league is a not a big enough focus an entire category (in this sense) on. But, to emphasize, this is under the strict assumption that of someone was looking for lore, for example, they could click "lore" in the All Chat Board and see nothing but lore discussion posts.

JingerbeardmanJun 23, 20151 votes

I like all your boards except Riot Plz!

that can fit into all chat.

Sir ArmaMalumJun 23, 20151 votes

Makes sense. And I really don't have enough in All chat atm.

However, for argument's sake, I think Rito Plz! may simply be too big a topic for a tag, do you feel the same?

JingerbeardmanJun 23, 20151 votes

yeah pretty much. I feel like it would just end up becoming a place for irrational complaints and beg threads that would drown out any constructive threads that were posted there.

I understand the desire to funnel these threads someplace but this sort of direction is not a very positive one.

there would also be a constant flood of "I have an idea" threads that would take an incredible amount of time to read through for riot. all of those would be better off in league creations anyways. Keeping them in league creations pushes posters to create more serious and thought out posts which are more helpful and much easier to read. the same can be said regarding balance posts as well.

I would also change it from league creations to community creations, but thats just my opinion.