Boards›Boards Feedback

Some Possible Solutions to all the "Anti-Reddit" Sentiment

AbiwonKenabi·9/19/2013, 8:23:56 PM·5 votes·339 views

So I've been poking around this new community and, while I think the discussion thus far has been a lot more constructive, I think there are still plenty of users who would be disgruntled if THIS was the style the ultimately settled with in lieu of the standard forums. (Myself included)

I think the main problems can be boiled down to this:

  1. The use of upvoting shows us only the popular topics and newer topics are not given a chance to receive lots of input

  2. Showing in "Best" order and not "chronological" makes it difficult to follow a topic (i.e. look at a topic, return to it later to continue from where you left off). Even using the "Recent" filter instead cannot indicate to us when new REPLIES are made on older posts, only new parent posts.

  3. The format can be confusing and hard to follow for some; recognizing who is replying to who can require more backtracking than we'd like.

So I've some solutions to these cooking in my head. Be warned that these aren't perfect, just some ideas I'd like to throw around with the community:

  1. Upvoting problem: at first I thought going back to that tried and true bump format was best, but then I found this thread that had a solid idea:http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/c/beta-feedback/4wrEIgAZ-new-posts-on-the-left-highest-rated-on-the-right Simply show both at once, without requiring bumps.

  2. "Recent" problem: I understand that showing groups of replies together can allow you to follow all the branching conversations, so retaining that would be ideal. So perhaps the ability to "follow" a thread would be nice; simply click "follow" (no post required) and you get an alert on your profile that when you click, will take you straight to the new posts in the continuing conversation(s). I think this is doable, because the feature is sort of there when concerning your own posts.

  3. Confusing design: I couldn't really come up with an easy solution to this, so I open the question to the community. What do you guys think?

tl;dr the last 3 numbered parts are some of my ideas about how to allow the non-Reddit users to feel more comfortable with this new format.

5 Comments

Pryotra9/19/2013, 9:56:57 PM2 votes

I got some solutions, and I will list them here.

  1. That solution you gave is pretty much as good as it gets.
  2. Follow feature is going to be a necessity, seeing as they want to stomp out 3rd party involvement, but I think that the Recent sort, or a new sort similar to recent, that does the same thing but also considers replies. It should sort similar to the current forums. While this may reintroduce bumping, bumping could easily be addressed by outlawing it, and having visible moderators actually punish it. It's not like anything they create will work without visible active moderators anyways.
  3. Why not a simple @SoandSo line at the top of each reply? like this post would have "@AbiwonKenabi" next to it, and a reply to my post here would read "@Pryotra".
bahamutkaiser9/20/2013, 4:32:45 AM1 votes

In a large community, bumps just allow the players who are willing to shamelessly spam bumps, or subjects which have a lot of discussion even if their disapproved of, the most visibility. While a great thread may have almost no comments but everyone rates it up because it's good.

Others have submitted already that they should do a multi column view which shows popular, hot, and new threads in seperate categories side by side in order to allow players to sample all of them without having to switch between them.

Popular, Busy, and New (newly made not recently discussed, that's busy) are probably the best categories. Beyond that, I'm still new to this, but some way to track your personal threads and recently participated threads in order to find them if you wanna return to the subject would help.