ronan wrote:Your idea has indeed been effective! It is true that getting such a well-organized news forum is a benefit that I had underestimated. Have you considered the possibility to sort news by genre, or to indicate the genre in the thread title or with an icon?
I understand why you'd like to see threads sorted by genre: you are not interested in many of the genres, and would rather have an easy way of ignoring threads which belong to genres you are not interested in, instead of being forced to click on all of them to get to the news that you are interested in. And though this is not such a problem for me, since I am interested in all the genres (except the ones I've banned lol -- though note that most of them are not really genres but theme types), I do recognize that this would be a useful feature -- even for me, to an extent (though on the other hand, it's kind of exciting to me to not have any information on a game beyond the title and system, and clicking on its name while waiting for the images to load, etc. to find out what it is. It was one of the things I loved about the Korean site VideogamerX, which I visited daily for years before it went belly up for a few weeks last year and then came back essentially neutered). However, I have no technical means of implementing it at this time, short of dividing the news forum into multiple boards, one for each genre, etc., which would maybe make your life easier, but it would make mine hell, because I would have to click on several dozen different forums every fucking day, etc. Even if I simply divided it into two forums, say one for 2D and one for 3D games (which is a TERRIBLE way to categorize games, since it has ALMOST NOTHING to do with genre -- see Recap. You'd be essentially categorizing games by aesthetics...), it would still be a pain in the ass for me. The easy solution would be of course, as you say, to simply add a genre tag to each game's title: FPS, RTS, STG, FTG, etc., but there would be two problems for this: 1. There already exist many games for which listing even their full system tags is impossible due to length -- for example games like R-Type, which have been ported to dozens of systems, and for which I have invented the [VAR] tag, so adding yet another tag on top of that would make the situation even worse, and 2. There are plenty of genres for which tags do not exist and I would have to make them (e.g. free-roaming), and also plenty of games which are a combination of genres (e.g. Deus Ex, where you'd need to include both the FPS and the RPG tags, or Planetside, which is FPS and MMO). When you also consider that there are also quite a few games (usually Japanese) with such long titles that you can't even write their full names in the thread title, adding genre tags can be seen for the overkill that it is. I mean consider the "Learn to Counter" moran, and just look at how ugly his forum is:
http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... ?board=3.0
He copied the system tags from me, but in order to not appear to be simply copying me, he thought to himself "Let's add something, anything, to appear that I am actually able to think and not just simply copying him". So he moved the system tags to the RIGHT of the title instead of the left (which is counter-intuitive, since the very purpose of the system tag, as a more general category, is to help you filter what you're interested in, and should therefore be placed before the title), and then he added the year of release after that, which is sort of superfluous if you are already using system tags, because, with the exception of the timeless PC, the system already gives you an idea of when the game was released. When you see Amiga or Mega Drive you think early '90s and when you see GameCube you think mid-2000s, and in the vast majority of cases you'll be correct; all the year tags do in his forum is make it harder for your brain to process the game titles on each page which are supposed to be the focus of the page -- and that's what would happen if I flooded my own forum with genre tags and tag combinations.
Now, perhaps there's a phpBB3 mod which would add proper tags to each thread (as opposed to having to include them in the thread title), as they have on rllmuk, which is powered by IP.Board:
http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?/f ... iscussion/
But as you can see if you click on the above link, they rarely ever use them, and even then they use them very inconsistently, because there's no moderation and the users do whatever the fuck they want -- or most usually nothing at all. So the Dark Souls thread is simply tagged "Action" lol, etc. But obviously such a system would work great here, if I could find a way and the time to implement it. So if anyone knows of a solid (i.e. without bugs) phpBB3 mod that would do it, let me know here and I'll look into it once I find the time. The other thing to consider is that I am using a heavily modded forum with a custom template, which could make it potentially hard to integrate any mod of this kind also aesthetically -- and if the end result doesn't look good I don't want it.
So that's all I had to say about that for now. Any more thoughts on this issue, or on any other issue pertaining to the running of the News forum, should be posted here.