O5 Command

Our forums need work. Right now, we've only got five boards with twelve topics, and two of those boards only have one topic apiece. I think it's high time we updated the forums to have a more diverse spectrum of discussion. If you look at general discussion, it's all content-less spammy threads because we don't provide much else to talk about. If we expanded the SCP Discussion section to have more boards about SCP Discussion, and made General have more topics we might be able to relegate these fast threads to the past and have more actual content. At the very least it would make people use the forums more.

Therefore, I propose a complete reformation of the forums and to multiply the number of boards we have by a great number. We should massively expand the General and SCP Discussion sections to be their own boards with a myriad of subtopics, with General covering stuff like video games, media in general, books, board games, whatever. General discussion. For the SCP Discussion, we could have boards like GoI discussion, SCP Discussion, character discussion, the sky is the limit. Because right now, the forums look a little anemic. If you discount the writing and announcement/proposals section, we only have three usable boards. We can do a lot better than this.

Some possible new subboards:

• Fast threads(I would be also down to ban these as long as they continue spamming up recent posts. When we move to a new site we can set the forum up however we'd like to.)
• General Discussion
  • Video games
  • TV/Movies
  • Roleplaying/Board Gaming(Foundation and non-Foundation)
  • Artwork
  • Books and Literature
  • News and Current Events(With rules against sensationalist headlines)
• Foundation Universe Discussion
  • SCPs
  • Foundation Tales and Stories
  • Groups of Interest
  • Foundation Universe Characters
  • Locations, Settings, and Facilities
  • Mobile Task Force Discussion

We could also maybe have a newbie section, with the Introductions thread and also a "there are no stupid questions" board for newbies with questions they can't find answers to.

What are everyone's thoughts on this? I'd like to hear any proposals for additional or different ways to change the forums. I just really think we can do better and hope you all do too.

I simply don't think we have a wide enough content to justify anywhere close to this amount of divisions.
I'd be 100% down for banning fast threads, though (with a grandfather rule for ATPAYAQ because that's like, our social thing).

I am behind this proposal 100%. Some of my personal thoughts on board distribution/management-

Personally, I'm throwing my vote behind "ban fast threads" but I dunno how the community would like that and I don't want staff to just enforce what we like on a community that wouldn't want it.

The main problem I see with this are seeing Recent flooded with non-scp cruft, but that could be manageable especially if we try to keep an eye out for quality of discussion (ie don't shitpost, don't make posts that are just "me" or "^" or "Ninja'd") On the other hand, wikidot makes removing shitty posts a gigantic pain in the ass.

I wouldn't mind see a board for non-SCP writing/critique. We've already got the non-scp creepypasta board (which… i actually wouldn't mind seeing gone so maybe that defeats my point), so there's some precedent.

I really like the idea of a "no stupid questions" board

Not sure how much of a fan I am of splitting up Universe discussion so much. SCP/Tale boards especially are redundant. We have those. They're called discussion pages.

Side note, but I know a couple of forums I visited before this would assign specific mods to specific boards. I think that could be a pretty good way to do things if we do this (maybe toss it at community outreach wink wink), but who knows it just might end up being more work for little benefit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

EDIT: Another thing I've seen sites do is host off-site forums for when the main site they're using doesn't really accommodate such things. Not saying that's the best or even a good idea here, but just throwing it out there.

Has anyone bothered to ask the users what they want from the forums?

I am in favor of this.

It certainly might make using the forums a more viable alternative for community integration than using the chat, which has become more or less mandatory at this point to really get to know and interact with community members.

This, very much. I think what differentiates a community from just people who happen to interact with each other, is the desire to discuss things other than what brought them together. There are forums about graphic card drivers on the internet. They aren't communities. They don't discuss they favorite movies and some such. We are a community. People in #19 just chat about random non-scp stuff more than half the time. It would be good to allow people to do the same on the forums.

That being said, we're somewhat limited in what we can do by wikidot (ha, that's a new one). Ideally I'd prefer to filter out fast threads from recent posts, or at least only see recent posts from an entire board. The fact that users aren't notified when they get replies to their posts, and have to keep track of the threads they've posted in, doesn't help matters any. But oh well, we'll just have to do the best we can do with what we have.

Has anyone thought about moving our actual forums off site? Setting up a simple message board would be pretty easy, though we'd probably have to host independently, unless Crayne is a true warlock who sold his soul for power.

So far, most of the response seems to be receptive towards the idea of expanding the forum. There also seems to be some defense of the fast threads, so allowing the people who use those threads to move them off-site seems like a fine idea. Just as long as we restrict them on our forums in the future along the lines that Coony suggested and don't endorse this new site in any official capacity. Fast threads are not a worthwhile reason for a spinoff site.

I also don't like spinning the forums themselves off is registering another forum account seems counterproductive to the idea of getting more users more engaged in the forums. In the future when we have our own site we'd have to migrate the forums again, since at that point we could configure it however we pleased.

Giving this a week or so to simmer, and let Zyn assign people as needed.

Alright. I finally managed to get some time to address things, so here goes:

1) Forum Moderation: On Wikidot, we only have the ability to make people absolute mods or only site mods. Attempted to carve people off into the forum group but not onto the site group have failed. Originally, the entire Community Team was going to have Forum Moderation abilities. This failed. I have no interest in appointing a dozen or so mods for the entire site to police the forums at this time. Our pool of potential people that I feel we could trust with both levels of responsibility is also currently low.

2) Yayyyy no fast threads.

3) Forum structure, from Bright's model:

General:
Games Discussion (Discussion of video games, board games, sport games, rping games, etc.)
Media Discussion(TV, Movies, Books and other noninteractive media)
Hobbies/Interests(Collections, hobbies and interests discussion)
Fan Work(Same as present)

SCP Universe
Foundation Tales and Stories(Discussion of stories in the foundation universe)
Foundation Universe Characters(Discussion of characters in the skipverse)
Locations, Settings, and Facilities(Discussion of locations in the skipverse like Site-77 or the Wanderers Library)
Mobile Task Force Discussion(To discuss MTFs, esp. necessary after contest)
Interesting Groups(GoIs and other entities)
SCP Fangames

General looks fine, but we're going to have a lot of overlap on some of this things. For example, we have a section for Fan Work, then lower we have a section for SCP Fangames. Well, those could be the same thing. Furthermore, we have a section for Games Discussion, which also has similar overlap.

To be a legitimately successful forum, we need to have as little overlap as possible. "Where does this go?" should be an extremely rare question. Furthermore, by breaking up discussion of SCP Universe Topics, you're actually hurting conversation. Threads won't be able to evolve as easily and discussion will start running into people wanting/needing to police it. That should only happen when absolutely necessary to keep people legitimately talking. This was brought up earlier in the thread. To address what I feel is the most important of those points:

I think it's likely that making these boards would result in the content appearing.

This has proven patently false in everything we've ever done with the site. Only a handful of canons were expanded after that contest (mostly by author recruitment), and only a handful of GoI objects were made after that contest — mostly because of the MTF contest which required it. "Make a forum so people talk there" is a horrible idea, which has been demonstrated in dozens of other websites for the past twenty years. To grow, you have to create forums where discussion which is already taking place can legitimately grow.

To that end, I suggest the following structure for 'General' instead:

General:

General Discussion (Whatever Board)
Games and Hobbies Discussion (Discussion of video games, board games, sport games, RPGs, CCGs, miniatures, etc.)
Media Discussion (TV, Movies, Books and other noninteractive media)
Fan Work (Same as usual)

Games and hobbies fit together well. People who want to paint minis are usually using them in a game of some sort, and most things people would define as hobbies in the internet age are connected to games/gaming in some way. We don't need a completely different board for the people who do Woodworking or Leatherworking, in spite of how much we love those people (me and Waxx). Fan Work exists just for members to post their creations on (or for us to post awesome stuff we find on Tumblr/Reddit that people have done — and link back to it, you anti-sourcing bastards).

The SCP Universe section's structure is just a flat out bad idea. Firstly, there are too many divisions. We don't need a forum section because we had a contest. There are some hub pages and plenty of tales for that discussion to happen on, and for the most part, the threads would just be dead. Same for Locations, Settings, and Facilities and GoIs. All three are bad ideas. The only worse idea is a discussion of Foundation characters, because that's just going to turn into either a bitchfest or a wankfest. "I love Clef" and "I hate Clef" t-shirts being sold on the sidelines (I would buy both).

All the discussion of Tales and Stories happen on the Discussion pages for those things. That makes this a completely dead forum.

To that end, I prose the following structure for 'SCP Universe' instead:

SCP Universe

Foundation Universe (Discuss the SCP Foundation Universe's Characters, GoIs, MTFs, Settings, etc.)

And that's it. But that won't always be it. If we're serious about this actually being a real expansion for the community, then we need people active on the forums and paying attention to the discussion happening. If it looks like MTFs are a really hot topic? Then hell. Let's make that forum then. But you can't make an empty forum to generate discussion. You wait for the discussion to happen, then you give it a place to grow and expand. We might never have to break something off from the forum. We might get to break off a dozen things. But we need to respond to the community rather than trying to make the community respond to us.

Furthermore, to do a few tweaks to our existing structure:

Creepy-Pasta can be folded into the new Media Discussion section that I proposed without problems. Meta-Reality Projects should be part of Fan Work. And we can probably join Proposals and Policy without any problems. My full proposal would make the forums look like this, in their entirety:

Announcements

• Announcements
• Proposals and Policy
• Introductions

General Discussion

• General Discussion
• Games and Hobbies Discussion
• Media Discussion
• Fan Work

SCP Universe

• Foundation Universe

Writing Help

• Help: Drafts and Critiques
• Help: Ideas and Brainstorming
• Help: General Advice

SCP Universe is structure this way to make it easy to add new forums and give it a special callout, since it will be the only forum now standing alone. This keeps our actual number of forums low (making it easy to figure out where we're going), keeps our focus clear (three writing forums), and still gives a lot of new ground that people can tackle and expand. And, given time, easily expand into a number of new directions.

Signposting a relevant suggestion on the site forums. Linking directly to my response to it because I'm lazy.

http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-1698554/site-standards-and-critique#post-2503378

(Caveat: Don't take my activity in that thread as an indication of being returned as staff. It's just a topic near and dear to my heart as a writer, and I'm not inactive as a writer right now. This is just a signpost! :) )