Series of the Season Idea

[Yukimura]

I think it's safe to assume the Gundam Thread won't bee seeing much use forthe next 23-25 weeks. This combined with the fact that the Code Geass R2 thread has more posts with only one episode released then the threads for several completed series in General Animation has led me to an idea.

Instead of dedicating an entire section to a series that has no show currently airing why not retask it to be the place for the forum voted 'Series of the Season' to have individual episode threads.

With Gundam 00 there were threads for each individual episode and as the season went on each started averaging over 25 posts per episode, more than some series in General Anime manage to get. In addition the presence of lower quality speedsubbers meant that many people were limiting themselves to a point sometimes severla episodes behind the newest release. For an average show I don't think it's a big deal, but Gotwoot has a way of occasionally becoming obsessed with certain series, and usually it's only one series per season.

From the size of the season one thread as well as the size of the season 2 thread after only one episode I would wager that Code Geass R2 would be voted 'Series of the Season' were it to be put to a poll. I think it would be a great boon to the fans if we could discuss individual episodes of the show in separate threads as well as make use of an otherwise empty section of the forums.

[Kraco]

Hmm... An interesting idea. I can't right away even judge whether it would be good or not. Certainly it would do much good to the Geass situation as it's a bit ridiculous has fast that single thread grows.

Although I won't support the idea of turning the Gundam section into something else. It has always been there (because there always seems to be a new Gundam series in the horizon), and thus my conservative nature fights against such a change. The FMP section going away was far more justified.

[Munsu]

I don't like series specific forums. They never last, and in the end the discussions get lost, since the forums will get deleted because of the clutter. And I'm not a fan of discussion getting lost.

Blood+ was the last series to get its own forum... and I'm quite sure it'll be the last one; unless a Bleach/Naruto/One Piece series-like pops up again.

A "Series of the Season", in the end, will create a mess.

So unless you have a solution to remedy such. this would be a no go.

Now, I don't think is prudent to replace the MSG forum... the forum will serve for much more than Gundam 00... it's a franchise that keeps going year after year.

[Yukimura]

Since you don't like this idea please consider it withdrawn, however there's something I'm a little confused about your reasoning.

The goal of my idea was to make things more convenient 'right now' for fans of very popular and heavily talked about series. The price of this convenience would have been that at the end of a season you'd be left with 26 threads which are unlikely to be used again instead of 1 thread that was unlikely to be used again, a 'mess' as it were.

However in both cases aren't the thread(s) are likely to become old and forgotten anyway? It seems that you're saying its better for people today to be cramped into a single thread and so that people who may come along six months to a year from now and look through older threads might not be inconvenienced. Why is it better that people be able to more easily dig up older threads than it is for them to be able to more easily express themselves in the current ones?

As to losing the discussions can threads not be moved from one section to another? I had envisioned that once the season is over the episode threads of whatever the 'Series of the Season' was would be moved into General Anime. I'm sure this would mean messy clutter on later pages of the General Anime section but there would conceivably be enough new threads to knock the episodic threads off the front page or two. Is the neatness of the later pages of the general anime section six months from now really so important that it's not worth making things a little easier on posters today?

[Munsu]

Don't be so narrow minded... forget about the justification of my disliking the idea and help come up with a solution.

Wether my dislike is warranted or not is of no issue currently, but since I became a mod my main issue has been trying to maintain the forums as organized possible, while trying to conserve the discussions. It makes the search engine work more efficiently among other things and reasons for me doing so.

Regardless, the issue at hand is not wether I like it or not. The issue is finding a solution, not convincing me that it's a good idea.

A possible solution:

Control the type of discussions that go on in these forums, so that ONLY episode threads will be created, and at the end of the series I can just go and merge all the threads into one, and then move that single thread to General Anime. The discussions should for the most part flow smoothly this way once merged.

Maybe some child forums to preserve discussions... I don't know if that's capable in these forums, but it's worth checking out. Help me out here...

I don't know, come up with ideas instead of going bitter because one of your ideas got turned down because it's not about that.

Organization and discussion preservation are not going to be compromises.

Do any of those ideas make sense and are worth pursuing to discuss with the other mods?

[Yukimura]

There's no reason to come up with a solution to a non-existent problem. Your response puts me under the impression that your chief concern is the organization of the site and a single crowded thread does not affect the overall organization of the forums. Since you didn't seem to find it an issue and nothing will change without your approval there's nothing to discuss so I wanted to drop the suggestion and move on.

The reason I then asked about your reasoning though is because I didn't understand that what you prioritized was organization and I needed clarification. It would be pointless for me to make any more suggestions that are contrary to administrative priorities so I wanted to know explicitly what those priorities were so I didn't waste my time suggesting things that would violate them.

With what you've said about your priorities there isn't any problem with the way things work now. In addition any sort of change that spreads out discussion on the same topic would invariably involve compromising organization.

Your suggestion about rigidly dictating what people can and can't make a thread about I find quite unattractive. "Hottest girl in 'Series of the Season'" would not belong in any episode thread but there would be nowhere else to discuss it if those were the only avalable boards to post in. In addition, even if you restricted the discussion to only episode threads some people would invariably continue to discuss episode X even after episode X+1's discussion had started making a merged thread a mess. You could lock old episode threads once the new ones are created, but again, that would be stifling discussion for the sake of keeping things neat.

You could put each 'Series of the Season' into its own child board (which accorting tothe manual vBulletin 3.5.8 supports) but that would cause a host of organizational issues as well. Eventually the child boards would stack up and form clutter as they can't be hidden from view and remain searchable. To make matters worse over time more and more 'Series of the Season' child boards would be separate from the General Anime Board potentially causing confusion about where to search for a particular series.

If I'm bitter about anything it's the fact that you seem to care more about the people who read threads than you do about people who actually post in them. As an active poster who doesn't read many old threads it feels somewhat insulting that an administrator doesn't value my experience on the site because I am not passive enough. Ultimately it makes little difference to me how things are done as long as interesting things are still discussed.

[Munsu]

Well, I tried... looks like it's a no go. Sorry about that. Your Code Geass thread will have to do. Can't have a fruitful discussions on trying to solve the problem (which I don't have to justify to you) if all you're worried is about discussing the philosophies of how a forum should work. Already told you why I don't like the idea, and showed you some possible solutions along with compromises that I probably would be willing to do... but you're more worried about discussing other things that are of no interest to me nor do they help in coming up with something productive.

So none of my solutions I brought forward, even with their weaknesses, are appealing to you? Can't come up with no other possible solution?

If I'm bitter about anything it's the fact that you seem to care more about the people who read threads than you do about people who actually post in them.

I actually care about both, and that's the problem you are having with me saying no. If I went with your idea, then I would be giving a big fuck you to the "passive" readers of the forum.

Don't post again here if you're not coming up with ideas to try and come up with a working productive solution or to talk about possible solutions already presented... They are helping none, besides putting me in a really bad mood for wasting my time.

I'm willing to listen and make changes... but stop wasting my time with useless bullshit philosophical discussions that are of no help to me. Don't ruin this opportunity for everyone else.

[Splash!]

Although I am not much of a poster but more of a reader on these forums, I think that a 'Series of a Season' thread is a good idea. Not only does it help people who want to engage in active discussion but also makes it more convenient for readers such as myself to find a discussion that interests them.

@Munsu
For the sake of keeping the forums organized, I think that merging threads in the forum at the end of the year is the best compromise. However, I dont think its best to limit the new forum to simply episode discussion threads.

Here is variation on that idea:
Let the users create whatever threads they want. However, make it a rule that the 1st post of each thread follows a certain template (this will serve as a separator when the threads are merged).

Once a series is over, all the episode discussion threads can be merged into a single thread and all the other ones into ANOTHER thread named 'Series XXX - Other Discussion'. With the thread seperators in place, this single thread will still make sense for someone reading it. The only problem will be that when people want to add to 'Other Discussion' for a series that has long been over, they wont have the luxury of adding to the topics that have been subdivided in the middle of the thread.

Still this is alot better than having no forum at all, especially for a very popular series like Code Geass R2. It might be a little extra work for moderators than simply merging the entire forum, but I am curious to your thoughts on how feasible this might be. I think its quite possible, no?

[complich8]

Mmm.... Serious Business™. Seriously. Maybe a little less ego-flaring on both sides is called for?



As a wait-binge-wait style viewer, I've always sort of liked the idea of having a thread per episode rather than a thread per series.

But that only works with certain shows that get that much per-episode discussion. I know I haven't been alone in being basically shut out of several series discussion threads because I didn't have time to catch up to the very latest episode, or because I was waiting for a slower group's releases. Anyone who prioritizes quality over speed has been there at least a couple times.

The problem is figuring out which series deserve that status. We could stick Geass2 there this season as a pretty easy gimme, but if the conversation falls below a certain weekly threshold, then splitting it up into multiple threads is very likely to kill it faster. At least, that's my feeling on it... it's more interesting to post in a thread when you've got a couple dozen posts of history than when you've got 3 posts since the beginning.

I like the idea of merging episode discussion threads at (or preferably a couple weeks after) the end of the series and moving the result to GA. However, it should be noted that when you merge threads, vbulletin doesn't preserve post ordering, but instead orders everything chronologically. Not a big deal, but you'd lose a little context viewing the resulting mess later.

As far as "hottest girl" threads go... as far as I've seen we've yet to have one that hasn't degenerated into a giant raging shithole. We don't need that shit. We really don't. It also presents a problem with the idea of later thread-merging, because we end up with cruft like that that doesn't fit into the series discussion itself.

Anyway, with some tweaks (eg: making its own forum category rather than hijacking gundam, and the post-series merge-n-move) I don't see why not. But I'm not the one moderating either, and I don't know how that might affect either the moderation workload or the traffic in other threads in GA. Moving "series of the season" to its own subforum under general anime, and updating the subforum title every time a new season's series got added to the list would be a reasonable, workable answer to that -- because to get to the subforum traffic would still go through GA, and still see the same level of incidental traffic. It wouldn't clutter up GA (from the parent forum it would be just like stickying a thread), and on the whole I don't really see a big problem with it. But I definitely wouldn't want to clutter GA up with dozens of subforums -- recycling is the key.

At any rate, if we were to dedicate a subforum to that, we could effectively extend it to two or three series comfortably over the course of a season... so betting on one to be the series of the season wouldn't be a big issue.

Only administrators can rename forums or create subforums though, which means that for every season and every series that got added to that subforum, an admin (either me or Bud, since it wouldn't be Ciber or Wilik...) would have to go in and change the subforum title and description. So there's a certain level of intervention on our part that'd be required, but I wouldn't be loath to doing that, as long as I had someone suggesting the direction it needed to take.

Overall, I like the idea, in some form or another. It'd definitely be interested in seeing it, and hearing feedback from the rest of the staff as well. If we can get all the concerns addressed, then it might be worth doing.

[Munsu]

Although I am not much of a poster but more of a reader on these forums, I think that a 'Series of a Season' thread is a good idea. Not only does it help people who want to engage in active discussion but also makes it more convenient for readers such as myself to find a discussion that interests them.

@Munsu
For the sake of keeping the forums organized, I think that merging threads in the forum at the end of the year is the best compromise. However, I dont think its best to limit the new forum to simply episode discussion threads.

Here is variation on that idea:
Let the users create whatever threads they want. However, make it a rule that the 1st post of each thread follows a certain template (this will serve as a separator when the threads are merged).

Once a series is over, all the episode discussion threads can be merged into a single thread and all the other ones into ANOTHER thread named 'Series XXX - Other Discussion'. With the thread seperators in place, this single thread will still make sense for someone reading it. The only problem will be that when people want to add to 'Other Discussion' for a series that has long been over, they wont have the luxury of adding to the topics that have been subdivided in the middle of the thread.

Still this is alot better than having no forum at all, especially for a very popular series like Code Geass R2. It might be a little extra work for moderators than simply merging the entire forum, but I am curious to your thoughts on how feasible this might be. I think its quite possible, no?

That doesn't sound like a bad idea... sure some posts might seem out of place, but for the most part you should be able to tell what is going on.

Episodic threads are merged together to become the main discussion thread in GA. The other threads I'll merge together and probably close it. People can go back to them and browse them, but not post on them to avoid confusion of what is the main discussion thread. Anything new anyone would want to add, they can just go to the main discussion thread and post there.

I'll keep it in mind...

Anyone else got ideas to make this work, or thoughts on Splash!'s idea? What do you think about what Splash! said comp? I would preffer the merging of the threads than the "Child Forum" idea. Even with the loss of context, it would be just for a few posts here and there... most of the time people post in order as far as per episode discussions are concerned. The other thing we can do is close a thread after a new episode comes out... that way we make sure everything goes chornologically.

[complich8]

How about two subforums: "series of the season" and a subforum of it, "sots:dumpster en fuego".

The first would have all that series discussion we talked about, and the second would be where the non-mainline discussion would go to die after the big cataclysmic series merge. (ie: dumpster = browse-only, posting disallowed)

[Munsu]

How about two subforums: "series of the season" and a subforum of it, "sots:dumpster en fuego".

The first would have all that series discussion we talked about, and the second would be where the non-mainline discussion would go to die after the big cataclysmic series merge. (ie: dumpster = browse-only, posting disallowed)

With some proper tags on the episode threads or any thread for that matter, that could work... and we don't have to make it browse only if done right.

For example, for every series we make sure that each threads starts as "Series X:" and that deals with it. We can then have a sticky thread somewhere in GA were we can tell people what Series are discussed in that dumpster...

Just like this, I like the idea of closing threads when a new episode comes out... that way when it's all said and done and moved to the dump, there'll be one main discussion thread for the series... which would be the final episode one...

I like that and Splash!'s idea with my modifications... thoughts? I'm still leaning towards the merging of threads...

[Assassin]

Ok im too tired to read yours and yuki's long posts, so forgive me if this has been brought up already.

First, i like the idea of a forum for the popular series of the season as it does give more 'wiggle room' in terms of discussion. However i also acknowledge bud's concern about discusisons being lost once the seires ends, and a need for a solution. So heres my idea:

Create 2 forums. One for the "series of the season", and one "archive" forum. What i have in mind is something like this:
http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/8670/solutionbc4.jpg

For the longest time i've wondered why we have a Trash Bin and a Category Graveyard (ofcourse only the staff see these), because both serve the same purpose really. So instead, turn the graveyard into an archive subforum, and move it to general anime.

That way, each season we can simply change the forum name to reflect the current series being followed, and all of the old threads/ep discussions/polls and whatever else can just be moved to the archive forum under that series's name.

I doubt having multiple series subforums will take up that much space (though i could be wrong), and it would provide one single place for all old stuff to be collected.

Edit: wow, in that short time, like 5 more posts appeared

Edit 2: Category graveyard already seems to do this, except only the blood+ forum has any threads and discussion in it.

[complich8]

.... did you just TL;DR us all, AND break the box with an unnecessarily large screenshot??

I'd definitely prefer to go subforums under general anime though, rather than full-blown front-page forums. I think it'd be better for general anime to have people going through that forum to get to the subforum, rather than having people ignoring it. I suspect a lot of threads get incidental traffic (and series get incidental notice) from people coming to discuss other shows, and I don't want to sacrifice that to save people a click. As well as I've got the LAMP stack tuned on this server, I think an extra page load isn't a big burden .

The category graveyard was more of a holding location for categories we retired. Now most of those categories are empty and could safely be deleted, and the ones that aren't empty could ... err ... also safely be deleted. But in its time it made sense to have it separate from the trash bin! And since only staff can see it anyway, who cares?

[Munsu]

What happened with the Category Graveyard was that Ciber came and killed forums like he always does, and with that all the discussions in there were lost. So I was asking him make something work, and he did a complete mess by doing that Graveyard and then dumping hundreds of shitty threads in GA. The Graveyard used to be Admin only or something... and I don't know what made him throw all the threads in GA nor do I know what made him think it was a good idea.

We've lost most of the FMA discussions among other things this way and why I wanted a system that would allow per episode discussion for a series while still conserving past discussions in a fairly ordered manner.

Edit:
So you preffer a subforum series "dumpster" under GA? Or do you want a subforum for each series under GA?

See no merit on Splash!'s idea with closing episode threads after a new one comes out (then merging episode discussions into one thread and all other bs into another and close that one thread)?

[complich8]

no no, I'm thinking like ...
>[ General Anime ]
---> [ Series of the Season: Code Geass R2 (, others) ]
------> [ SotS: Dumpster En Fuego ] ( read-only)
>[ Books and Manga ]
...


Or possibly just two subforums under GA. Too many subforums is as bad as too many stickies -- you lose the ability to use it meaningfully as anything other than a category.

you follow?

[Munsu]

Alright, I follow... though I don't think we would need to make it read only, nor would I want to. I think with proper tags we can keep it "Post-Allowed" or whatever it is.

Or, is your idea to make it read only and then have some main discussion thread somewhere else? I don't know how that would work quite frankly.

And again I ask... see merit on the other idea of merging threads as explained in the post above yours?

[Splash!]

no no, I'm thinking like ...
>[ General Anime ]
---> [ Series of the Season: Code Geass R2 (, others) ]
------> [ SotS: Dumpster En Fuego ] ( read-only)
>[ Books and Manga ]
...


Or possibly just two subforums under GA. Too many subforums is as bad as too many stickies -- you lose the ability to use it meaningfully as anything other than a category.

you follow?

Isn't GA a subforum of 'Anime, Manga and Related Topics?' Then are you saying that it is possible to create further subforums within GA?. I thought the hierachy was Forum (Anime, Manga and Related Topics) > Sub-forum (General Anime) > Thread. You can add stuff in between?

[Munsu]

Isn't GA a subforum of 'Anime, Manga and Related Topics?' Then are you saying that it is possible to create further subforums within GA?. I thought the hierachy was Forum (Anime, Manga and Related Topics) > Sub-forum (General Anime) > Thread. You can add stuff in between?

Yep, and I think you'll just see some Text with a botton on the side right under the parent forum.

[complich8]

I spose .... that might work out too. Have to think about the merits of leaving it read-write versus read-only. My biggest concern is threads degenerating to what the One Piece "Hottest Babe" thread fell into under our not-so-watchful eyes if we leave it open-ended and open to posting after the series is over.

But really, I don't care too much one way or the other, as long as the same thing doesn't happen again... I'm pretty open to you guys working out the policy on that based on whatever reasons you want.