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[Jeoshua]

Just remove this whole damnable thread.  I already seriously offended one person unintentionally, I don't want to risk pissing anyone else off based on what I think.

[NW_Kohaku]

The problem with your example is that you don't even cover the main points I was making in Improved Farming with your "four basic points", as the most important aspects were the automation to prevent micromanagement, the conservation of mass and need to maintain a cycle of nutrients through the ecosystem in order to limit how many resources a player can pull from organic resources, the introduction of pests to force dynamic player reactions, and uses of farming as an umbrella system to pull all "organic resources" into a single giant system.

Further, a large portion of my thread was the argument for these elements, preserving the arguments that had been made against them, and the reasoning for how the systems I was proposing were counter-arguments against those arguments against Improved Farming.  Stirpping the suggestions of their context and simply throwing out bullet points would have made the suggestion thread a pointless series of bullet points listing statements without meaning.

Furthermore, I did a significant degree of research, and shared the results in that thread.  One of the best assets we, as players and suggesters can bring to the table when we suggest things to Toady is bring expertise or research in topics Toady had no experience in.  Arguing that we shouldn't bother with this benefit to Toady because it's tl;dr for some forum members is just counter-productive.

If I had split up the thread, it would have had no meaning and none of the organization that the thread was created to have.

I'd wind up simply flooding the Suggestions Forum with useless suggestions that would have had no value on their own, and didn't deserve their own suggestion threads... like, say, this one, or some of the other recent suggestion threads, yours included, which are either restatements of things other people have already suggested, or would be better suited to being expansions of existing threads.

While I'm sorry that you don't have the interest to read that thread, (I even added a TL;DR version and a link to the pretty pictures for those who wanted the short points, you know...) arguing that we should have shallower and less thought-out suggestions is simply not the right path.

[Jeoshua]

Wasn't about you.

[NW_Kohaku]

It was a lot of work on my part, but it was a rewrite of an argument that had gone on for nearly 1000 posts and over 2 years, and whose arguments were getting repeated because nobody would read through 1000 posts to get caught up.  It wasn't just my argument, but a streamlining of everything that had been argued.

The thing is, you look at

I've seen many suggestions that are long, rambling ideas that encompass so many changes they take over 5 post-limit threads to write out. 

(bolding mine)

... and that describes exactly one thread in this forum - not even any other thread of mine hits that length in its initial argument.  And given that this thread pops up to the front page for the first time in a year just a couple days before this thread is made, and it's hard to see this as anything other than a thread made to complain specifically about one other thread.

[Jeoshua]

Wasn't about you

[NW_Kohaku]

Even putting the narrow focus of what you have argued against aside, I still stand by my statement that your argument is wrong. 

What we need is more people willing to discuss at length either their own personal fields of expertise or research they have done for their threads, for example, Buzzin' Beard's Bee thread, where an experienced beekeeper goes on at good length about the subject of bees (in a manner that involves "rambling" about multiple subjects related to his overall experience with bees). 

What we need is less redundant threads of a couple paragraphs, or worse, lists of bullet point suggestions from people who can't be bothered to add new information to the forums because of a misguided notion that shorter is better.

What you are arguing for is not simplicity of rules, you specifically are arguing against explaining your ideas or going off into exploring the ramifications of those ideas.  You are explicitly arguing for shallower arguments that would be detrimental to the Suggestions Forum overall.

If there was fault in your sand suggestion thread, it was in that you didn't take the time to write out the ramifications of your suggestions.  If you had taken the time to actually stop and consider every possibility, and logically step through each and every logical case, as formal debate should, you would have been able to recognize the faults of your original idea and react to them before someone else had to argue them to you.  You could have then made changes to your original idea as need be to make the original idea work through the addition of nuanced conditions - exactly the sort of thing that leads to lengthy, well-reasoned posts. 

Even in your own example, you should have taken the time to write a more thorough and thoughtful suggestion.

[Jeoshua]

Wasn't about dumbing things down.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I understand the idea that suggestions should be short and to the point. I understand that sometimes, they're so long that people don't even read all of them. There's a simple solution to this: Any suggestions more than a paragraph or two should have a summary near the beginning or end.

I, personally, like to ramble on about ideas. I tend to think about a wide variety of things when I'm doing stuff that's not demanding mentally, like chores or waiting for my computer to finish processing stuff so I can read whatever I'm trying to read or whatever. Point is, I think about things in-depth. Why are humans simultaneously the largest actual civilized race, and not trying to bully other races into doing their bidding? Either more physically powerful races need to be more important, or humans need some more-defined personality to justify why they're not as violent as goblins. Stuff like that.
I'm not the only one. Most people who present big, complex suggestions also like to go into great detail about their ideas. Related is the fact that they imagine one section of a group of interlocking gears, not just the central gear of their idea. They imagine, say, how the farming affects how fast you can set up a fortress, or how the addition of roving ogre bands would allow clever kobold civilizations to trick the ogres into attacking rich towns, leaving the kobolds to pick through the ruins, or whatever. We like to look through every facet and how it all works. This gives us a chance to both see what the other peoples' ideas are better and gives us more stuff to discuss. That's what this board is really for--not suggestions, but discussing suggestions.


NW_Kohaku, Jeoshua, you're really just arguing. You're not even arguing over something in DF, just how you think people should post ideas for DF. It's not like many people will change their behavior just from looking at this thread--I know I won't, except maybe to remember to add summaries more often. Try to find something more productive to discuss, like how you're reacting to this somewhat condescending reaction to your argument.

[Babylon]

One thing that makes a big difference, IMO, is keeping each thread restricted to one proposed change, rather than lumping several together, and making the title clear rather than "here's an awesome idea" or whatever.

[Jeoshua]

Absolutely right there, Babylon.  I am guilty of "piling" on myself, sometimes.  I try to add a new thread whenever it's become clear to me I've broken beyond the original suggestion that the person was making, but I haven't always been so thoughtful and probably derailed quite a few threads in my time on the internet, be it here or elsewhere.


Wyrm:  I'm not trying to modify people's behavior, just get them to think about their suggestions in a new light.  It's as much a realization that I had about my own ideas as it is about anyone else's posts, maybe even more-so a reminder for myself.

The only thing I would try to modify is to get Kohaku to realize this wasn't supposed to be an attack post, in the slightest.

Related is the fact that they imagine one section of a group of interlocking gears, not just the central gear of their idea

Precisely so!  That's the "central gear" of my idea here, actually.

[Supersnes]

The thing about large threads, as a collective brainstorm, is that they can lead to varieties of ideas, sometimes very good, that would not have possibly come to the surface from the more specific threads, mainly due to being constrained to a particular aspect.  Overall there should be both broad and narrow specified threads to make sure that the ideas are being put in there.  A possible way to make it so the concepts are findable afterward is to work on making an megathread index of the this forum board that breakdown the overarching topics down into the fine detailed threads.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Jeoshua: So...you want each topic to relate to a few topics directly related to one issue, or something? Or am I completely misunderstanding you?

[lordcooper]

OP was totally tl;dr.  Practice what you preach my brother.

[Jeoshua]

IT was a lot more succinct before I had to start modifying it and defending my position against imagined attacks and missteps in my own phrasing.  That is not TL;DR territory by any means lordcooper, it doesn't even take up more than one screen on my browser window.  Your tolerance must be low.

Jeoshua: So...you want each topic to relate to a few topics directly related to one issue, or something? Or am I completely misunderstanding you?

I guess I may not have phrased it as well as I could have.  Not that each topic should not discuss the idea to absolute death, and the situations that must arrive from it's rules and what-not.  That's natural and part of discussion.  If I didn't want people to discuss things I would have suggest people not suggest things in a discussion forum, neh?

No, what I mean is that when thinking about a suggestion, ideally a person should try and figure out what the simplest set of rules that define that suggestion really are, and consider how they link together and what arises from that.  Which is why I kept telling Kohaku that if anything I have no real issue with the Improved Farming: Redux thread since it really does do that, in incredible detail.

[NW_Kohaku]

IT was a lot more succinct before I had to start modifying it and defending my position against imagined attacks and missteps in my own phrasing.  That is not TL;DR territory by any means lordcooper, it doesn't even take up more than one screen on my browser window.  Your tolerance must be low.

You only added a couple extra paragraphs and actually started using bullet points.  But hey, nice to see that at the instant you get pushback from the other direction, you start playing the victim for my pointing out that you essentially went through a derogatory description of my threads as an example of what not to do. 

Also, that's basically the thing about "TL;DR" - tolerance is entirely in the eye of the beholder, what they, personally, find interesting, and how disposed or indisposed they are to reading in the first place.  (Although, yay, irony for saying other people should have more tolerance for "tl;dr" threads in a thread about avoiding "tl;dr".)

If the problem you ran into that caused you to write this was finding out that the simple solution you wanted to impose on a problem would not fit into complex mechanics, then, again, I say that the message to take away from that is that simplicity is not a virtue in and of itself.  You're not even able to keep a "Keep It Simple" message simple, here, and you're waffling back and forth on what you are saying after every response you get from every side, trying to add nuances to keep every side happy.

The reason I wrote a monstrously long farming thread in the first place was because I was trying to navigate the straights of two factions: Those who wanted complexity and realism and challenge in farming, and those who wanted simplicity and a paucity of micromanagement.  The only way to navigate that course was to make a heavily researched and complex system and explain every side of the argument and how I had tried to satisfy every requirement of nearly diametrically opposed interests. 

Achieving the actual objective of describing the best system are far higher priorities than a completely subjective "succinct"/"tl;dr" threshold.