To be honest, now that I've had time to reflect on it, I can think of one extremely compelling reason to start a new thread and start ignoring this one, or at least stop discussing anything remotely important or interesting in this one:
This huge thread makes it impossible to find discussions over any one topic. It's ranged over all sorts of useful information for the upcoming version, and the only way to get any of that information is to read the entire thing from the beginning. If it had been divided up into different threads, it would be much easier.
And, on top of that (and here is the real issue, and the main reason this thread has to die)--this forum's search function doesn't return results pointing you to a specific post, or even a specific page. Nope, it just tells you what thread the hit was in. If someone is searching for useful information about the upcoming version and gets a hit from this thread, all that will give them is an "it's in there somewhere, on one of those 65+ pages."
That's a fairly serious problem. So while this thread is great for idle chatter, I'd like to ask... Could people stop discussing gameplay in it? To get down to the real issue, could people stop saying things that ar making Toady post useful information in it, and try to start many smaller threads for that sort of question-and-answer stuff instead?
Yes, I know that sounds like an awful request to make, and I feel slightly embarrased just to ask it, but right now, with things changing so quickly, Toady's posts and the question-and-answer stuff on this forum is often the best manual the game has... as long as threads are short, it's easy enough to catch up with the search function. In a long thread like this, though, all that useful information might as well be getting dropped into a black hole. (Well, ok, not so much black hole as a really messy a pile of papers. But you get the idea.)
With the forum's search function as limited as it is, long threads are very bad in the long term. It's not something anyone is noticing now, but few months from now (or whenever the next version is out), when we're doing searches to find that helpful comment Toady made that we half-recollect? Whoops. It's somewhere in these 65+ pages; hope that helps.
This thread is already a disaster as far as that's concerned; most of the available information about the upcoming version has been shuffled into a huge pile that, by the nature of this forum, is going to be a horrible pain to get information out of. We should stop before it gets any worse.
[ July 15, 2007: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 158310 times)