I don't think a new VN would be a good idea, from what I've heard about it. Whether you like it or not, if you start having boards like that people will start bleeding over into the other boards. Not to mention a board like that will most likely bring down the forum image anyways, and will put off new users.
To elaborate: a board, VN, once existed to house all the useless meaningless crap posts, to appease the masses and keep the garbage from seeping into the other sections of the forum. It increasingly became a pain to moderate as people tested the boundaries of what exactly could be posted there, until eventually it was shut down and purged permanently for generally horribleness. A prophecy was spoken, that when the time was right, VN would be born again. Since then the old souls of the forum have remained ever-vigilant against this threat.
What? What prophecy?
This makes me sad
Toady, what exactly would be the negative ramifications of just letting the chaos happen instead and encouraging people to moderate only what needs to be moderated (offensive, spam, that sort of thing)? Or maybe a sub-board specifically devoted to chaos? Because while a large number of users might be pressing the "Clutch Pearls" button, it seems that an even larger number of users want a fair approximation of anarchy.
A fair approximation of anarchy leads to things like /b/. We don't want that.
And taking a step back, this is first and foremost a Bay12Games forum, dealing with DF. GD and its ilk are basically houseguests. We're not going to succeed in lobbying for increased anarchy or whatever, because that's not really what this is meant to be, and there isn't really any incentive for that.
The situation is probably quite a bit more worse that we think it is, because ThreeToe and Toady and all the secret invisible phantom mods are deleting a bunch of them and generally doing the best they can. Toady already mentioned that he's devoting a fair share of his time moderating the crap out of this place, and though I personally really appreciate the time and effort he's putting into this community I don't think it's far that we're hindering his progress this much.
Now as for the as few pages I'm starting to wonder what the hell happened here.
... I hate to say this, but I'm with you on this one, Nagash (sorry, still not using the Lord).
I feel like we had a healthy balance oh, about nine to twelve months or so ago, when we were mostly talking about things that made us happy and things that made us sad. Right now, it seems like a lot of people are using these boards as a sort of IM service.
I suppose what I mean is that perhaps, when one gets an urge to start spewing silly one-word posts and all the other... weird... that tends to be generated around here, one might hop off to IRC or some other similar place, rather than stuffing it in these threads.
My only disagreement with you is that we shouldn't have either thread in the first place, as I feel that they provide a lot of productive community discussion when used correctly. You know, with posts that have paragraphs and so on.
Meh.
I agree (well, maybe not about the months bit, because I was probably still in the DF boards then). That stuff is better off somewhere else. Not here. We're supposed to be eloquent and intelligent! What happened to that idea?
... I hate to say this, but I'm with you on this one, Nagash (sorry, still not using the Lord).
I feel like we had a healthy balance oh, about nine to twelve months or so ago, when we were mostly talking about things that made us happy and things that made us sad. Right now, it seems like a lot of people are using these boards as a sort of IM service.
I suppose what I mean is that perhaps, when one gets an urge to start spewing silly one-word posts and all the other... weird... that tends to be generated around here, one might hop off to IRC or some other similar place, rather than stuffing it in these threads.
My only disagreement with you is that we shouldn't have either thread in the first place, as I feel that they provide a lot of productive community discussion when used correctly. You know, with posts that have paragraphs and so on.
Meh.
That's okay, the lord is only for formal occasions.
Anyway, if I was moderating this forum I'd probably mellow out to allow the happy thread and the sad thread, as broad threads for both emotions. But that would be it. No 'Things that made you ambivalent today', 'Things that made you kind of annoyed but then you looked back and you realised you overreacted and then you felt kind of silly today' or 'Things that make you go hmmm'
From what I've seen, a fair share of those threads are by enterprising posters who though more of these would be a good idea.
Oh gawd 5 replies already this is getting out of hand. o_o