I'm with Capntastic on this. Suggestions forum only exist everywhere on game fora because regardless if the developers will read and use them or not, people will feel entitled to make them anyway. The "suggestions forum" is there so they don''t clutter the rest of the fora with their self-entitled right to make suggestions.
There should be a super-secret-double-suggestions forum for them, where they can huddle together and stew in their snide superiority, leaving the escaped lunatics to their fun
And this is exactly the problem I'm talking about.
Someone who likes DF, and wants to try to help make the game better tries to make a suggestion? No, no such thing exists, they're just self-entitled assholes who are only making suggestions because they want to flaunt their ego.
No, there's nothing that can be done to make the suggestions forum or process become any more smooth, effective, or beneficial to Toady or the development process, we should just insult anyone who even tries until nobody even wants to participate anymore.
We're just going to accept this defeatism?
I actually really do like this community, and think it has quite a few very intelligent people who have some great ideas and some of the really specialized niche knowledge bases that can really flesh out some parts of the game.
Beyond that, it's worth having a serious discussion about the forums - They're not getting smaller. Not unless Toady actually wants to start driving players off, or just stagnates in development for a very long period of time until players lose interest, neither of which we should really want. (Especially if this project stays funded by donations - not everyone is going to make yearly donations of the same amount every year. In order to keep the money coming in at a rate capable of supporting Toady, it means he needs an influx of new players.)
That means that if it's difficult for them to moderate these forums and juggle everything else to do with this game now, it's only going to get worse as time goes on.
He's not going to make this open source and accept a collaborative coding project, so why can't the community itself help with some of the other jobs?
guh, quintuple ninjad...