Please read: A personal appeal from shadowmaster

[Iris]

For the forum game players:

link.

[Gambit]

*bump*

Thread unlocked. Discuss.
The policy that is… not the image. Or the image I guess. It's pretty awesome. No really though; we want to hear what you guys think.

[PeterPorty]

Agreed in a 9999%

[doofus-01]

I don't know anything about the security angle, but I do know that large, active, and pointless off-topic threads make the forum search function a little more difficult to use.

So, I agree.

[HomerJ]

Forum games are not for me. However I have no problem with other people play them. As long it is of no disturbance to the other forum users things should be fine.
I agree on the other hand that it's no use to have people register simply for one or two forum game threads.


Greetz
HomerJ

[Hulavuta]

I agree too. I've repented

[bigkahuna]

I agree, though I don't really know how we should "get rid" of the non-Wesnoth people.

[Daravel]

I've never played a forum game before, and only joined this one because I frequent the Wesnoth forums for legitimate purposes. I understand all the issues you describe.

You could tell the GM of the game to only include people who are active members and contributing to the forum/game? Also, just limit the occurance of these kinds of threads - the current R2D isn't too much of a blight; just don't allow any more to be created.

[johndh]

The other moderators and I on another gaming forum have recently been locking a flood of pointless "what is your favorite X?" threads on our off-topic board because it was getting so out of hand, and our forum is much smaller than this one.

Our response:

Hi all

I looked around a bit in this offtopic forum and I think there are too many useless discussions!
This is mainly the glest board and not a place where:
People publish their political/religious statements, play silly posting games that just fill the board and so on.
Please all try not to do this from now. I don't want to be too restrictive because its the offtopic board, but please try too keep these things in mind.

What I am talking about are things like these:
Salute the US
longest thread ever!
Immigrants
Post Big Big Big pics here!

Please stop this kind of things!

Regards
titi

Edit: Spoiler'd for clutter.

[Thrawn]

Perhaps putting a post requirement for use in the OT forum would be useful, as it would do a couple things:

1) Prevent people from joining solely to spambot/troll/play forum games in OT

2) Allow us to see what *kinds* of posts users are making to get to the minimum cap: are they intellegent posters w/ good sense, or simply +1ing till they can get into the OT

[Gambit]

I knew it would be a good idea to get some input on this.

So some things people have mentioned so far:
1. Some people do enjoy forum games. Also "forum game" is a broad category and some may be more fun for certain individuals than others.
2. Forum games clog the search feature (I didn't think of this angle, but yes it's true. Almost all the hits for the word "lock" for example are in R2D).
3. We don't want people to register just to use forum games. However there have been legitimate uses of the off topic section by non community members in the past. Such as spreading awareness of other OSS projects.
4. Forum games are not worth keeping around.

I think the solution is pretty easy. Forum games get their own subsection. It could have a decently long autoprune so that we're only keeping the most popular 70 page games. It won't be indexed for searching, and it won't get an atom feed. Additionally maybe it should be invisible to guests and you can't post in it until you get a certain post count elsewhere. What do you guys think?

[johndh]

I think the solution is pretty easy. Forum games get their own subsection. It could have a decently long autoprune so that we're only keeping the most popular 70 page games. It won't be indexed for searching, and it won't get an atom feed. Additionally maybe it should be invisible to guests and you can't post in it until you get a certain post count elsewhere. What do you guys think?

That sounds good, except I think giving them their own section endorses/legitimizes them, which might encourage them in a way. I guess that's not necessarily bad if it's auto-pruned, but just something to think about.

[Gambit]

That's one way to think about it. Another way is that we're shoving the disgusting little buggers off into a corner where we don't have to look at them.

Then there's the happy medium viewpoint wherein this is the best thing for everyone.

[Thrawn]

I knew it would be a good idea to get some input on this.

[snip]

I think the solution is pretty easy. Forum games get their own subsection. It could have a decently long autoprune so that we're only keeping the most popular 70 page games. It won't be indexed for searching, and it won't get an atom feed. Additionally maybe it should be invisible to guests and you can't post in it until you get a certain post count elsewhere. What do you guys think?

Disable post count for that section as well, and sounds good.

[thespaceinvader]

And search indexing. Make it a child board of Off-Topic, so it's not too prominent on the main page. I'm not a fan of them, but when they start, it's tough to stop them.