Forums | MacLife

I can't believe there hasn't been any piratey johnny depp "...but why is the forum gone?" jokes yet.

Yes.

Next comes assigned screen names.

I think that Boot Camp forum should have "Windows" incorporated into the name somehow. Not everyone will immediately recognize that forum as a Windows forum. I actually think "Windows For Addicts/Lifers" was a great name.

'm smurfing lost

Where do I rant...

-mark

avkills wrote:

Where do I rant...

-mark

What do you want to rant about?
Politics?- minithink
Life?- unplugged
Your mac/smurfy software?- everyday tech

seeing the pattern?

Orion wrote:

I don't think combining Unplugged and The Rant Room is such a good idea.  The rest seem okay.

Wait...

They haven't always been the same thing?

<PREPARES SOMETHING VERBOSE AND OF QUESTIONABLE VALUE>

Talking about the forum reorg or the MacAddict -> Mac|Life ?

Bren wrote:

What I wanna know is:

Why the Hell did somebody have to come along and mess with a good thing?

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," is the phrase that comes to mind...

++

Just cause you could see the cracks doesn't mean they weren't there. There were a large number of topics dying unseen & unanswered across the board. We ere having to move obviously misplaced topics all the time. Plus a certain burnout factor was atrociously high.



Add to that the two most import factors: we were bored and you all were getting overly complacent.

A couple of things.

1. What's the problem with the Avatars?

2.  I never knew why there were gaming forums on the site to begin with as they never, ever seemed to have any new threads.

3.  I preferred some of the older forum titles more i.e. Windows for Lifers, Circuit Board, etc.

Otherwise I think it's fine.  There have been times where my topics were so gray that I didn't quite know where to place them, so this could be good.  There were other times that I just accidentally placed a topic in whatever forum I happened to be in at the time. 

matt wrote:

The problem was (and you may not see this as much not having access to the moderator forum) it was broke. And to a certain degree still is.

First, there were many forums that got barely any responses. About half of the topics in Balloon Help had no replies and the ones that did only had one or two replies total. And even the moderators couldn't agree among themselves as to in which forum certain topics belonged. That indicated a lot of unnecessary overlap. The idea is to put "like" topics together. Topics asking for help should go with topics about whatever subject they're dealing with. That will help them get more responses, and make searching the forums easier.

Certain forums had/have been basically abandoned or get little-to-no traffic-- for example, many of the gaming forums(which have yet to be fully addressed). [MA] UT - Dark Squad has not had a single post in almost two years. That being the case, does it deserve its own forum? Shouldn't the forum list be short and easy to navigate and not have a lot of dead rooms where no one goes?

Second, being a moderator here is obviously stressful. More than it used to be. There are certain things about these forums that even the moderators have no control over. Like the complete lack of page titles. And the utter lack of staff contact. No one who visits these forums has server access, and the staff won't contact the administration here to give them server access, so no one can fix the page titles and avatars.

There are only about a dozen current moderators at this site. But there are about two pages worth of current and former moderators in the user list. They get called a Nazi for enforcing policies which they may not personally support, and they get overwhelmed by having so many different rooms to watch that they just stop coming.  It wasn't always like that.

The reorganization was about starting to make this place easier to use again.

It was broke. It's still broke, to a degree. The next thing would be getting the magazine's attention to fix things like the page titles and the avatars. I'm not sure of any way to contact the magazine about this issue other than through the podcast(1-877-404-1337 ext 622). Who knows, if enough people contact the magazine about these forums, maybe they could even be persuaded to implement themes again. But the only way to actually fix the things which are broke is to indicate to the magazine that these forums are important.

That does sound like a good explenation but I wonder if the unanswered threads will disapear even if you change the line up. How about adding a function to show unanswered threads? I'm not sure how that works or if it even works with the current version of the forums but I have seen it implementet in the swedish forums "99.se"

Jasoco wrote:

Oh, now I'm just disoriented.

This is the anti-Mac way of life. Changing something just to confuse people. Remember the OS X Beta?

You mean 10.0?