Neil wrote:Please suggest a structure.
As ever, I appreciate your willingness to engage to this delightful community you have cultivated. I've only been a member here a short time, but I already feel at home enough to offer some suggestions. I can't say for certain any of my ideas are wise or guaranteed to produce positive results, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that some new approaches are warranted - the impending release of the development Rift is driving the overall volume of this forum to deafening levels.
Firstly, I quite like the overall structure of the forums, but one initial step I feel would be helpful is to introduce several Oculus Rift subforums to assist people in focusing in on their exact areas of interest while comfortably ignoring others. All the other forums and subforums seem to be well suited to their respective levels of posting and readership, but with the (hopefully justifiable) buzz surrounding the Rift, one forum can simply not contain all the aspects of interest. A good start on a list of prospective subforums (comments and further suggestions are highly encouraged): Rift Support For AAA Games (possibly to be merged with-); Indie Rift Games In Development (for official announcements and discussing press releases); Rift Developers Corner (for devs working on Rift games/software to talk shop); Rift-Compatible Peripherals (home to the excellent "look what I made" experimental threads as well as commercial hardware well suited to use with a Rift); Rift Buzz Beehive (a safely-ignored but probably popular area to contain idle speculation and chat about other topics only tangentially related to the Rift). Care should of course be taken to ensure that these categories don't overlap too significantly with others - I doubt I'm the only hardware wonk here who considers "VR/AR Research & Development" the most interesting location on MTBS3D, but if experimental devices were encouraged to be displayed in something like Rift-Compatible Peripherals it could create a confusing divide. Likewise, the Rift is only one facet of the much larger focus of this website and could accidentally subsume several lesser-visited forums, but I think you'd agree that currently and for the foreseeable future the Rift is going to be the single axis around which a large majority of discussion turns; I'm confident you recognize this and will carefully walk the line between turning MTBS3D into an all-Rift-all-the-time fan forum and squelching discussion in the name of heterogeneity.
But a word regarding squelching, or rather a more active hand in moderating all these new discussions. I greatly respect the overall moderation style of the MTBS3D staff, and the overall quality of the discussions here are a testament to it. Yet, while I abhor outright censorship, I do feel we're reaching a duplicate thread tipping point - the recent Team Fortress 2 announcement spawned something like a dozen threads that could have easily been merged into one. I feel it's time for the already overworked moderators to begin locking duplicate threads while gently herding similar discussions into single threads. Ultimately, though, I believe we should all be encouraging a somewhat
greater rate of thread creation - many threads go off for pages at a time on tangents not at all related to the original intent of the threads, and a fascinating topic that crops up can easily be forgotten by the time the thread gets back on track. I have personally encountered this phenomenon several times now, but even when someone points out that a tangent deserves a dedicated thread, I and others remain too shy or fearful of clogging up the board to start it. Searching for preexisting threads is not always easy, but considering the quality of some mothballed threads I've encountered I believe a positive form of
thread necromancy should be celebrated; anyone starting a new thread that is quickly discovered to be a duplicate would be only delicately chastened and herded into the more senior thread as the junior is locked (with either a cross-post by the locking mod in the senior thread to alert participants of additional discussion or a full merge of all posts as warranted). Conversely, MTBS3D staff already introduce news items that are welcomed by the community, and I believe any staff member who identifies an unexplored topic worthy of a separate thread would be similarly welcomed in starting it. Additionally, something like
a per-post upvote/downvote system with a high or nonexistent bury threshold could help to eliminate one-line reply posts while giving everyone a better sense that they weren't only talking to themselves.
Finally, and perhaps of greatest long-term benefit, continually updated sticky FAQs and perhaps a topic aggregation feature would do wonders for acclimating the mounting flood of new members to the current facts and keep them from spamming up the boards with thoroughly answered questions. The community would do most of the heavy lifting on this one, but they will need careful guidance and perhaps staff curation to be most effective. Just a few stickies I'd like to see (many of them carefully sliced groupings of Wikipedia entries): Rift Hardware Specs; VR Game Launch Timeline; Getting Started With VR Game Development; Oculus Personnel; Rift And Unity/UDK; Rift Control Schemes For Seated Play (I already have a large mental start on this one); The History Of Virtual Reality; and anything else we can identify as a question that spawns an unnecessary new thread more than once a month. Additionally, having a way to present a centralized aggregation of locked duplicate and related ongoing threads might help people intimidated by the prospect of searching through the entire website's corpus of information. I envision this as something like a sitemap web only at a finer level of detail; this however may not be necessary and could involve a lot of work to get to a useful state.
It's a great time to be a VR enthusiast, and hopefully about to get far better. New members will be coming out of the proverbial woodwork in the coming months, and they should be welcomed warmly yet pushed to understand that there are rules to be followed and that the signal to noise ratio here is already becoming worrisome. Whether you utilize all of these suggestions or none of them, I'm confident the entire staff will plot a steady course through these exciting yet turbulent times, and I look forward to continuing to call MTBS3D the most civil and also most fascinating web community I've ever had the pleasure of joining. Keep up the good work!
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