Well, it seems that kyhm has fallen off the face of the earth again, leaving the forums in temporary limbo. But that's no reason to sit around doing nothing, so we may as well start organising and commenting upon what people are suggesting should happen with the forums to make them interesting and active once more. I guess I'll sticky this thread once I have TEH FORUM SUPAPOWAZ.
So currently, we have (being optimistic here) around 60 people who care about the community and wish to stick around and possibly even post. At that level of population, we have too many forums to build up any sort of critical mass of discussion, therefore we should probably cut back on the number and expand the roles of some of the forums we possess. This here is a list of current and new forums and what I feel should done with them divided by existing categories with a brief comment where necessary...
Community
- Unrelated
- Roleplaying - to be moved to a new group, but internally, untouched. Perhaps locked and roleplaying made part of creative arts forum.
- Game board - to be moved to a new group with roleplaying, but internally, untouched.
- Current Events & Serious Business - Debate Club renamed and expanded to include discussion of current events.
- Image Dump
- Hall of fame/flame - A new forum to put good unrelated threads out to pasture and prevent them from being necromanced and turning into 5 pages of laughs followed by 15 pages of depressing "lol, remember this guys?"
- Post something archive - merged back into unrelated with its threads remaining locked.
- Webcomic Hell - new forum for discussion of any webcomic, past, present or future.
Things & Stuff- Bulletin Board - give it a rename and make it the forum for discussing everything about the forums. Kest suggested something like Meta I think...
- Webcomic colab forum - deleted or turned into the backend for the frontend. More on this later...
- Polling station - merged into bulletin board with threads locked.
- Secret mod forum - locked and moved to a new archive category.
Comics- ES, EN & SOFFAP - fate to be determined. Ultimately, archived and locked.
- Midlands/Heliothaumic/Empire Song
- RIF - hanging around if spools still wants a forum for it.
- S*P - no real opinion on it. Can stay if people want it.
- Stoats - to become the new creative arts forum, can't remember if I thought of anything about the name.
Dead shit- All existing forums - locked and archived with the permission of the moderators, or merged into Webcomic hell.
Now some specifics...
Admin and moderator guidelines - Discussed in
this thread.
I think some form of guidelines are necessary for admins and moderators so that they know what is and isn't acceptable and that the community knows they aren't abusing their powers. As part of this I would suggest leaving moderation to the moderators and admins become a form of oversight or point of appeal on any moderation. Essentially, admins as supreme and impartial administrators. Because of this, I'd suggest that admins cannot also be moderators, except in cases where they have their own webcomic forum.
User guidelines - Also discussed in
this thread.
Along with admin and moderator guidelines would be user guidelines, as such, what is and isn't acceptable to post on the forums. These can be as broad or as general as the community desires. Individual forums can then add to (or possibly remove from) these guidelines as the moderator feels is appropriate for the nature of their forum.
Unrelated
Unrelated would be given its own moderators, either by some form of vote from the unrelated community, or appointed by the admins. Those moderators would then have the task of devising any guidelines for unrelated that they and the community feel necessary and policing them.
Frontend
Currently in designer limbo. Volunteers welcome.
Early design concept from a while back. Feel free to make suggestions here as to what else could go on there besides content from the creative arts forum. Putting webcomics from the forums on the frontend has also been suggested and is looking promising.
Backend
Back when I initially conceived of the creative community frontend thing (I'm sure others had thought of it beforehand), I pictured it being run directly off a separate forum here as per
how the baron suggested in the petition thread. It would not be pretty, but it would work. I'm sure there's better suggestions out there for how to set up the backend.