The truth about the new forum

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goldfinger0303
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#81 Post by goldfinger0303 » Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:21 pm

flash2015 wrote:
Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:13 pm

Correlation != Causation. There could be many reasons why people are not involved in dip as they once were.

Anyway to turn your specific complaint into an actionable request - why couldn't we potentially have both - some way to view "All Topics" as well as a way to categorize too? If you tried to post from the all topics thread you would need to specify a category...with an opt-in to display the Politics/other hidden stuff in the "All Topics" and on the front page. What do you think?
I'll grant you that. A simple comparison to other websites would give a better idea of causation. As Webdip by far has made the most consistent improvements to the diplomacy aspect of the site, we should be outperforming the others.

As for the request, I think that's sorta what I was thinking about. Make the forum more like reddit. One central page that shows every post that is being posted. That is the forum. However, each post has a tag on it, which files it into a specific category-thread which you can exclusively browse. You can have the option to hide tags if you wish.

The general idea behind the request is that the biggest thing with the old forum driving content creation was that people could easily and visibly see new topics being created, and how quickly the most recently commented topics turned over.

The thing is, I'm not site architect. I have no idea how feasible this would be. Nor do I think the dev team would be thrilled at the prospect of re-hauling an aspect of the site they poured a ton of work into just a few years ago.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#82 Post by goldfinger0303 » Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:22 pm

flash2015 wrote:
Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:21 pm
goldfinger0303 wrote:
Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:14 pm
And I've had feedback on the tournament part of the site sitting for several months now. One of which was "could you widen the columns of the chart so I can read people's names"

Seriously though, go to Tournaments->Scoring and Participants. Is the leftmost column not squished all to hell?

But since the tournament scene is dead too I understand that's not a priority. Only tournaments that seem to be consistently going on are cross-platform ones.
Not for me on Firefox. Are you looking at this from a phone?
It happens on my phone too, but currently on my laptop using Chrome.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#83 Post by flash2015 » Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:37 pm

brainbomb wrote:
Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:03 pm
You keep saying no one has any ideas
no one has any feedback

I just listed 1 page ago 7 things that could make the site fun
I guess I was asking Octavious specifically, but in response to your feedback:

(1) I would like that too! But there must be a good reason why this was disabled...apart from jmo being able to post his picard/banhammer memes :razz: . It would be great if we could have another discussion about this to see if there was a way to make this happen.

(2) I thought the complaint was that we had too many categories? We now want more?

(3) Sure, but who would do this? Are we prepared to pitch in to write specific requirements and potentially pitch in to hire some outside help?

(4) You know that reversing this completely won't happen.

(5) - (6) I am sure this would be great but who would volunteer to do this?

(7) Why should we allow multis for the forum?
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#84 Post by flash2015 » Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:41 pm

goldfinger0303 wrote:
Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:22 pm
flash2015 wrote:
Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:21 pm
goldfinger0303 wrote:
Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:14 pm
And I've had feedback on the tournament part of the site sitting for several months now. One of which was "could you widen the columns of the chart so I can read people's names"

Seriously though, go to Tournaments->Scoring and Participants. Is the leftmost column not squished all to hell?

But since the tournament scene is dead too I understand that's not a priority. Only tournaments that seem to be consistently going on are cross-platform ones.
Not for me on Firefox. Are you looking at this from a phone?
It happens on my phone too, but currently on my laptop using Chrome.
I would say your problem was using Chrome (Firefox is better) but then jmo would beat me... :P

Joking aside, so does this page looks bad to you? It looks fine to me on Chrome on Windows 8.1:

https://www.webdiplomacy.net/tournament ... namentID=3
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#85 Post by goldfinger0303 » Sat Feb 15, 2020 10:08 pm

I just updated to the latest version of Chrome and this is how it looks for me

https://pasteboard.co/IUR2at5.png

I'm relieved that it doesn't look bad for everyone though.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#86 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Feb 16, 2020 2:52 am

@brainbomb,
Also this new forum ate up all the donation drive money. this IS where all your money went.
this thing
the new forum did not consume the money from the donation drive. It's a free system and reduced server load. To my knowledge the only cost that went into that pool was moving to a new server when the old one met it's end of life. Please stop blatantly lying, especially when it comes to finances. Also your implication that no other improvements to the site happened after that donation are idiotic, see viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1354 for massive changes to the site (again all done via time donations)

As for this:
"point is, jmo admitted vdip forum can sustain 35 more years of staying the same. So what hes saying is, webdip jumped the gun, we couldve just told vdip to shove it, and hand over their forum. Then we couldve forced vdip to use this ugly pcp forum."
I hope you didn't damage all 2 brain cells that came up with this argument. But I am glad to see you haven't lost your trolling skills in your time away.
School of war was a big thing. and I noticed its mostly vanished with this new forum also.
Yeah, rallying 7 good players, 2-3 amazing players, and 7 new players into a game for months at a time has always been a MASSIVE pain in the ass and it's typically infrequently done but we've had them since the new forum too.
1. Add a new forum and allow images and imbeddable youtube videos like 99.9999999999999% of all other active forums in every known corner of the internet.

2. Invest in forum content add more categories, including sports, writing, film

3. add more emojis, add more fonts and give users avatars

4. get rid of hidden forum areas and bring everything back into the light

5. allow award winners to have tokens on their forum profile showing theyve won an award before. Give awards to tourney winners.

6. host yearly awards like they used to for most improved gr, best gunboater, best full press player, mvp, best mod, best forum game, best debater.

7. allow alt accounts that cannot join games and auto link to your existing account using current tech that is used to track and unearth multis
1. Kestas had security concerns about phpbb3's scanning of images and video's.
2. Nobody's asked for this aside from you but a few people have asked for different categories in this thread, if there's interest there's no reason not to have these.
3. Adding emoji's is easy and in a thread from when we added the initial ones we asked if people wanted others, reach out via email and we'll tell you what image formats we need to add them. Font's I don't think this supports, avatars are a pain but if you open a thread to that topic we can discuss it.
4. No, but you can use the subscription service the forum has to get updates to those threads to appear on the subscription page on the forum, it's pretty decent for following conversations you're interested in.
5. It's a planned improvement on our github and part of it is already implemented with our tournament feature.
6. A change to our SQL server made this way harder to do, but is something we definitely want to bring back. Anyone with SQL experience who's interested in writing queries for these would be welcomed too.
7. For what purpose?
the mentorship program hasnt had a substantive post in it since august. and that was the NEW big thing
This is because it was moved to the registration email, so people sign up and the program's been going well.

@alexintour and others
"I don't see a donor star of whatever color in the profile of the poster."

Please don't dismiss people because they haven't donated, we never want anyone to feel pressured into donating and we understand many can't for various reasons.

@oct,
So what were the typical numbers of active female members before the changes, and what are the typical numbers of active female members now?
I'm aware of more now, though we don't ask for gender on our sign up page.
Utter tosh, Flash. Every single time there has been a plea from the membership regarding anything that the site leadership dislikes, it hasn't happened.
Bullshit, Chaos, 1 vs 1, dark modes, game search by name, game search between you and other users, additional profile stats, changes to RR to only include the last year worth of games, easier to use menu that doesn't hide pages and rules, hall of fame having all time and past 6 months (highly requested from vDip), making takeovers free, searching in game message archives by country, I can literally go on all day. Nearly every development change stems from a user request. We take notice when people ask for things to change and we implement a lot of them.

@goldie
Eh, not exactly. There are certain personas non grata that they won't take who are willing to volunteer, myself among them I think. I've offered multiple times.
You run multiple tournaments on a regular basis, what are you talking about? Aren't you actively running 1 right now?
They'll throw stats at you about how the site has improved, but a simple look at the waybackmachine shows that 8 years ago there were more active users and more active games than there are today.
I've posted rather long posts previously about how the diplomacy community as a whole has dropped off over the last decade, and playdip's, vDip's and the other site's numbers have similarly dropped off. Largely in my belief due to the lack of developer volunteers meaning none of the sites can offer features that compete with the endless instant gratification games available on phones and shorter attention spans people possess these days. 8 years ago the numbers were 73 games higher and 1700 vs 1400 active users. 4 years ago the game count was identical with 200 more users. The drop off was happening before the new forum, so I don't get how it can be blamed on a forum change.
And I've had feedback on the tournament part of the site sitting for several months now. One of which was "could you widen the columns of the chart so I can read people's names"
1. I haven't had time recently and development was blocked by the bots
2. This literally ONLY impacts you and the mods, everyone else has a different view that looks perfectly fine and non squished, so the priority of this is pretty low for me vs other dev projects, but it will get fixed eventually.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#87 Post by goldfinger0303 » Sun Feb 16, 2020 3:02 am

I meant volunteer as a mod jmo, not in other capacities.

As for your second point, I did concede to flash in my next post that the better way to analyze it would be a comparison across different sites. If what you say is indeed the case, then I largely agree with you.

As for the third, I didn't know until flash posted a screenshot that it only impacts me. Understand on low priority now.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#88 Post by brainbomb » Sun Feb 16, 2020 3:44 am

Thank you for the responses Jmo.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#89 Post by brainbomb » Sun Feb 16, 2020 3:47 am

I dont mean any disrespect but I recall you used to say that you arent an actual mod here just a programmer. And ive noticed that over the last year you are basically the official voice of all official responses from webdip. Is there some reason why the vdip house guest is designated to be the PR spokesman for this site?

youre doing a great job of it
I do wonder if theyre taking advantage of your volunteer program status here though. somebody cut this guy a check already
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#90 Post by brainbomb » Sun Feb 16, 2020 3:48 am

play mafia jmo.
didnt you play 1 game
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#91 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Feb 16, 2020 4:00 am

brainbomb wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 3:47 am
I dont mean any disrespect but I recall you used to say that you arent an actual mod here just a programmer. And ive noticed that over the last year you are basically the official voice of all official responses from webdip. Is there some reason why the vdip house guest is designated to be the PR spokesman for this site?

youre doing a great job of it
I do wonder if theyre taking advantage of your volunteer program status here though. somebody cut this guy a check already
At one point I'd resigned as a mod and only was doing dev work. I've also resigned as a vDip admin...no one takes me seriously when I resign, they won't even remove my status on either site when I do it :(

I'm the lead dev, and frequently an admin in terms of training mods and helping with decisions. Pw, bo, and I rotate based on availability. Right now I'm the most active. That'll probably rotate in the near future.

I wouldn't accept a check from any diplomacy site. Providing a place to play this game and making it as good as we can while still staying ad free and free to play is the main goal I have here. And I think that's shared across the team.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#92 Post by brainbomb » Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:11 am

you are really hard to troll. ill give ya that
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#93 Post by Octavious » Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:09 am

jmo1121109 wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 2:52 am
Bullshit, Chaos, 1 vs 1, dark modes, game search by name, game search between you and other users, additional profile stats, changes to RR to only include the last year worth of games, easier to use menu that doesn't hide pages and rules, hall of fame having all time and past 6 months (highly requested from vDip), making takeovers free, searching in game message archives by country, I can literally go on all day. Nearly every development change stems from a user request. We take notice when people ask for things to change and we implement a lot of them.
Really? You managed to find stuff to object to about all them? What on earth was disagreeable about that lot?
jmo1121109 wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 2:52 am
I'm aware of more now, though we don't ask for gender on our sign up page.
So what you're saying is that the push to appeal to more female members was based purely upon a stereotypical view of women being delicate flowers who need protecting, that there was no measure of how big the problem actually was prior to the changes, no attempt to measure how big the problem is now that the changes have been established, and no interest at all in ever finding out?

So rather than being an issue that you had a genuine enthusiasm about tackling, the lack of female members was simply a convenient excuse to push forward the changes you wanted. Now you have your changes the issue is closed.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#94 Post by Squigs44 » Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:30 am

brainbomb wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:11 am
you are really hard to troll. ill give ya that
Having spent lots of time with both brain and jmo, this comment tells you the most important things you need to know about both of them
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#95 Post by leon1122 » Sun Feb 16, 2020 11:36 am

MajorMitchell wrote:
Sat Feb 08, 2020 3:18 am
The Forum wasn't replaced, it has evolved to be a Forum with more Decorum, so it's much more welcoming and far less offensive, especially for lady members of WebDiplomacy.
I would say something, but I won't for the sake of "decorum".
jmo1121109 wrote:
Sat Feb 08, 2020 1:38 am
And the fact that all the site crashes that were happening every other day for weeks before Kestas archived a massive section of the webdip forum (everything from creation in 2008ish - 2 Jan 2013) is just sheer coincidence.
Why not just archive every 5 years then? I don't think anyone would mind. Categories are a horrible idea, IMO. Creating categories constrains people from just posting whatever comes to the top of their mind.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#96 Post by captainmeme » Sun Feb 16, 2020 12:56 pm

Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:09 am
So what you're saying is that the push to appeal to more female members was based purely upon a stereotypical view of women being delicate flowers who need protecting, that there was no measure of how big the problem actually was prior to the changes, no attempt to measure how big the problem is now that the changes have been established, and no interest at all in ever finding out?
I don't think not wanting to be harrassed counts as being a 'delicate flower'.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#97 Post by leon1122 » Sun Feb 16, 2020 3:01 pm

captainmeme wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 12:56 pm
Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:09 am
So what you're saying is that the push to appeal to more female members was based purely upon a stereotypical view of women being delicate flowers who need protecting, that there was no measure of how big the problem actually was prior to the changes, no attempt to measure how big the problem is now that the changes have been established, and no interest at all in ever finding out?
I don't think not wanting to be harrassed counts as being a 'delicate flower'.
When has a female member of this site ever been "harassed" on the basis of her sex?
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#98 Post by flash2015 » Sun Feb 16, 2020 4:23 pm

jmo1121109 wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 2:52 am
4. No, but you can use the subscription service the forum has to get updates to those threads to appear on the subscription page on the forum, it's pretty decent for following conversations you're interested in.
I actually tried subscribing to a few topics and at least a couple have had some activity since I subscribed. I am probably missing something obvious (happens a lot) but where should I be seeing something?
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#99 Post by Octavious » Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:12 pm

captainmeme wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 12:56 pm
I don't think not wanting to be harrassed counts as being a 'delicate flower'.
Well done, captain. You should give yourself a little woke award for that quip.

The trouble is, as Leon has pointed out, the harassment of female members has never been a problem on this site so the comment has very little relevance to anything. The issue was never about female members being harrassed, but about whether the site was a welcoming place to females. My argument is that nothing whatsoever seems to have been done to establish whether it was before or whether it is now. I'm surprised to hear that you don't seem at all interested in finding out whether it has or not. Wahey! There are no women being harrassed on the site! Well, there are no women being harrassed on Mars either, but it doesn't mean it's a welcoming place.
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Re: The truth about the new forum

#100 Post by brainbomb » Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:51 pm

leon1122 wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 3:01 pm
captainmeme wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 12:56 pm
Octavious wrote:
Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:09 am
So what you're saying is that the push to appeal to more female members was based purely upon a stereotypical view of women being delicate flowers who need protecting, that there was no measure of how big the problem actually was prior to the changes, no attempt to measure how big the problem is now that the changes have been established, and no interest at all in ever finding out?
I don't think not wanting to be harrassed counts as being a 'delicate flower'.
When has a female member of this site ever been "harassed" on the basis of her sex?
Her name was durga
I recall her stating she had been called a b and a c regularly on here.
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