Too many Ronnies threads

[Jack Aidley]

A glance over the Indie Game Design forum shows that is currently awash with "Ronnies Feedback" threads. Now I don't have anything against the Ronnies - hell, I plan on entering when sometime when it matches up better with my schedule - but I do feel the number of threads it is spawning is over the top and swamping out game development threads from other sources. Traditionally, Indie Game Design threads have always been started by designers who want feedback, input and the like on their games - the Ronnies threads reverse this by having Ron present his thoughts on someone else's game.

When the Iron Game Chef contest was hosted it here, it managed to keep itself down to three or four threads, could not the number of Ronnies threads be similarly reduced? Perhaps by keeping the feedback to a single thread for each contest and letting the designers themselves start new threads as they see fit?

[Graham W]

A glance over the Indie Game Design forum shows that is currently awash with "Ronnies Feedback" threads. Now I don't have anything against the Ronnies - hell, I plan on entering when sometime when it matches up better with my schedule - but I do feel the number of threads it is spawning is over the top and swamping out game development threads from other sources. Traditionally, Indie Game Design threads have always been started by designers who want feedback, input and the like on their games - the Ronnies threads reverse this by having Ron present his thoughts on someone else's game.

When the Iron Game Chef contest was hosted it here, it managed to keep itself down to three or four threads, could not the number of Ronnies threads be similarly reduced? Perhaps by keeping the feedback to a single thread for each contest and letting the designers themselves start new threads as they see fit?

I think this has been true for the September competition. I'm hoping that, as the number of entries reduce (due to the shorter competition time), it'll get more bearable.

There's something very nice about posting the threads in Indie Design. It means that there's an incentive to read the games and discuss them, which I like.

Graham

[Mark Johnson]

Perhaps the Ronnies deserve their own forum if volume is a problem.  Perhaps not.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Bluntly, only a minority of Forge posters are really participating well here. They don't post to Actual Play, which means losing the crucial social and creative context for any comments they make. They don't participate in Indie Design, which means they are not taking it on themselves to see what is happening with newly available and almost-available role-playing games. All of this bad.

The overriding purpose of the Forge is to promote and support independent role-playing publishing. Clinton and I are fully agreed on what makes this happen most successfully - discussions founded on mutual understanding of how we (the people talking) play; attention and interest directed toward the ferment of creativity that exists and has always existed out there in the world.

The Ronnies are here to show you how to do it. Yes, I am "taking over" Indie Design for a while, with no apologies for any other games in development, if they aren't receiving enough attention to stay in the first three pages of the forum. This is intended to model to the entire Forge community exactly what the site is for:

seek out new games, encourage their production, find ones you like, try them out, comment on them

get inspired to try it yourself, especially when you realize that it's not that hard, and that one not-so-great attempt today is not the end of the world

The current extent of this takeover is only temporary. I expect later rounds to be smaller, which is being borne out now, with five entries so far in this round. But you can bet that the Ronnies are here to stay, and that their content is expected to be meaningful to everyone at the site.

This is no loss to people with other games unless they fail to "get" the whole Forge thing in the first place. If they participate in Ronnies threads, you can bet that their own games will receive exponentially more attention and a vast mutualistic wave of support. There is no downside. If you really are concerned about any specific threads that got bumped down via the Ronnies over the last week, then all you have to do is post meaningfully to them. Or better yet, participate in some Ronnies threads, then post new threads about the game you were focused on before with a better understanding of what's supposed to be happening here.

Best,
Ron

[Sydney Freedberg]

....no apologies for any other games in development, if they aren't receiving enough attention to stay in the first three pages of the forum.

Just to make sure I understand: The rule "any thread on the first three pages is current enough to post to, any thread on page four or later is closed and should not be resurrected" applies not just to Actual Play, but to Indie Design and, presumably, all other forums since the reformatting reduced the number of threads per page?

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Actually, the reformatting makes the whole thing confusing, and not precisely to my liking at the moment.

BEFORE the reformatting, both Indie Design and Actual Play used the "first three pages are open" rule, and all the other general forums used the "first page only" rule. I have no idea how many Forge people understood that, and I assume not many. But that was the rule. Folks, don't bother me with whether you did or didn't understand it. Not relevant.

NOW, the same rules apply ... but with less posts showing per page, it's not ideal. Clinton and I will discuss whether we can restore the function which resulted in more posts per page. That is a smoke-filled room discussion which you can't attend. (Actually, it just means we talk on the phone.)

Best,
Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

I wouldn't presume to join your discussion about posting rules, but would you take a suggestion? Ignore freely.

The way I see it, the important thing isn't some hard limit of how many never threads there are. After all, the reason for a ban on thread necromancy to begin with is to preserve natural conversational time limits, which has nothing to do with how many other threads are active at the same time. So the rules about "pages of threads" seem artificial to me to begin with. What that all amounts to is simply that you'd probably be fine with a rule like "within a month" or "when it's still current", rather than the pretty arbitrary "still on the front page". Double the forum activity, and you halve the best-before dates of all the threads, after all. Not sensible. Anyway, I think that any human being can differentiate between "current" and "old" on their own, so it's not a big priority to get a hard rule in place as long as the principle is upheld.

Other than that, I very much like the Ronnies thing, and think that it's the best thing that's happened for the Forge for a while. Ride on, and expect to get my game tonight.

[Doug Ruff]

Hi,

Here's some more unsolicited advice...make of it what you will.

Although it may not be an actual rule, there is a definite principle of 'think carefully before you post' in place at the Forge. (In some cases, I recall posters being advised to walk away from a thread form a couple of days to think about what's been said, before continuing with a discussion.) This is one of the reasons the discussions here are of such high quality.

I think that a 'first X threads' rule of any size may encourage some people to post earlier than they should, in order to keep their favourite discussion 'live'. Meaningless 'bumping' of a discussion has no place here, even if it's disguised as a response. I feel quite strongly that a time-based limit does more to preserve the quaility of a discussion, by removing any element of competition to stay 'live' between it and other threads.

Regards,

Doug

[Andy Kitkowski]

Clinton was able to make it so that more posts-per-page showed up in each thread (now it's like 15-20 or so).

Is it possible to increase the number of threads shown per forum?  I'm thinking that if Indie Design had 50 threads per page instead of 20, more games would stay "in mind" (I noticed myself that I rarely go back a page in the forum topic listing, and never go back two or more pages).

Just a thought.  Opening the playing field to more threads might get more eyes on topics, and level that playing field.

-Andy