Tutorials forum to move to a blog interface in Feature Requests

ID:336017
 
Feb 24 2012, 7:18 pm
Keywords: blog, forum, tutorial
Applies to:Website
Status: Open
Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
I suggest the tutorial forum should get a blog-ish interface. Tutorials are better served this way for two reasons:

- More professional look. Most tutorials in communities similar to our own get published blog-post style. People expect them to look that way.
- Separation of comments discussing the tutorial, and the tutorial itself. The important part gets emphasized. It only takes a quick glance at the tutorial forum right now to see why this kind of separation would be beneficial.

Thanks for reading!
#1 Feb 29 2012, 6:02 am
I'd like to see tutorials have their own kind of hub entry. That way the comments wouldn't just be separated from the tutorial, they'd have separate threads.
#2 Feb 29 2012, 6:08 am
I actually really like Toad's idea, I definitely think the blog-post format looks much more professional and is [ at least for me ] easier on the eye.
#3 Mar 12 2012, 8:52 am
I actually like the hub entry idea even better.
#4 Mar 12 2012, 9:22 am
I'm still not sure how moderator privileges should work in these cases. Most of it can be left to the hub entry's owner, but if these topics are being cross-listed in the main forum then it gets weird - as far as the user is concerned they're just posting in the "BYOND forum" without it being obvious whose scrutiny their post will be subjected to. It also creates a weird situation for BYOND's forum mods - if someone posts in the forum attached to my hub entry and calls me a "poop head" I don't care and wouldn't delete the post, but if the post is cross-listed and gets displayed on BYOND's forum the moderators will delete it right away.

It's certainly an improvement but there are still some kinks to work out with it.
#5 Mar 12 2012, 9:33 am
Cross-post moderation has been something of an on-going issue for a number of iterations now, and probably is demonstrated best as an issue in Game Updates (which ... needs work, anyway). They are both semi-personal avenues of posting, and yet also on the main forum.

Our tools at present are pretty crude regarding that, as we may delete the entire topic, or leave it. At present we can't moderate such posts really, although you might expect it to belong in our remit because of it's cross-posted location. As a moderator it irks me, and as users who may end up losing their entire topic when really they personally were not fussed about the replies a moderator was fussed by, I'm sure it would irk them too.

So to do the hub entry approach, you need a review of the permissions surrounding that more or less regardless, I think, because moderator permissions are simply untenable for a tutorial forum. Either we moderate it and the site makes it obvious it's ours to handle, or it's not our area at all and people know it.

I'd almost go for a visual change in the forums to signal that step over into user-moderated land, but I'm not sure if that's overkill to convey a change in "ownership" and responsibility or not.
#6 Mar 12 2012, 11:06 am
I see two parts to the issue:

1. Making it clear to users that they are responsible for moderating their content (to some extent at least, I'm sure the BYOND staff will always be on the lookout for bots posting advertisements).

2. Making it clear to users who owns the content they're viewing and posting in.

Maybe they could create guilds. Each user has their own guild but some guilds are staff-owned. That way if I post something in my guild, it's my responsibility. If I post it in the BYOND-owned DreamMakers guild, it's the staff's responsibility =)

The second part of the problem would sort itself out if people could make better use of feeds (ex: your updates page). Feeds don't have ownership of anything, so when you're viewing a feed it's clear that any content you navigate to from there may be a forum post on BYOND's main forum or part of a member-owned hub entry.

If feeds were more functional people wouldn't have to rely on posts being cross-listed in the main forum to find things. If less content was cross-posted then there'd be less content shown on the main forum that the forum mods have limited control over.