How important is scenery? Scenery sets the mood of the table, it begins to paint a picture in the story your army is telling. Or is it? Is scenery just obstacles you use for cover? Is it some cumbersome object you have to manouver your miniatures around or balance precariously on? Would a card saying “forrest” be better than a bunch of plastic trees? Should the trees be removable? If I can move troops into a house, should it have an interior as detailed as the exterior?

How deep do you dive into your favourite settings?  Some people just play a game, others live it. Years ago I played Warhammer, I read novels set in the Warhammer world, played computer games set there, I roleplayed in the setting and dreamt of a Warhammer TV Serioes or movie. Does everyone deep dive? Is it needed? Does it help or does it distract you from being a better player by burdening you with stuff like ‘themes’.

What aspect of the hobby is best? Collecting, planning, building, painting playing, winning, talking about the hobby, displaying your models, socialising? If you could only do 1 aspect of the hobby, what would it be? What’s the best part of the hobby and why?

How can you get a start in the gaming industry? I’d love it if Warren could get James M Hewitt and the guys from Wayland to discuss how they got into the industry and how they’d suggest others seek out a career in gaming.

Heh as is always the way I work out how to express the point I try to make after the fact.

I’m not in favour of heavy moderation and keep it nice policing of threads, but there have been times when its been needed, and its been quite shocking when it has happened as its so against the grain of how the community here usually works.

A better way of expressing what I meant is to think of forums like a garden, they need cultivation. Sure you can set out borders and lawns and leave it at that, after a while it becomes a bit over grown and ill defined. You can leave it like that and it keeps on growing but the structure is lost, and certain plants take over areas, as its so overgrown you cant easily enter, and don’t know where to start. However with a bit of pruning, reseeding and clearance you create space and light and things grow again, now you can either leave it to own devices and have to prune it all over again in a few years or you maintain it.

Im a huge fan of the forums here, id sworn off any form of community interaction online after having run some forums in the past and generally spent to much time online, there is a massive chunk of my life which is only online and after 17 years of usenet and then forums i was done with them and way tooo invested where it caused for lack of a better term burnout, so i went cold turkey for a few years, but it was the community here which dragged me back into interacting online. That said the net has changed a lot in the last 10 or even 5 years.

Forum usage is declining across the board for many reasons, partially its a problem with delayed gratification, compared to the more “social” platforms for discussions its asynchronous, the threaded discussion paradigm doesn’t flow as well on mobile devices which have become the default method of browsing these days just look at the decline in laptop sales (desktops are basically games machines outside of the IT/Work world), compared to channel and group messaging. One other big change is communities have shifted from being based around sites, and instead have been aggregated by Facebook into groups, and for a lot of people the internet is Google, Facebook and YouTube, so actually getting them out of those silos and here is a challenge, why post here when you can cross post to several groups at once there.

For us internet crusties (if you dont remember the joys of modem screech or AT codes to get the bloody thing to take advantage of your UART enabled serial port, your not a crustie ;)) the record and collectiveness of forum posts is a feature, for digital natives they tend to operate in a more individual manner, its that which defines their content creation and interaction is based around reciprocal following, broadcast your opinion and get responses, and the discussion format of forums is an anachronism, and not how they generally want to express them selves or communicate online (its hard to make likes/popularity meaningful in a forum, which seems to be the overriding obsession these days). Forums prompt dialog, where as social prompts responses.

Where am I going with this waffle?

Simple I think to make forums effective they have to adapt to the evolution of browsing habits, while they can be viewed as an archive, that’s a reference and past tense view in my opinion (they can be both, but it more like flicking through a guestbook at a hotel or b+b seeing comments of those who were there before you, than historical archive). To make them live, we need things to trigger engagement, so i would propose some events, much like the blood thirster painting competition i ran, or the terrain challenges. Rather than make it complicated with prizes and things like that we can dish out awards and drive it by community led voting. Wouldn’t even have to organise anything more than a theme, i.e. word of the month, do something that fits the word e.g. “horror”, could encompass painting and conversion, terrain builds [graveyards, crypts, gallows, dioramas], battle reports of a survival horror game, fluff etc.

Something else i would like to see and wouldn’t be to hard to implement would be auto signatures as well, where it would pull in your projects and link back to them at the footer of your posts, make it dynamic so it always pulls in your latest 3 updates, and drives the community to your projects and hopefully increases engagement too…

throwback content, lets dig some of the gems out of the archives, this goes with @horus500 suggestion of how to get into the industry, its been covered there is a series in the archives of sitdowns with the designers and industry luminaries, but there are loads of things which would be great to dredge up and remind us who have forgotten and present to those who have never seen

Community games design and rules, used to be quite popular forum and topic not so much now, with forged in avalon could be a good starter framework or seed idea to grow from

Wider hobby, have a place or feature on non table top, trains, scale models, rc, gundam, comics, re-enactment things which feed into the hobby but are distinct

I dunno no solutions, just some ideas…

@sundancer unfortunately several bits of kit in my racks still only telnet and cant handle ssh, i mean why would i want a secure protocol on my PDU….

Id say with the forums is maybe think of them a bit like a village hall for events like a jumble sale loads of different stalls one common theme, that gives people a reason to interact, educate people on tagging, then you can have many threads all under one umbrella across all the forums, but does require a bit of curation if not moderation…

And here is a topic to shoot myself in the foot with:
Does the performance of the site lead to a lack of engagement, as there is a massive difference in speed and loading time between being signed in and signed out, its something i have no good solutions to, but i dont like the fact that the performance punishes members and benefits visitors, is speed important or does the content make the wait worthwhile? Do we need more personalisation and keep it slow, or less and make it fast?

Would syndicating blogs and posts and presenting them hear like a news aggregator help with the cool but lost bookmark blog problem, or would it just be more homepage churn and lost in the noise

I love the projects system. But it does feel a bit “clunky” if you’re writing a long post (I tend to hit the “ten items limit” quite quickly – and through trial and error discovered that a post with more than ten items would be prone to “disappearing” without saving anything back to the server).

I don’t know how the website is constructed but it feels like the entire project/blog entry is being posted in one hit – a bit of ajax which auto-posts media content while you’re writing a post, or uploads each section individually (maybe even after you’ve clicked the “create a new text box” button) instead of the entire post being (HTTP)POSTed in one go would probably reduce the number of “lost post” failures?

How many entries are created per day/week in the WAYPN thread? Would it be feasible to “curate” them periodically? Have someone apply tags to entries, to make them more easily searchable? (hey, in doing so, you might accidentally create some “here what our community members have been doing this week” type content to include in a newsletter).

When I ran the BuildBrighton project system (many years ago) we had something similar (what are you making now) and created a slightly more structured interface for people to link their own personal project blogs. It basically asked “which section(s) apply?” (an early version of tagging) and “what kind of response would you like to this?” – users could ask for feedback/praise, help/advice, discussion points, criticism. It meant that people just learning wouldn’t get swamped with posts like “why haven’t you used a switch mode regulator, your linear reg is less efficient” and left them feeling like they’d never get anywhere! They could post stuff just to show off and say “look at this cool thing I made” and acknowledge that it’s not the most amazing thing anyway, but here’s what I’ve been doing this week.

For the radio discussion, I’m particularly interested in the direction of “cottage industries” (here in the UK we’re yet to discover if Brexit will lead to a golden age of cottage industries, or kill them stone dead). Many tabletop suppliers are (or started out as) one- and two-man operations (usually run out of a garden shed). Kickstarter has encouraged many of us to “aim high” to create retail-ready products – fancy packaging, campaign-based games with add-ons for replayability etc. But running a Kickstarter is also a massive amount of work in it’s own right – and for a small outfit, would those efforts be better spent elsewhere?

Has the “cult of new” killed off the opportunity for a small-scale, organically-grown fanbase for new games? Do you have to have a production company, marketing department and international distributor now, to be successful in tabletop gaming, or is there still room for the husband-and-wife team to make a living by monetising a hobby?

@timchubb 100% on wargames without luck = strategy games. To your initial point, this morning I got up spent maybe 2 minutes looking at discord and then 15 minutes reading forums, yours and @blinky465 foremost amoungst them. Byw Blinky I love that garden industry topic idea. Maybe they could link it to ‘Indy of the week’? And the community focused project of before and after “paint 3 characters” is a great idea.

Don’t understand the tech stuff, but my frustration with the projects system is that I struggle to find my own pages sometimes and that occassionally I upload something only for the upload to fail. Then I’ll read someones post saying it’s been happening all day.