Keep It Simple Stupid – Forums, Your Thoughts?
October 20, 2011 by warzan
So last week we had started to work on the forums (before the Nuke that was Necrons went off!) and its become clear that the time has come for a major overhaul.
A long time community member @ade73 sent me a message outlining his frustrations with the current way the forums work and are organised. And on the whole - I Agree!
We are now into our 15th month of this grand experiment called beastsofwar.com and to be fair to the team and all our community we have achieved loads for a site that only sprang up little over a year ago. However it don't change the fact that some stuff doesn't work and there is loads we can do to make your precious hobby time spent here much more fun, inspiring and productive!
Why the Forums are the way they are...
On BoW each forum is actually a 'group' that has members, any registered member to the site can create a group and invite their friends to join it. In the group you have a forum and even a shared calendar you can post events too. These groups can be Public, Private or even Hidden. Our original thoughts were that gaming groups and clubs could set up a group (probably private) and use it for their discussions and as a bit of a shared events diary.
Many did, however they became hard to navigate, and so we created a bunch of official groups for each of the main game systems. And here I believe we made two mistakes - we created way too many and made them very granular (which one do I bloody post too!) and in doing so we hid the functionality for little gaming clubs to create their own groups to help them keep in touch.
Pretty much lose lose really.
On top of that the forums are quite different from the 'normal' forums you guys are used to and do infact act a bit more like a Facebook Group. They are also missing some key functionality like easy uploading of pictures, although many have got round that with embedding from photobuckets etc.
We'll the whole thing is up for an overhaul and heres where we would like your input (if you don't often post on BoW please make an exception this time as we want as much feedback as possible)
Some options are:
See if we can change the whole forums module to a more traditional forum (however this will be less integrated with the rest of the site)
Dramatically cut the number of forums (groups) for each game to stop fragmenting topics.
Introduce the ability to upload pictures etc.
Either make it easier for clubs and gaming groups to create and use their own groups or ditch the functionality (including calendars etc all together)
Make one simple button in the top nav called 'Forums' and pull more forum conversations to the home page of the website etc.
Encourage users to create groups dedicated to their 'Projects' who can then contact us to have them added to lists to make them easy to find.
Tell us your ideas!
Beasts of War covers more and more games every day so is in effect a 'community of communities' we want you to be able to come here and immerse yourself in the game(s) you love while still having the opportunity to see and fall inlove with all the other cool stuff that's going on in our hobby! So getting the way you guys can share your toughts, questions and opinions sorted out is vital! Big thanks to @ade73 and everyone else who works the forums day in day out!
From a purely navigational point of view, I suspect the easiest way to go would be a traditional style forum , especially with an ever increasing number of games and subjects to discuss, whether the necessary lack of integration with the rest of the site is a bad thing is probably something only you guys could say, it depends where you are going with the whole thing. From this readers perspective, pressing the ‘forum’ button and going to a different layout of a typical vbulletin or whatever forum wouldnt bother me at all, what you lose in graphical layout you… Read more »
Traditional forum system please. I have stopped using any of the forums/groupd on here as they just do my head in.
Loosing the BoW look isn’t a problem. To be honest, I sometime think the look and feel is a little much, but that’s not the subject here so I will shut up.
We’ll open the topic of changing BoW’s design for the Aged and Game Designers soon 😉
cool!!! I want more articles on walking sticks please
lol – I have one that has an embedded wiskey bottle 😉
Darrell won it and gave it too me 😀
Smart, where the hell do I get one of them!!!!!!
It’s true – the forums are the one aspect of BoW that needs working on. The rest is excellent though; ie, the actual content you produce, which is the most important thing! But…a more typical phpbb forum would get a more activity than what you have at the moment I think. I find them much easier to navigate. I also feel the website is a little on the slow side when it comes to navigating the forums – could do with being a bit snappier, if that’s possible. Perhaps even have a separate server hosting the forum, which I know… Read more »
Why do you think its cheap to run a forum? Heresy is a medium sized forum and costs upwards of $4000 per year to run. In fact, the only way to run a popular forum without going into the red is to fill it with unsightly adverts and ask for member contributions. BoW is a big fish, hosting wouldn’t be cheap and would certainly need to pay its way.
You simply can’t run a popular site on a crappy $10 per month shared package.
This is exactly right. We have a fair amount of infrastructure behind BoW already and the traffic from the crons knocked it all on its ass. (it only takes one bottle neck to cause it to fail)
Forums are a database heavy system with constant calls back and forth so caching etc is pretty difficult.
@jezlad appreciate you dropping by matey, it’s good to have one of the communities top forum experts casting eyes over this! Much appreciated!
Ditto to the above. our company database has seven servers, two mirrored SAN arrays and more fibre than a bowl of All Bran. Far from cheap, it’s very expensive. I would however, advise splitting the site away from forums. webby wise they can look integrated, but if someone gets pushed to another box it saves bandwidth for the main video website. It also allows you to spread out – co-hosting, load balancing, multiple routes in and what not. 15 months? Seriously? I remember hunting around the web for UK sites on 40K when I got back into it a year… Read more »
The Heresy forums are quite large in comparison. And I’m not suggesting a $10 a month solution. As usual, somewhere inbetween is the answer. Just look at the Latest Topics section and see how many posts a day it’s currently getting, not many. Even with a fair increase in activity, it won’t be a huge undertaking or require a high cost to run. Or just stick a phpbb forum in your existing infrastructure if you think it can handle it. It’s just my sense of how sluggish the BoW sight can be in general suggests to me (if a separate… Read more »
Traffic also includes those reading the forums etc (which is pretty significant)
See if we can change the whole forums module to a more traditional forum (however this will be less integrated with the rest of the site) Dramatically cut the number of forums (groups) for each game to stop fragmenting topics. It would be nice here to see the main portal for these section and a cascade of their subsections all in one spot. Introduce the ability to upload pictures etc. I dont really see the need for this. Most people use photo dump sites so they can link to more than one site if they like. Make one simple button… Read more »
One of the first things I do when I hope onto the site is to check the latest activity of the groups I’m involved with (members/wildchevy/activity/groups/). I like this function a lot because of the timezones I am online while most of the wargamers are heading to bed/pub. If you change the forums please keep this function in mind.
This is what we mean by integration (not design that’s straight forward) but keeping things like new posts appearing in the activity streams, and having the Karma system in posts as well as comments etc.
A big button leading to a traditional style forum would be the best option. Somtimes keeping things simple is the best thing to do!
Plenty of very popular sites work just fine with a disconnected forum space, big examples I can think of off-hand are places like http://www.escapistmag.com and just about all major webcomics. With the escapist though, videos have a forum thread assigned to them, and that is where all comments go, rather than on the video itself.
Plus 1 for Noggin
+1 for traditional forums. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, Id love to see you put together a forum. (please not phpbb though…it sucks)
Perhaps then we could film a forum vs forum championship pissed on guiness in your backyard. Instead of the usual points system the losers cane ale until last man standing 😀
@jezlad You don’t need an excuse to get pissed on Guinness with us matey 😉 We definitely have to get you over and on the show!
Any forums systems you think are worth looking at?
Yeah the forums do need work, personally I kind of like the way you have groups for each faction but I can see it’s not strictly the best format.
One of the key things that’s missing is a General Discussion as most of the random chat about GW, for example, ends up in 40k General Discussion. I think anything you can do to streamline the Forums and make them simpler to navigate for people is better 🙂
I don’t really mind the way forums are at the moment, was nice to be able to start your own forums for a specific thing. But, I suppose traditional forums would be easier in the long run to manage and police.
I’m going to give you my view point as a newbie to all this forms stuff. BoW is the first site I ever posted on a form. With that said, what I find is I get e-mails with others posts on topics that I posted on ages ago even after removing myself from said topic. As much as I like to know what the next Tau codex will have, I don’t need to know everyone wishes for the tau to have a good close combat unit over and over. I’m bet there is a simple action I can do to… Read more »
Here some thoughts from me. • There are too many options, between groups/topics. The biggest issues is the split between hobby and game system. I liked your idea of groups also meaning war-games clubs but that hasn’t really kicked off, so maybe relaunch that service later with a special place of it’s own. • Should there be a separate painting top level forum or should a painting section live under each games system. ie a different painting section for space marines and necrons? • I’m not that keen on the traditional “off the shelf” forum structures. Although easy for everyone… Read more »
Taking notes (However is suspect to implement a liquid layout would take months due to all the various components we run!)
However in saying that we hope to set aside some time to look at a design ‘evolution’ at some stage – to look at some design improvements.
The short version …
For me I’d hate to see the forums dumbed down too much and lose touch with the rest of BoW. Just need some more structure.
If instead of having to go that way pressing a “forum” button lead you directly to that page it might be faster
Ok I have been on a long time and I do not see many of these issues, I think that it is just a matter of making options more visable to users. Almost all of the shortcuts mentioned above are already in existance just very hard to see. This could be improved. I think the issue of huge amounts of gaming groups setting up their own grouds could be simplified by the addition of regional rather than different groups. This could combine the need for gaming groups to make their own (I am guilty of that myself) while also getting… Read more »
To start with, I really must point out that the plural form of forum is fora. Forums is listed in OED but it’s usage is still sodomy of the that the most noble of languages, Latin. As for constructive feedback I don’t have much to come with. When i joined up I was overwhelmed with the complexity of the system as a whole that I’ve actually only used it on a couple of occasions. When commenting different threads, like this one, the only problem I have found is the depth limit for answers. Otherwise it is very simplistic and easy… Read more »
I think probably the best thing to do for now is cut things up a bit more, when you click the discussion groups button up top it takes you to the “official groups” although its missing a couple of them- there no Kings of war, warpath or heavy gear groups shown- and it shows every individual board. Some them haven’t even been posted in, not because they’re hidden away like some of the user created groups that don’t show up till page 15, but probably just because they’re not needed- does FOW really need three boards for the different stages… Read more »
Yeah I agree dude, Maybe making new groups only creatable by demand, eg 6 people must ask for a forum to be created before it comes into existance.
My opinion: change the whole site to run off IPS Community Suite instead of (I think) WordPress + addons. It will take a lot of work, but you can integrate the main site using the IP.Content or IP.Blogs module (both have their advantages), and use IP.Board to run the forums.
It even has built-in support for Backstage: you could run it off IP.Nexus, which integrates nicely with Paypal etc., and set Backstage up as a paid-access usergroup.
Disadvantages? Well, you’d have to trash the site… but you’d end up with a totally integrated site and a traditional-style, full-featured forum.
I just wanted to say thanks to Warren and the team for taking my comments on board and putting the issue to the community at large.
I won’t go in to my suggestions in public, as I have discussed them with Warren privately.
However for the record I would much prefer a separate traditional forum section.
I agree with @jezlad don’t try and reinvent the wheel.
Cheers
yeah here here, community power, excellent
vbulletin is a powerful forum
A number of addons can be added to it including a “paid users” area for back stage pass users.
What is the site built on today? Is it possible use a CMS like Joomla for the main site (should allows for the same look, feel and User XP, while allowing a smoother integration with forums such as PHPbb, or vbulletin, either way, it would be nice for the forum system to integrate with anything like forum runner, or other method to allow easy mobile device browsing for forums…
Either way, love the great work BoW has done!
While I love the idea on BOW groups and how discussion is evolved, I cannot follow it, I think traditional forum format is more practical, although I am open to any suggestions.
Have to be honest with you guys…
I’ve always thought that the design and layout of the BoW forums was retardedly over complicated.
There’s a reason forums the world over tend to be similar – Don’t fix what ain’t broke.
The traditional format works and it works very well.
All that’s needed is something like…
Announcements
Competitions
General Discussion
System Discussion
–Game system 1
–Game system 2
–Game system 3… etc
Modelling and Painting
–Game system 1
–Game system 2
–Game system 3… etc
Hah, i knew i had seen this picture before …
On topic: visiting your site daily, but your forums arent “top notch”. I´m a big fan of vBulletin – style forums and of the big “TO FORUMS” button.
But : good work with the rest of the site, big fans since the good old youtube times before the site went online.
As I’m new to the site I won’t go on to big of a rant as I’m not familiar with all the inner workings. I will just put my .2 on what I’ve noticed. I will say when I joined the site, I was a bit disapointed in traffic or lack there of in the groups/forums. I’m not sure if that’s because they are a bit difficult to navigate or people just don’t have that much to say. As FoW is my primary game I was hoping to beef up those sections with some of the stuff myself and the… Read more »
Thanks for this!
I’m sure we can liven up the discussion aspects of the site – round here most of the discussions take place on the posts – so it can make the groups/forums look a little redundant sometimes 🙂
However what seems to be coming back loud and clear is that simplicity and structure are big areas to be addressed.
I agree that the posts are were the highest amount of discussion occurs but without the forums would you have a problem with generating a loyal base and also some user generated content?
Yup the Groups/Forums are very important exactly for that reason 🙂