Thinking About Forums

By Shamus Posted Sunday Mar 10, 2013

Filed under: Notices 249 comments

splash_frustrated.jpg

This blog is a very unusual beast. I don’t say this to brag. It’s unusually big for a WordPress blog. (Once sites get this busy, they often move away from blogging software.) There’s an unusual level of “engagement” for a personality-driven blog. (If you’ve got a big blog based around a single person, it’s common to have the comments aimed not at the subject matter of the post itself, but at the author.) But here we’ve got long, detailed discussions between people on all sorts of topics. The comments are busy enough to be interesting but not so busy that you feel like you’re shouting into a hurricane. On top of all this, the whole thing is shockingly civil for an open-comment discussion thread where anyone can join without creating an account.

The point is: We have some sort of delicately balanced ideal here, and I’ve been slow to change things because I don’t want to disturb the mysterious alchemy we have. For years people have been asking me to create forums, and I’ve resisted because I don’t want to harm the blog or make it less fun. This blog has been a big part of my routine for 7.5 years now. It works well and I’m very reluctant to mess with it in a way that might make the thing less fun.

But Shamus, why can’t we have some optional side-forum, just for people who want to talk about other stuff?

That seems like a perfectly reasonable question. Months ago Krellen expressed an interest in running a play-by-post game with some of the other folks here. And last month some people actually went to all the trouble of setting up unofficial Twenty-Sided forum. These two events lead me to believe that:

  1. There are good, worthwhile things that you can do in forums that you can’t do here on the blog.
  2. There is a non-trivial demand for forums and thus a reasonable number of people would benefit from them.

So I’m considering it.

My concerns:

  1. Site load. You may remember my blog was slow and laggy for over half a year because of a bad plugin. (Ironically, a plugin designed to make it faster.) That’s all fixed now, aside from figuring out why cookies aren’t working for some people. But if forums begin devouring resources then we could end up right back where we started, performance-wise.
  2. I don’t want to cannibalize the blog. The blog comments are for discussing the blog posts, and I’m worried that if we have a forum that some of the discussion will move from here to there.
  3. I don’t want the community to become too insular. The is related to the previous item, but I don’t want us to have this ugly divide between “members” and “pubbers”. Over time, the names I see in the comments turn over. Some people lose interest in the site and move on. Others discover the site for the first time and join the conversation. If the community is dominated by the forums, then the outflow will continue and the inflow will slow. (I don’t create forum accounts unless I really, REALLY love a site or have something super-important to say. Account creation is just too much hassle.) We could end up with a much smaller community of long-time members. Communities that undergo this sort of thing generally become sort of rigid, elitist, isolated, and prone to hipster-esque posturing about who was here first. While that’s hard to imagine it happening here, it’s still a concern to take seriously.
  4. I don’t want to overburden myself. I can spare a bit more time in the day to tend another garden (which is how I think of running a community) but forums take a good bit of time and I would most likely need help. For help with administration and moderation, I’ve reached out to some people who are gentle, reasonable, and thoughtful. I also asked Josh.
  5. I don’t want to disturb the tone of the community. Part of why this place is friendly is that I run a very unorthodox moderation system. When you join a typical forum you usually have to agree to a bunch of rules that should be obvious to anyone that isn’t a sadistic sociopath. I don’t tell people not to post hateful things about other people. I let them do it and then silently ban them and nuke the offending comment.

    But Shamus, what if they sneak back in under another name and then write only civil comments so you can’t tell it’s them? Well, mission accomplished. I don’t moderate based on post content, I moderate based on personality, demeanor, diplomacy, and integrity. I’m aiming less at what is said and more at what people have going on in their hearts. I’ve culled people from the site who, while not directly insulting or offending others, seemed to have a lot of pent-up anger or an ax to grind. They didn’t have a single post that I could point to and say, “This was unacceptable”. Instead, they had a pattern of agitating people, testing people’s patience, and generally making discussions less fun.

    The drawback to this system is that it’s capricious. If you have nice, fair, clearly-stated rules, then you’ve either broken the rules or you haven’t. But our moderation is run on the whims of a supreme dictator for life who strives for benevolence. But sometimes I’m grouchy, or I take something wrong, and react with overdue harshness. You can add more dictators to mitigate this, but then there’s the question of who will mitigate conflicts between THEM, and what happens if THAT person is having a bad day, etc.

    The point is, I don’t know if this moderation style will work on a forum, particularly if there’s a team of moderators. On the other hand, I’m not interested in running a “HERE ARE THE RULES AND BY POSTING HERE YOU AGREE TO ABIDE BY THEM” kind of place.

Those are my concerns with a forum. Having said all this, I’m still open to creating one. I’m doing this very slowly. I talked it over with a small number of trusted friends, then a few more, and so on, gradually widening the circle and gathering everyone’s views and concerns. Now I’ve come far enough that I’m willing to discuss it publicly.

If at any time it looks like the forum project will harm the blog, I’ll scuttle the whole thing.

Facts known about the forum so far:

  1. It will run on phpBB, and be hosted on this domain. Actually, I might make it a subdomain, assuming I don’t bungle it.
  2. Religion, politics, and other holy war topics will still be verboten.
  3. The only category I KNOW will be there is play-by-post. The rest is negotiable. (But probably involve videogames, tabletop games, etc. Coding and genre fiction might also show up.)
  4. The color scheme will be red text on a lime green background.
  5. I’ve got my mods in mind, although I’ve only recruited two of them so far and only in a sort of informal, non-committal manner.
  6. One of these facts is a lie.

Now is time for the feedback, concerns, thoughts, suggestions, and offhanded comments about how I’m looking younger and thinner lately.

 


From The Archives:
 

249 thoughts on “Thinking About Forums

  1. Trithne says:

    Red text on a lime green background? Sign me up!

    I think a forum would mostly benefit in giving the community a watercooler of sorts – A place to just discuss stuff. That’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing though, it fosters community (provided it doesn’t become too insular), but it generates aimlessness.

    That said, I’d be down if only for play-by-post (or a chance to meet some people for play-by-IRC), it’s been far too long since I’ve had an opportunity to play an RPG.

    1. Zeta Kai says:

      I’d prefer bright red text on a deep blue background. Or vice versa. Whatever will make the text look like it’s floating all the damn time the most.

      Hey, this could be our first flame war topic. Viva la resistance!

      1. Dave B. says:

        Red-and-Greeners rally around my banner! Let us crush the foul Red-and-Blue scum!

        1. zev says:

          This has the added benefit of excluding approximately 8% of the male population. This flame war can help make the insular community that Shamus secretly longs for.

          1. Newbie says:

            This seems awfully close too a Holy war topic, therefore being banned on the forum.

            Is that ironic?

    2. Alan says:

      Agreed.

      Also, I think that #6 on that list is the lie.

      1. Unbeliever says:

        But if number 6 is a lie, then all the statements are telling the truth.

        But if they’re all telling the truth, then one of the statements is a lie…

        Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhh…. ;)

        1. Alfie275 says:

          What if two of them are lies?

  2. Moriarty says:

    yeeees. Finally a forum to insult people’s religion or political opinions with fancy eyehurting colors.

    1. Hal says:

      It both thrills me and pains me that I came here to make this same joke and was beaten to the punch.

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        Let the trolling championship comence! I appoint Josh as the judge.

  3. Catiff says:

    So, you’re saying you don’t have mods in mind? (last item is usually the untrue one. ) kidding, though red on green reminds me of pleanty of the websites seen when the intertubes was new.

  4. Justin says:

    What if the lie fact is fact number 6?

    1. Jackson says:

      Pfft, thats not possible. :P

      1. DGM says:

        It’s possible if more than one is a lie. Now where did I put that tin-foil hat, Shamus is making me paranoid…

        1. Kanodin says:

          ah but what if that statement is a lie and there are only two lies?

          1. Doctor Broccoli says:

            Well, if there’s two lies then it’s still possible that both 4 and 6 are wrong.
            In fact, saying that one of these facts is a lie means that they could all be lies! Maybe there won’t be a forum after all! Maybe his name isn’t even Shamus! Maybe everyone’s a robot and they’re all out to get me! TRUST NOBODY! THEY’RE AFTER YOU!

            1. Hitchmeister says:

              If #6 is a lie, then any number of other items could also be lies.

              1. Retsam says:

                Well, it wouldn’t be possible for it to be the only lie, so the number has to be non-zero. (And presumably non-negative. And an integer.)

              2. Bryan says:

                …Any number of the others except zero of them.

                Because if zero of the others are lies, then exactly one of the six is a lie, which is what #6 said — making it not a lie.

                So it might be more correct to say “any one or more of the others is a lie” or something like that…

                Edit: Hah! Ninja’d.

                1. Syal says:

                  Actually, the list is only a list of known facts, while the lie refers to any fact regarding the forum, known or unknown. So 6 could be a lie while 1 through 5 remain true, with an unknown 7th fact also being a lie.

                  But I’m pretty sure the lie is number 2.

                  1. Duneyrr says:

                    Guys, this is getting way too long. We should continue this discussion over on the forums. :D

                    1. Nick says:

                      I dunno, this might count as a holy war, forever splitting the community between the 6-falsers and the 3-falsers. In essence, the split will be accomplished by taking 2 moderators. (/obscureMathsJoke)

                    2. Thomas says:

                      Guys there are 2 lies, 1. That one of these facts is a lie and 2. that number 6 is a fact about the forums

  5. Jackson says:

    On many small forums i’ve witnessed spam bots pretty much take over, which of course makes people not want to post and soon enough there is nothing but spam bots talking to other spam bots about all their delicious spammy goods.

    Is that a problem that you currently deal with and have under control, or is that something that will add to the FUN of a forum?

    1. krellen says:

      If you moderate account signups, you curtail almost all of the potential spambot problems. This does add an extra barrier to entry, which will likely lower overall participation, but by removing later barriers (a lot of forums lock you away from several features until you’ve been “vetted” by making several approved posts) you can create a still-welcoming feel: “We just want to be sure you’re a real person. Once we’re sure, the whole place is open.”

      1. Exetera says:

        It also helps if you use non-standard spam-catching features. When I (briefly) ran a small forum, I hacked an additional test into the account registration feature that required you to copy some text into a text box. Because it wasn’t standard, the spambots were entirely flummoxed. I’m not sure if that sort of thing would work on a forum the size of Shamus’s, though – I assume there’s some method of customizing the spambots.

        Also, manual account approval is a giant pain in the behind for basically everyone involved. I’ve moderated (different) forums which had that before, it basically irritated everyone. Also put up a giant barrier to entry for new users, since they’d have to wait an undefined (often quite long) period of time before they could post anything.

        1. anaphysik says:

          The forum should have an extra sign-up feature where you’re given a sentence or topic and have to make a pun on it.

          1. madshaw says:

            I think you are my new favourite person

          2. SyrusRayne says:

            Presumably so that Shamus can keep the level of pun-related posts under control, right? The main problem with that is that Rutskarn would never pass that test.

      2. Wedge says:

        On the xkcd forums, which I frequent, cleaning up spam is part of the moderators’ jobs–generally a person’s first post has to be approved by a mod before anyone else sees their posts. It’s a bit more work for the mods, but the wider community almost never sees spam.

      3. Jace911 says:

        An easy way I’ve seen used on Spacebattles is to have new members be required to make one post in a certain section before giving them access to the rest of the forum. That way spambots are easily spotted and contained and never muck up the forum in general.

        1. krellen says:

          That is also the method used by the other forum I was on for a long time; an “Introductions” board for new members who had to get approved to be released into the wider forums.

        2. baseless research says:

          the obsidian forums require new members to get their first 5 posts be approved by moderators before the general board sees the post. Makes it easier to spot the bots

          1. krellen says:

            That’s pretty hellish on the moderators, though.

    2. a spambot says:

      til I looked at the draft which had said $9672, I be certain …that…my mother in law was like truly bringing home money in there spare time at their laptop.. there sisters neighbour had bean doing this 4 less than eighteen months and recently cleared the depts on there apartment and purchased a new Land Rover Range Rover!

      1. Sam says:

        but then I signed up and bought my very own fleet of 787’s in 6 months so sign up now at Spam.bot.annoyinghell.hk
        Also, why is my avatar a depressed hexagon?

        1. Retsam says:

          If you don’t like your randomly assigned emotional geometric figure, you can register your email at Gravitar to set your own avatar.

        2. Duneyrr says:

          I used to be a part of a forum that purposely allowed a single bot account to make posts. It was like having a crazy robot crew member… or something.

          1. swenson says:

            A writing site I’m an admin on, one of the recent articles had a spam comment about… “air conditioning training”. It was universally declared hilarious enough to live (except by the article author, who was kind of annoyed that the entire comment thread was derailed by discussion of air conditioners).

        3. tjtheman5 says:

          Because geometry

        4. anaphysik says:

          “Also, why is my avatar a depressed hexagon?”
          Because on the outside it’s an octagon.

          1. Sam says:

            Oops, I never actually counted. He wishes he was a icosikaitetragon (24 sided polygon). :(

        5. swenson says:

          For whatever reason, I’ve actually always liked my Gravatar.

          1. McNutcase says:

            That’s actually a Wavatar. Shamus wrote a generator when he implemented Gravatar support, so that those of us who refuse to use Gravatar would still have persistent avatars. It’s generated from parts based on a hash of your email address.

            Also, grrrr, the cookie bug hit me. I have autofill, but that’s the first time I’ve had to do it since the last time Firefox tossed its cookies…

            1. krellen says:

              I was under the impression that Gravatar had adapted Wavatars as the defaults.

              1. anaphysik says:

                http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/04/22/identicons-monsterids-and-wavatars-oh-my/
                http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1618

                Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, but in a /possibly/ dickish manner.

                (And Shamus, the site still won’t keep my field data D..:)

                1. Thomas says:

                  Shamus is responsible for that too? It’s kinda shocking just how much stuff he’s influenced, across so many different things to. It’s always nice seeing something you’d think completely unconnected coming back here

          2. Slothful says:

            Yeah, I think mine suits me pretty well too.

          3. kmc says:

            Me, too. It seems kind of dapper.

        6. Because a Pentagon would have been political. Military-industrial complex, and all that.
          (He says, not realizing he himself is a pentagon)

        7. Fawstoar says:

          While I’m glad that I’m more geometrically complex than that hexagon, I am nevertheless just as depressed.

    3. Attercap says:

      I’m an admin of a phpBB-driven forum. The best way I’ve found to decrease the likelihood of spambots (and many spam-people) is to include a custom question as part of the registration–usually something that requires minimal look-up and isn’t a math question… like “What’s Shamus’s Twitter account?” You can then include one or more potentially correct answers in phpBB’s settings. If the answer isn’t right, they can’t register.

      One or two bots (or humans) sneak through every year, but the number is so low that it’s not problematic.

  6. I’m definitely intrigued by the idea of forums here. I haven’t been a truly active member of a forum community in years. Games forums tend to descend into off-topic flaming, and almost any forum devoted to a certain topic end up taking on a very myopic viewpoint. So far this site’s commentators have mostly avoided those pitfalls, so I do have some hope for a forum.

    Just as a suggestion, I’d make sure “Religion, politics, and other holy war topics will still be verboten” extends to users’ avatars/signatures/other personalized forum type things. It seems like that would be a logical extension, but apparently some places don’t think so. I’ve been to several different forums where such flame war topics are either banned or restricted to one area, yet users run around with signatures defaming political groups or religious beliefs they don’t like. It’s disconcerting, to say the least.

    1. krellen says:

      Honestly, I’d suggest doing away with signatures altogether. I’ve never found that they add anything to a community (the best forums I’ve been on have bee signature-free).

      Avatars are trickier to do without (we’re highly visible creatures and they’re quick identifiers – usually). If someone has come up with a way to have Gravatars in phpBB, that’d be pretty cool.

      1. MelTorefas says:

        I would like to second the no-signatures thing. As a slightly more complicated alternative, maybe make an option to show or hide them globally.

        1. Mephane says:

          I have yet to see a forum where there are signatures but no option to hide them completely; this is the expected standard, and the reason why signatures are allowed in so many places – those who don’t want to see them just turn them off, and so everyone is pleased.

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Well limiting the size of the avatars can be a good thing.Draaks lair(forum for irregular webcomic and darth & droids)has that,and it helps keeping them from going way overboard.

      3. Peter H. Coffin says:

        Throwing gravitars into phpBB should be a trivial exercise.

        [nerd]You lowercase the supplied email, take the md5 hash of that, and that’s the identifier that you use in the URL when referencing the image in the HTML. Everything else is static. So you can just replace the part of the includes/function_display.php that returns nothing if no avatar is uploaded with a hook to return a generated gravitar URL instead.[/nerd]

      4. Retsam says:

        I agree on the no-signatures thing.

        If I can add another to the list, perhaps disable post counts, at least don’t make it visible on posts. I’ve found that if you put a number on something it will become a competition to some, which encourages posting for its own sake just to boost their “score”, and a post count doesn’t really add anything to my forum going experience.

        Secondly, and seemingly incongruently, if the forum has an option for a “karma” system, I’d actually encourage trying it out. Karma basically allows users to award other users karma for good posts, and negative karma for bad posts. (Ideally, on a much more limited scale, like once a day, so it doesn’t just turn into a facebook “like”)

        The difference between karma and post counts, is that karma turns posting good and helpful contributions into a competition, (sort of the point of the xkcd comic) and tends to let the community itself exercise some of the “capricious” weeding out of bad posters, even if they aren’t breaking rules. Often users with low karma will either just “take the hint”, or mods could just go through and sweep out users with negative enough karma without needing to fear that it isn’t justified.

        1. Thomas says:

          I also think no sigs, post counts (or join dates) would be good. If we’re worried the forums won’t be as special as these comments are (and these comments are pretty special, I’m still amazed at how ridiculously good of job Shamus does at keeping things civil), getting rid of sigs, post counts and join dates would probably help because they all lend to the outsider/insider feeling in small ways.

          I don’t know how I feel about karma. There was a karma system on the ctrl+alt+del forums (yes I have terrible taste =D) and it worked well at encouraging the right sort of posts and discouraging the bad ones. But it would feel weird to ever bad karma some of the people who’ve always seemed to be around and if we don’t it’s sort of a two class system

          1. I also have mixed feelings about the karma system. On one hand, it has made it easier to avoid more inflammatory posters while skimming a conversation. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to deter people given low karma as much as give them a persecution complex. I’ve seen the old “masses censoring unpopular viewpoints!” claim far too often by people who are just being rude or combative.

            1. swimon says:

              Yeah I’m really not a fan of karma stuff. It’s well intentioned but it doesn’t seem to help that much and it has a tendency to create insular communities. It’s not as bad as upvotes but often good karma is given to popular opinions rather than well structured or insightful posts. Which is perfectly understandable but often creates societies where certain people don’t feel welcome because they have the wrong opinions.

              1. Chris Robertson says:

                I would upvote this comment so much…

          2. Retsam says:

            I should admit; part of the reason I tend to be pro-karma is that the forums that I most saw it on were really good at being respectful about not using it as “bad karma = stuff I disagree with”. I tended to have the minority opinion in the things being debated, but don’t think I ever received negative karma for it. (I even occasionally remember getting karma from, gasp, people who disagreed with my opinions)

            My thought is that this is sort of the community that could use karma well, but yeah, I understand why people are nervous, and maybe it’s not a great idea.

        2. Slothful says:

          I really don’t like the idea of “gamifying” human interaction. People who do bad things should be punished, but coming up with wacky new ways for people to rise to the front of the pack with a semi-arbitrary metric is just dumb. If anything, it distracts from the honest communication that’s supposed to be the whole point of the thing.

          1. Andy_Panthro says:

            I agree! It’s better to have no such systems, or for them to be hidden.

      5. Trix2000 says:

        Personally I like signatures to an extent… but usually very small limited ones, like a line or two. Honestly, it’s probably better to do away with them at that point so meh, guess I agree too.

      6. swenson says:

        I used to think it would be terrible to have no signatures–they’re so identifiable, they’re funny, they’re just a part of the wallpaper! How could you live without them! Then I ended up on a forum that, due to technical difficulties, couldn’t display signatures for several months. By the time the owner fixed the backend problems, we’d all gotten so used to not having signatures, he just never turned them back on.

        It helped that the site had a very minimalist look (posts are simply an avatar, the poster’s name, the time of the post relative to when you’re reading it, and the post, separated by a single horizontal line), so signatures were deemed too messy for the look.

        Anyway, on the topic of karma, I’ve been on two forums where karma-type things were used well. On one, it wasn’t a big deal and was more of a way to express to someone that you appreciated something they’d said than anything else (negative karma was rarely, if ever used, as I recall). On the other (the Roosterteeth forums), it’s more about giving reactions to a post: there’s four positive mods (+1 Funny, +1 Cool, +1 Zing, and +1 Ditto) and four negative ones (-1 WTF, -1 Noob, -1 Lame, and -1 Flamebait). In a lot of ways, it’s nice, because you can tell someone how you feel about their post (do you agree with them? +1 Ditto. Do you disagree but appreciate what they said? +1 Cool. and so on) without wasting space with another post. And if a post is negmodded enough, it will automatically be hidden (you have to click to show it), so it gets rid of spam/annoying posts.

        On the other hand… it can get abused. And it annoyingly often is. People go on negmodding sprees because they’re angry or just want to cause trouble, and some people just get overly obsessed with mods. (You can only see who gave you mods if you’re a paid sponsor, by the way, and then only positive mods, which sort of helps… and mods don’t actually give you much of a benefit anyway.)

        tl;dr: Karma can be a nice way to tell other people that you like your posts. But negative karma, in my opinion, very rarely is helpful. It’s somewhat helpful in that it can hide bad posts, but people just get really worked up over it. In my opinion, it would be far better to avoid anything like it. Let people’s posts speak for themselves, not what other people have said about them.

        1. anaphysik says:

          “the time of the post relative to when you're reading it”
          I HATE that. Give me a proper timestamp, please.

          “-1 WTF”

          B-bu-but-butt why is ‘WTF’ necessarily bad??

          1. Syal says:

            That’s why you give them the ‘WTF Cool Funny’ trifecta.

          2. swenson says:

            This would be why there are endless complaints about there not being a +1 WTF. It would be *so useful!*

            1. Bryan says:

              So “+1 WTF” would be, basically, “I rate this comment at four cuils” or so?

              A mime cries softly as he cradles a young cow. I am singing the song that gives birth to the universe…

          3. Mephane says:

            Yeah, post times are a thing that so many forums totally screw up, either by

            a) Showing times like “1 week ago” instead of a proper date and time

            b) Choosing a single date for the entire world, replacing only separator characters as needed. Example: in American format, today is 3/12/2013, i.e. the 12th of March 2013. Now replace the slashes with dots for languages that don’t uses slashes, and we get 3.12.2013; in Germany, for example, this means the 3rd of December 2013! There are actual, professionally made forums from big companies doing just this.

            P.S.: Don’t get me started on forums forcing leading zeroes on or off for everyone…

      7. X2-Eliah says:

        Agreed on the no-signatures. Also, no karma, no up/downvoting (because they are simply harmful), no registration date / post count (obvbious). If the process of registration were made simple, that’d be good too.
        Also, minimalistic visual design, imo, is a must. Just have, idk, the post text, username and date of submission.

        Oh hey, we already have that in this here comment system. Funny that.

      8. zev says:

        Hell, I can’t even come up with a single valid argument for having signatures on a forum that wouldn’t be solved by avatars.

        That said, I haven’t put much effort into doing so, but I’d imagine there probably are some beyond “other successful forums have done this, so we should too.”

      9. Fawstoar says:

        Agreed. Signatures tend to mar the continuity/readability of threads. Given that this is already a text-heavy, article/discussion-based site, it would make sense to keep it fairly legible.

      10. DP says:

        Another call for no signatures. As a lurker, I appreciate discussions where posts don’t occupy more vertical space than their actual content.

        Also it looks like the 20sided blog avatars don’t support/allow animated GIFs (or people here have such excellent taste that they don’t use them). Either way I’d make sure they’re turned off in any forum software.

  7. Amstrad says:

    I can understand the fear of unwittingly creating a monster of us vs. them insular thinking when the idea of a forum comes up as it’s unfortunately true for so many of them. I think what you’ve done absolutely correct here is state openly in this very blog post your desire that any forum connected to this blog not become such a place. As the personality behind the personality-driven blog, it’s ultimately your firm hand at the tiller and the willingness of everyone along for the ride to buy in to your mindset that will make or break the endeavor.

  8. Jace911 says:

    Regarding the “elitist” issue with regards to interactions between newbies and old hands, one thing I highly recommend if you do decide to create a forum is to make sure that nobody can see anybody else’s join date or any of that junk. I can’t count on both hands and feet the number of times I’ve seen a lurker’s argument or viewpoint dismissed by ‘veterans’ simply because they’ve only officially been a member of the forum for a few weeks despite the fact that they’ve been reading and exploring the site for far longer. Giving everyone a clean slate with just a name and maybe a gravatar would go a long way to creating an equal environment where everyone’s opinions are given weight based on the contents of their posts, not their post count.

    1. Exetera says:

      You’ll never be able to totally get rid of the ability to compare join date – in phpBB, at least, it would take either major changes or crippling restrictions (or both!) to make it impossible to see the user ID, which is a pretty decent estimator of join date.

      1. evilmrhenry says:

        I think just removing it from the post window would be good enough. (Maybe post count as well.)

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Theres no need for that.If the community is mostly civil(like this one is),you wont see someone using arguments from authority.Or if someone does attempt it,others will jump to the defense of the newb.

      1. Syal says:

        Or Shamus could nuke the account and make them get another one with a new join date if they try.

        1. Tony Kebell says:

          This.

          (Also, most other blogs/internet places, would “CRY LIKE BABY!”, at the mention that the “most powerful” amongst them, was actively censoring people. I like that we trust Shamus enough to be so… O.K, with his judgement)

          1. Syal says:

            It helps that people who disagree with the censoring policy get censored away.

        2. kmc says:

          At that point, you basically have a “days since last acting like a hipster” counter. Which, if you wrote it like that, would be hilarious.

      2. Trix2000 says:

        Doesn’t hurt as a preventative measure. Not sure if there’s much value to keeping things like join date visible anyways.

  9. Infinitron says:

    Doesn’t seem necessary IMO. The best forums seem to grow around sites dedicated to general topics of public interest. You have gaming forums, movie forums, etc.

    So what would this be? A Shamus forum?

    I’m not saying a forum couldn’t gather a small, dedicated community around it, but I doubt it would ever be anything impressive.

    So unless you really want to go the extra distance to make a minority of your readers happy, I wouldn’t bother.

    1. StashAugustine says:

      I’d like it because I have lots of off-topic things to say, and think that the community here would be a good place to ask. (Anyone played Crusader Kings? Seen the new Shadowrun footage? AGEOFEMPIRESAGEOFEMPIRESAGEOFEMPIRES?)

      1. Aldowyn says:

        I got crusader Kings II … last Friday, I think, and promptly dumped around 40 hours into it over the extended weekend.

        P.S. Cookie issues are annoying. Just another data point.

        1. krellen says:

          Much to the chagrin of Disclosure Alert fans.

          1. anaphysik says:

            And much to the chagrin of the other Disclosure Alert hosts.

            PS: We’re always hiring, so if anyone can present a better offer than Aldowyn, then ¡BAM! that sucker’ll be out of here in no time.

            PPS: Aldowyn, don’t read that prior sentence, k? ;P

        2. Prof Goldfish says:

          OH MY GOD CKII!

          Have had it for like a week and promply dropped like 4 whole days of play time into it. AGH so addicting.

          1. Kai says:

            Crusader Kings II is stealing my life!

        3. StashAugustine says:

          As the former king of Poland all I say is this: Fuck Mongols. Fuck ’em hard.

      2. Trix2000 says:

        Saw the Shadowrun video – it looks pretty cool, reminds me a bit of the new XCOM.

      3. 4th Dimension says:

        What about wharthundering across skies in your Chaika trolling everybody?

    2. swimon says:

      I like the idea of a Shamus forum. It makes us seem like a weird cult worshiping a programmer god.

      “Great god bringeth unto us two dimensional cars of light and uniformity and spare us from the goldun riters! Close Paren!”

      I’m calling it the terrain project is our genesis.

  10. Kdansky says:

    Before you use phpBB (which is like a relic from two decades past), consider a modern alternative like the new project of Jeff Atwood. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html

    Not that I’d use either.

    1. Exetera says:

      Ruby on Rails? Yuck! Shamus’s server is also probably of the old-school Apache+MySQL+PHP variety, so it might not be able to run that.

      I personally don’t love phpBB, but it’s perfectly acceptable with a decent theme and decent administration.

      1. Deadfast says:

        Yuck indeed, I still have nightmares from when I had to set Redmine up!

    2. Nevermind says:

      THIS!!

      Actually, using Discourse is probably way too advanced for someone who wants to set up a forum that “just works”. But please, please, for the love of God, stay away from PHPBB!

      1. krellen says:

        Best forum I’ve ever been on was phpBB. Spent eight years there, until the PbP community shriveled.

        1. Bryan says:

          The issue with phpBB, in my mind anyway, isn’t that it somehow makes the community worse, or less impressive, or whatever.

          The issue with phpBB is that it tends to be full of security holes unless the admin (or admins) keep up with phpBB releases and bugfixes like they don’t have another job. Part of this is the nature of PHP, which is why (not having actually tried it) I’m thinking something in Ruby would at least have a chance of fewer site-breaking security bugs.

          Of course, this should all be left up to whoever ends up administering this thing, I think. (Which isn’t me. :-) ) But I’ve been burned by PHP “features” and defaults too many times. For whatever that’s worth…

      2. atma (or vrittis, don't remember) says:

        i’d recommend staying away from phpBB if you’re afraid of the forum hogging ressources, but rather consider punBB (the forum by Rutskarn :p)

        edit: ok, i really am not a spammer

    3. krellen says:

      Okay, I just looked at this Discourse thing. That’s not even a forum. That’s long-form Twitter.

      1. Exetera says:

        … which would actually be pretty well-suited to a lot of us, if you think about it…

        1. krellen says:

          I can’t run a PbP on Twitter, even if I had no character restrictions.

          1. anaphysik says:

            I’d be up for tabletop’ing with you guys, except for the fact that I am not terribly enamoured with the PbP format. Not terribly enamoured at all :/

      2. Arvind says:

        I find it much faster and easier to use. The one thing I like most is that it lets me log in using google, which means one less forum account I have to remember.

        I find using the category layout there as the best of the phpbb and discourse worlds.

        1. krellen says:

          Funny, for me Discourse has a longer hang time than phpBBs I’ve used (and use). There’s also no clean and simple way to get back to the category view after you’ve looked at a thread (and the threads still have horrible non-forum reply-tracking methods.)

        2. Manny says:

          Do we really need accounts for the forums? The comments here seem to run just fine with the gravatar setup…

      3. 4th Dimension says:

        Why are you comparing it to twiter?!?

    4. TehShrike says:

      I just came here to post the same thing – even though over the last 10+ years I’ve had some great times with people in internet forums, I’ve really grown away from the style of conversation that grows in them.

      I would love to interact more with the 20-sided peepz, but I’m not interested in using the phpbb (or anything else based on the typical forum model).

      If you can get to be one of the first Discourse partners, that would be totally awesome and I’d be all over it!

      Or, if, say, a 20-sided IRC room were to get started…

      1. Mike says:

        Actually – despite the fact that you seem to imply that you don’t know of any – is there an official or somewhat-related #d20 IRC channel somewhere?

        1. anaphysik says:

          I believe there was a TwentySided minecraft channel. Seemed deserted when I tried visiting it.

          1. Mike says:

            Oh well, pity, but was worth a shot, thanks!

    5. David Hudspeth says:

      I was going to suggest the same thing. Add my vote for Discourse too :).

    6. Simon Buchan says:

      Obviously not done yet, but this was exactly what I thought of too. Looks like the “partner” thing is only for for-profit peeps, so you could run it yourself if you could cajole your server into running it. Normally rails stuff is pretty good at “just working”, though I wouldn’t try getting it running side-by-side with Apache. Maybe try pointing forums.shamusyoung.com to a VM on your host for a while? Google says http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html may by what you want, though I’ve not tried it.

  11. Vegedus says:

    Hum. I dunno if I would join said forums. Like Shamus, I only join forums if I reaaaally care about the subject matter, and, well, have something to discuss about it at all times. While I care about the subject matter of individual posts enough to comment here occasionally, I’m not sure what I would be interested to discuss at the forum in general.

    ON THE OTHER HAND, my current, mostly chat & RP-oriented is dying a slow death and I could use another one. Having one to jump into where I sorta, kinda know some of the people right off the bat would be nice.

    There’s also the thing that the forum format in general is kinda dying, being supplanted by facebook groups. The format still has it’s strength, and strong communities can make it work without problems, but I think starting anything up on the internet that requires people sign-up with more than their facebook account is getting harder.

    1. Bryan says:

      This assumes people have a facebook account, of course.

      Can’t tell you how many times I wanted to reply to something on SFDebris’ review, but then realized I’d have to sign up on facebook to do it, and walked away instead…

      (Optional OAuth support, to use FB or Google or Yahoo or whatever else people might have for a login, might be interesting. But requiring it seems like it’ll only limit the people involved.)

      1. Trix2000 says:

        Yeah, I’ve been in the same boat before. Used to be on FB, but never checked it and ended up deleting it when it got hacked.

        I tend to prefer forums anyways, and it might be nice to get into one considering I haven’t been to dedicated to any lately.

        1. Thomas says:

          I don’t sign up to things with Facebook even though I have it and will continue to not do so into the foreseeable future

    2. X2-Eliah says:

      Aye, I think I’d/I’ll avoid the forums too. Seen far too many places fall into what Shamus listed at concern #3… Plus, I don’t really want to indulge in posturing/argumenting, so a forum would be of no benefit for me – especially if the postcomments remain as they are.

  12. Jokerman says:

    Could you tie the comments to a thread in the forum? So anything said goes in both places and you can use what ever section you like to say your piece.

    It would mean the forum would not be taking away from the comments.

    1. krellen says:

      Probably a better solution would be to just keep blog-related content on the blog. Unless someone wants to start a conversation on a two-year-old post, maybe.

      1. Jokerman says:

        Sure, that would work too :D

    2. Lame Duck says:

      Maybe I just lack imagination, but I can’t think of any way you’d be able to do that and still retain the comment tree system the blog’s got.

      1. Exetera says:

        You could probably automatically morph the tree into forum-style blockquotes of the parent post, but that might be a bit ugly.

        1. 4th Dimension says:

          Some forums support threaded view.

  13. Exetera says:

    > I'm worried that if we have a forum that some of the discussion will move from here to there.
    You could just moderate that away, you know. I’d suggest allowing forum discussion of posts more than a year old, though, because comment thread necromancy doesn’t really work well.

    > Over time, the names I see in the comments turn over.
    It’s possible that this is because people drift in and out of lurker mode. I know that’s why I appear and disappear.

    > Account creation is just too much hassle.
    Make it even more of a hassle! Obviously, you can’t have any links to the forum. You might also want to make the URL something arcane and unguessable like “nrvnsqr” – otherwise, any old fool might find it. Dirty pubbers…

    > but then there's the question of who will mitigate conflicts between THEM
    You.

    > and what happens if THAT person is having a bad day
    Doom, death and destruction! Sounds like fun to me.

    1. Fleaman says:

      “nrvnsqr” is doubly unguessable because it’s mispelled.

    2. Paul Spooner says:

      > I'd suggest allowing forum discussion of posts more than a year old, though, because comment thread necromancy doesn't really work well.

      This is a really good idea! I’ve wanted to discuss older blog posts occasionally, but nearly no one goes back (even a few days) to read the discussion or reply. Even week-old blog posts are ghost towns for discussion. Having a “short time” moratorium on forum discussion of blog posts seems reasonable, as it will allow the “Pubbers” to have their say along with everyone else, while giving the “members” a place to carry on long-form dialog which is difficult to do in comment format.

      I just posted a comment at the end saying that an official forum is a bad idea, but if you allow blog-post related discussion for “older” (by whatever criteria) posts, that would turn my opinion right around!

  14. droid says:

    Since you already decided that it will run phpBB, how about I suggest the completely new and still in beta Civilized Discourse Construction Kit?

    It has some of the same brains behind it as Stack Exchange so it might turn out O.K.

    EDIT: Kdansky beat me to it

    1. Walter says:

      Man, I want to set up Discourse on my website so badly. Argh, why does it have to be Rails?

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        Because it the most hipster of the forum kits. Of course it’s not using PHP. :)

        Alltough I do like the look of it. It really looks as something modern, not something that Ungh and his buddy Gurnk smashed together in a cave during stoneage like phpBB

        1. krellen says:

          Does “modern” mean “disorganised and unreadable”?

          1. Zukhramm says:

            Looks like it does.

          2. 4th Dimension says:

            To me it isn’t. At least looking at the demo one. Categories are like subforums, and you can always access category by clicking on it’s button.

            1. John Lopez says:

              I have great respect for Stack Overflow, but the leadership at Discourse seem to be heading quickly into the weeds. Maybe what they are doing is so revolutionary that I’m just missing the point, but I would not run Discourse if it continues in the direction it is going.

              Which is sad, because I agree strongly with the mission statement.

  15. Deadfast says:

    The main reason behind my strong desire for a forum is that the comments here are just great. And I don’t get to read all of them because I can’t tell those that I’ve read from those that I haven’t :(

    Also, smiley faces!

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      RSS feed is a good way to distinguish between what is new and what is old.Though the problem with that is that who replied to what is a bit hard to follow.

      Which is why a forum with a quote function is still best for that.

      1. Sleepyf00 says:

        Is there an RSS for each individual post or for comments in general? I haven’t noticed either, though I haven’t particularly looked.

        Also, I agree with above commenters that enabling the forum for thread necromancy from old posts would be pretty awesome.

        Peace : )

        EDIT: I don’t remember my Wavatar being quite so spiky or angry. Then again, I think it has been a few years since I last commented.

        1. 4th Dimension says:

          Have you changed your email in the meantime.

        2. Daemian Lucifer says:

          There are feeds both for new blog posts and for new comments.I dont think there are feeds for specific replies though.

    2. Asimech says:

      No, no smiley face images. At least allow not showing them & default to not when lurking. Please. I hate the things. They’re almost always weird looking, bring nothing to the table & they’re visual noise. Please no.

  16. I think forums could be a good idea, and though your concerns are valid they can probably be solved:

    1) Site Load: If it becomes too much, you can always turn it back off

    2) Cannibalize blog comments: I think that’s a good point, and what would be ideal is a way to link the forums and the blog. Say, you make a post on the blog, and it shows up in a board on the forums. Any comments made on the article go into that post on the forums, and any post on the forum post goes into the comments on the blog post.

    3) Community stagnation: I think this would also be solved by linking the forums and blogs. Say you don’t need an account to post on the blogs, but you do to post in the other parts of the forums.

    4 & 5) Doing lots of moderation and/or lots of moderators changing the tone, or causing disagreements: This is the trickiest issue I think. I think the best way to handle it would be to continue to moderate the posts on the blog like you do now, and then do so yourself on the forums a bit, but rely on a set of rules for the other mods to follow to weed out the obvious trolls. You are the dictator, they are your lieutenants, that sort of thing. I would also heavily limit the number of boards, especially to start. You can always add more later. Maybe you don’t even want a general discussion board.

    One board I would suggest though would be about organizing groups to play together in certain games. Minecraft servers, EVE corps, tournaments in random indy games, that sort of thing. And maybe a “Currently Playing” type board to discuss what is currently being played. Could be the same one.

  17. Kingjosh says:

    I saw two things when I loaded this website. First, in nice big headline-y letters, I saw “Thinking About Forums.”

    A little below that, in smaller sub-heading-y letters, I saw “Do Not Panic.”

    Seems appropriate.

    1. Trix2000 says:

      Just make sure to know where your towel is.

      1. Bryan says:

        Appropriately, the next day is Douglas Adams’ birthday.

  18. Moriarty says:

    I don’t know wether a forum could work here.

    I rarely visit forums anymore as they require more commitment than the twitter/tumblr alternatives we have nowadays. On the other hand, this is propably the most civil online community I’ve been part of and it might just be enough to make an active forum work.

    Edit: also, nice work on the comments. The ridiculous loading times are gone and I can even edit my comments again!

  19. kaljtgg says:

    On the whole, I think a forums would be a great idea, implemented carefully enough. As an operator of a forum myself, albeit a small one dedicated to a roleplay server, I have a few suggestions.

    First, in regards to registration, I’d look to IRC for inspiration(specifically nickserv implementations), allow anyone to post under any username without registration and make it possible for users who care enough to register and reserve a username for themselves. Not sure how viable this is on your platform without putting some dev time into it but a few minutes mucking about in the admin panel on mine shows it to be easy enough.

    For rules, I’d just copy paste your paragraphs about how you moderate the comments now into a disclaimer before you post. (This is something I really wish my community could stomach and I’m sure they could have if it was established at the start.)

    As for software, we use Simple Machines Forum and have used vBulletin. In my experience they’re all pretty much the same with the exception of what plugins are avalible.

    Whichever direction you take it in, you’ll have my registration, so good luck!

    EDIT: One additional idea, perhaps integrate it into the blog itself, so every post has a thread created automatically and embedded below the post?

  20. Anachronist says:

    I recommend against a forum. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

    I have a vBulletin forum on a site that I built. The forum seems to attract mostly people who post barely-relevant comments, apparently to gain some sort of SEO benefit from the URL in their signature. I spend more time than it’s worth deleting obviously content-free or off-topic posts, and occasionally banning accounts.

    And there really isn’t a way to filter them automatically. URLs are allowed in signatures (I suppose I could disable that), but it seems everyone is careful to post text that isn’t canned, but the posts clearly don’t add value to the thread (like lots of “me too” or “I agree” posts with a business or website advertised in the signature).

  21. MerryVulture says:

    Do not want. As a mostly lurker, (yes that is a thing) one more place to lurk is way to much work. If a thread comes up that requires my participation, I would have to waste time registering, then typing,and then go back to lurking. The next time my participation is required, I would have forgotten my password, and would have to start from scratch. Really, I feel that you doing all the work for my enjoyment (the way it is now)is the best course.

    As an aside, has anyone had a spelling error that looked like it should be a real word? Participation as praticipation almost seems appropriate to my less than serious ranting. I am praticipating (praticing participating)in a forum! or maybe braticipating, being a brat about it. :)

    1. Aldowyn says:

      No one’s saying you HAVE to lurk there. I wouldn’t want it to change the blogs here at all either, although I would like the forums I think.

      1. MerryVulture says:

        What, and miss all the fine discussions you lot have? No, no. Lurking the forums would be a must.

  22. Scerro says:

    Lets see. This site, in my previous year and a half (or two? Wow, it’s been a while)

    Anyways, when I first came here I wanted a forum. The community is pretty cool, and your posts promote a very analysis driven community that is quite civil, respectful, and aimed towards gaming and to a slight degree, engineering.

    That being said I don’t know if I want to see one here. I’m on the same boat because I’ve been on a lot of forums, and while a lot of them can keep a community going, it’s going to die. There’s a natural cycle for each forum, and it seems like the older one gets, the more intimidating it gets. Large forums draw people, but after 3 pages nobody is going to read the full topic before contributing what’s likely to be spam. Spam bots can be a problem.

    Then again, the forums I’ve been on mostly focus on games, and they age. The community grows out of the game.

    There always is the problem where people recognize high post count posters, but ignore valid posts, content and such from newer members. It would probably be different in this case, as the community is vastly different.

    As a user, phpBB isn’t my favorite forum system. Something about the layout of everything, just ugh. Not intuitive to me.

    If anything, I would like to be able to access other members that enjoy your blog as well. Possibly gaming with them and sort of having it as an unofficial clan would be pretty cool.

    EDIT: Most important thing – Don’t display user post counts on user’s posts. It creates a horrible subconscious “must-post-more” attitude and takes the focus from actually dealing with content.

  23. Mechakisc says:

    I keep wondering why you haven’t banned me over my Fallout 3 hate, but maybe I’ve managed to close the page more times than I’ve actually posted.

    Chances are at least reasonable that I wouldn’t get involved in the forum, but I might. The play by post stuff could be fun.

    Whatever you want to do man. Followed you hear from … uhm … DMotR? I think that’s what. Usually when I like a comic and it ends, I wander off, but that hasn’t happened this time.

  24. Eric says:

    I would love a forum, Shamus. The fact is that discussion in comment form is just a bit inconvenient. Comments are, well, comments – and as anyone who knows how I sometimes post around here (and others), the system does not work so well for the mini-essays that pop up. I’ve had some very interesting conversations on your site before but I’d be lying if I said if it wasn’t awkward at times.

    Is there any possibility of allowing comments to interact with the forums, i.e. tying user comments into the forum account system and featuring the comments within a separate sub-forum? I’ve seen this on some sites, but getting the two systems to interact well could be… dicey.

    An additional remark on moderation: I’m not sure exactly how the system works. Keywords? I’ve had a post or two vanish before and I’m really not sure why, because they didn’t have offensive content (at least to my knowledge). Whether a post gets flagged seems very… arbitrary, and it seems to happen more often when I edit an existing post than when I post a new one. Just a bit strange is all.

  25. Brandon says:

    I think this is a cool idea. Mainly I like it because there are some really cool people who read this blog, and I’d love a chance to talk with some of them in another setting, about other topics.

  26. Wedge says:

    Yeah, forums are a very different beast from blog comments. I would honestly say that having a set of clear rules is *vital* for a good forum community. Yes, “don’t be a dick” is an obvious rule, but not all rules are obvious, and I think it makes for a very bad environment if people don’t actually have a clear idea of what is and isn’t over the line. It’s also hard for a team of moderators (and you WILL need a team of mods) to stay on the same page. Doesn’t mean you have to write up a 10,000 page legal document detailing every possible offense and the corresponding punishments, but things need to be laid out clearly and publicly. It can also work perfectly fine to include a catchall rule, to cover the cases you mention above where people don’t necessarily violate any obvious rule outright but you feel like their presence hurts the community–you can ask them to tone it down or they’ll get banned.

    It’s also worth noting that rules aren’t just about stopping people from being assholes–they’re also important for keeping the forums running smoothly and making life easier for the mods. For example, one forum I’m on has a “don’t reply to spam posts” rule because if people reply it makes it harder for the mods to recognize and respond to the spam. Doesn’t mean you have to bring down the banhammer on people who violate it, but it makes the forums run smoother if everyone knows not to.

    I could ramble about this forever, but I think you get the point. I am really interested in this–we have a really great community here, but blog comments aren’t the best place for people to…commune? It’d be nice to have a place where we can all hang out and talk about whatever, rather than having every conversation tied to blog posts. That said, I don’t think forums necessarily have to impact the blog community much–there will be plenty of people who will continue posting on the blog who have no interest in forums. There will likely be people who want to forum but have no interest in blog comments! In the end, they will be two different communities with a lot of overlap.

    1. Steve C says:

      I can’t disagree more about the clear rules being vital. I’ve found too many people enjoying dancing on the line when a line exists. I particularly appreciate Shamus’s moderation style as is. The vague rules directly contribute to the quality of the comments here and the blog. I do not believe clear rules will decrease any moderator’s workload, especially Shamus’s.

  27. Dragomok says:

    Personally, I think I will stick to the comments either way. You don’t need to log in, you’ve got a time window to respond to a certain topic (which keeps the discussion from dragging on) and a chance to meet interesting people with interesting opinions who speak on topics you wouldn’t probably join on the forums.

    I will still somewhat miss a way to search for your own posts (using Google is a bit… imprecise), but it’s not really worth implementing it.

  28. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Let me address your concerns by giving you my experiences with a forum David Morgan-Mar has going for his works.

    1)There were some minor glitches here and there,but for years there was no major problem with that place.Though,to be fair,that place does have its archive purged from time to time.It still is massive though.

    3)Ive seen lots of people come and go back there.Many of them would pop in to leave a comment or two,then disappear forever.Some would pop in after years of lurking and stay for a while(and listen).So dont worry about that.A classic “email+user name+password” registration isnt much of a hassle,so those that want to give you a piece of their mind will do so.And Ive never seen someone act like an elitist douche because “they were there first”.Not even me,and I am at the top with the number of posts.

    4)Aside from mister Morgan-Mar,there are very few moderators.And with a community as civil as the one there(and the one here),there really isnt much need for them.A split topic here and there is basically everything they do.

    5)Mister Morgan-Mar is acting like you most of the time,and it has worked for that place for years.Religion and politics are basically off the table,unless the comic revolves specifically around such topics.And even then,those topics are way more civil then about some geeky stuff.Which is more or less the case with your blog.Any additional rules come and go on the spot,as David sees fit to introduce/remove them.

    So the only problem youll be facing is the move of the archive from here to there,or splitting of the two.But you can always dedicate part of the forum for old entries,and have recent users create topic about some old stuff youve written and give their thoughts.

    So yeah,Im definitely in the pro-forum camp.

  29. Dovius says:

    Interested to see how this will work out.

    Also, when you say Play-By-Post, what kind of game would that be? I’m not really familiar with the format.

    “Religion, politics, and other holy war topics will still be verboten.”

    Well darnit, guess I’ll have to find a different place to discuss plans of world domination with my fellow neo-pastafarianists, then.

  30. Torsten says:

    The way I could imagine a forum working for this site, is if it actually was a joint forum held together with some other blogs. Say, the other Spoiler Warning bloggers. Forums for this blog only can easily have a negative affect on activity and community nature of the blog itself.

    Good forums usually have some wider aspect that they are built around, different videogame or hobby forums for example. The blog already has a comment section, so what would be the thing pulling people in to the forums.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Well this blog has plenty of things other than Shamus for quite a while now.Josh and Rutskarn have hijacked the place quite a few times already for their side projects(when is the next shogun lets play Josh?).

      Of course,every errant signal would get a special topic dedicated to it because of ludonarrative dissonance.

      And then there is disclosure alert,inspired by spoiler warning,that Id be happy to keep a topic open on,as I am currently doing here.Also,if you hurry up,you can catch Mumbles(yay Mumbles) on that lets play.

      1. Aldowyn says:

        Have I mentioned that I get a little shiver whenever I see Disclosure Alert mentioned like this? Cause I do. Thanks :D

        1. Tony Kebell says:

          Don’t let it go to your head, don’t want you going on some prima donna, rock-star, drug fueled, television set murder and hotel room destroying spree.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Oh yes,that heroin hero game is really tough to stop playing.That pink dragon is always so close.

  31. Zak McKracken says:

    As you said, a forum would require account creation, and many won’t like to do that, and some will just forget the password at some point and not return because it’s just too much hassle.

    Whenever this type of discussion comes up I ask myself what has happended to good old newsgroups. Threaded discussions, no account necessary (depending on configuration) readable offline (or online with the right software on the server) … and that’s all cool, ain’t it? Anyway, these things are sooo out of fashion, although no-one has really explained the reason to me beyond “Dude, that’s so 1980’s!”.

    Unrelated to this:
    – Can PHPBB also include openID logins and the like? (and FB, Twitter, blabla…).
    – This Discourse thing (www.discourse.org) looks pretty good, from where I’m standing. Which is some distance away. So notwithstanding any issues I’ve no idea of, I wouldn’t mind.

  32. somebodys_kid says:

    I most likely wouldn’t even look at the forums. I rarely add comments here though as I’m mostly a reader.
    But may I say that the comments and discussions following each blog post are NEARLY as good as the original post. So I would hope that adding a forum does not diminish the quality of the comments.

  33. Pearly says:

    I like your moderation system, actually. So often it seems like these miniature online cyber-governments forget that they’re not actually democracies and can therefore take control of and moderate without the notion of due process or real fairness where it is to the benefit of the community at large. It tends to lead to a lot of dramatic posturing and anxiety, I’ve seen people exhibit a great deal of stress to it.

    That said, I’m very interested in this. My first interaction with the internet involved the old EZboard platforms that ran on an early version of phpBB more than ten years ago. I don’t generally do much on forums anymore, but it’ll be nostalgic to poke around in one and make some posts, regardless. I hope it’ll help mitigate some of the issues you stated above without slurping up all the processing/bandwidth/what-have-you that it can.

  34. Klay F. says:

    While I won’t begrudge anyone the use of a forum, I will very likely stay far away from it. I swore off them in general after the Escapist forums turned to shit. I don’t really say enough to justify an account anyway.

  35. Irridium says:

    I’ve sort of warmed up to the idea of a forums. Well, mainly I’m interested in seeing how it all goes. Personally I’ll most likely stay here in the blog comments. Maybe I’ll create a forum account, not sure. I have more than enough of those as it is…

  36. Thomas says:

    As long as you don’t change much of anything about the blog, I don’t see why not, because it might have really awesome results. If it goes bad your moderating style of following something and immediately nuking it to hell if you see it go wrong, is something that could apply more generally.

    Ie, if you do it and you see any of the danger signs appear, I’m totally okay with you obliterating the forums off the face of the earth and going back to the way things were pre-forum

  37. Humanoid says:

    The primary attraction of forums personally would be keeping up with new posts/comments. As it stands with the current structure, I suspect reading comments is often a one-shot thing to a fair proportion of users: read the new post, read through the current comments, add one if there’s reason to, and that’s it until Shamus posts a new item. Not that there isn’t actual back-and-forth conversation currently, but it kind of gets lost in the middle of the page.

    Not too fussed on the specifics of the proposal, although I will plug Simple Machines (SMF) software over phpBB. Granted my personal experience with running each is limited, ran the latter for a couple years for a small community of maybe 50 people tops before switching to SMF in 2007. While my comparison is obviously outdated, the main attraction was the superior admin interface. They share the most important feature obviously, that of being free.

    Sidenote on volume of spam: once I got to the point of having to delete a mere few accounts a day, I installed the Stop Spammer mod, which compares registration details (username, email and IP) against a publicly maintained database and freezes those registrations for bulk rejection. The volume of daily spam registration attempts climbed into the triple figures so I later added another mod, httpBL, which prevents red flagged IPs from even seeing any of my pages without jumping through hoops, which cut the daily number to about a dozen or so.

    P.S. I hope there will be the alternate cyan on magenta theme to complement the default red on green.

    1. Zak McKracken says:

      I’d say that for those who find red on lime to aggressive, dark red on deep blue should be a much calmer and acceptable alternative. That way everyone will have something they’ll be comfortable with.

  38. Mephane says:

    I share the concern about fragmenting and isolating the community here. There are blogs and webcomics where I don’t even bother reading comments because it all runs through forums of some kind, and I can’t even hop in quickly if I have something to add to the discussion.

    On the technical side: I can live with almost any kind of forum as long as it does not tie into the whole Facebook/Twitter/Whatever mass at all. I am not part of all that (and Shamus’ Twitter is the only one I read at all regularly) and I don’t plan on changing this.

    P.S.: Please include at the very least strict HTTPS login, bonus points if the entire forum can be visited via HTTPS. Too many cheap forums forget even the most basic security features (really, HTTPS is so basic you can even run google with it), it becomes really annoying.

  39. What I can see happening is blog posts becoming less of a thing because the topic has already been raised and discussed to death on a forum. Or forum posts become cribbed to make a blog post. Or ‘I commented on the forum, meant to blog about it, but it already took off more in the forum, so forgot/got distracted.’

    On the other hand, don’t know until you try!

  40. Manny says:

    About point number 3, the community becoming too insular: How about deleting by default all threads older than 1 month (or even less)?

    It may appear drastic, but it would fit very well the water-cooler mentality, if that’s what we are after. Plus it might alleviate some of the other issues such as site performance and the appeal to SEO-spammers.

    If needed, you could still include the option of creating an exception for some curated threads/topics (like for example a good pbp-game) that just get moved the “best-of” archives.

    1. krellen says:

      You can’t do PbP under those conditions. (Though I suppose you could just make an exception for the PbP section.)

    2. Exetera says:

      The spambots aren’t smart enough to realize that the threads are deleted after a month. Heck, they’re used to having their threads deleted by moderators in a few hours.

  41. Deadyawn says:

    I think it’d at least be interesting to see how a forum would work out here. I mean, it’s not like it could do any irreversible harm that quickly right?

    Although, thinking of some other particular forums…you might want to keep a close eye on it, at least for a while.

  42. Even says:

    Have you considered just leaving it to the people you trust? If you’ve got anyone willing to dedicate their time to it, you could give them the reins and let them/him/her worry about the details and just let yourself be in a more participating role rather than full-on administrating.

    I can understand if it doesn’t seem that appealing, but I’d see it as the one of the only few ways that would ensure you don’t have to overburden yourself, given how just the blog seems to keep you busy a plenty.

  43. Slothful says:

    I’d probably get more involved in the community of this website if it was a forum, since it’s easier to follow a thread in a forum than it is to follow the line of discussion in this comment system.

    I’ve been frequenting the strange and interesting world of Something Awful, and it’d be good to see what internet community is like beyond the $10 paywall.

  44. RTBones says:

    Personally, I don’t see the need for a forum. One of the reasons I enjoy your blog is the posting ability – if I have something to say, I can just post. I have a great distaste for having to create an account JUST to leave a comment. I suspect the process of having to create an account would likely discourage some new legitimate posters, while encourage idiots that just want to stir things up. While you could certainly have an expanded array of topics to discuss outside of what’s posted, if any of us had something we were interested in seeing in one of your blog posts, we could just send you an email. I might browse the forum, but it is highly likely I would just lurk, if for no other reason that I simply don’t post enough anyway.

    Another thing I dislike about forums is it does lead to things getting very clique-ey. With post counts, join dates, titles, signatures, profile customization, etc – all tend to create groups within groups. You have a fantastic community here. I would hate to see its nature changed because a forum got added.

    Then there is the duplication of topics and posts. How do you intend to handle two separate discussions on the same topic, especially when the same things are said in both places, with the same questions asked and answered? Add to this the “we JUST got done discussing that in the FORUM” issue – how do you handle topics that get beat to death in one place only to be brought up anew in the other?

    My vote is nah – give it a miss. It’s just not needed here (in my opinion), and, at least on the surface, the overhead required to maintain a forum to your normal high content standards just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

  45. Tony Kebell says:

    Well, time to give my two pence.

    GO FOR IT!

    Throw caution to the wind and try it, if it doesn’t work, just post a blog entry, shut it down and leave it to someone else, if anyone volunteers to take over and then act like it never happened.

    I say this, cuz’ as a lurker I’ve never really got into the blog comments as the format has always seemed to dense to participate but I feel something more organised like a forum could work, especially since the people we see here are pretty civil, it should practically look after itself, with some simple E-mail registration.

    P.S: FUCKING. GO. FOR. IT. It can’t hurt.

    (EDIT: B.T.W, to not sound like a looney, I really want to reiterate, Do it, if you don’t like it, leave it to someone else. It can’t hurt the blog if you get rid of it afterwards)

    1. Steve C says:

      Sorry but it really can hurt. The potential is definitely there. Both in terms of it going up, and it coming down. Keep in mind this blog isn’t merely a great blog, it’s Shamus’s livelihood. It’s also the reason why it would be reckless to simply hand the reigns over to someone else if it wasn’t working out.

      1. Tony Kebell says:

        I feel, if he kept them separate, the readership wouldn’t stop reading or visiting the blog and those who also want to participate on the forum, would participate, whilst still reading. If Shamus was to post on the blog I’m shutting of the forum, I doubt it’d have much impact, what am I not seeing that you’re seeing?

  46. swimon says:

    I don’t usually use forums, then again I have never seen a forum where everyone weren’t assholes (yay the escapist!). Worth a try I suppose, if it doesn’t work you can always blow it up, no harm done.

    “Religion, politics, and other holy war topics will still be verboten.”

    Better get it out of my system then: Carthage must be destroyed! Hellenists are assholes! Delisle is the best temperature scale!

    (took me forever to think of a religion no one practices, obvious in hindsight)

  47. stratigo says:

    Forums are great! They do really create a community.Sure there’s a sense of “first” elitism. But uually that’s just a playful BS thing I’ve found.

    As for moderation, most forums run off the whole “dictator” thing. It works pretty well. A few (run by lawyers I bet) do a strict rules deal, but very few I’ve found.

    Ultimately though, the first few folks dictate the overall culture of the forum. Once established, that is extraordinarily hard to change. So get a good forum culture going in the first couple months and youare fairly set.

  48. The Rocketeer says:

    I’m a bit torn. On one hand, I can say that if this site did have a forum, I’d certainly join up, and would probably enjoy using it. But my time has gotten rather precious in the past few years, and perusing any forum might be a bit more than I could commit. Which is a shame, really; as much as I tend toward long-windedness, a forum is the ideal environment for me to inflict wholly-undeserved prolixity upon people I earnestly like and respect.

    Which segues into my next statement: you do have a good community here, one nurtured over quite a few years. I don’t make a habit of posting too often, but I do read the majority of the comments, especially from names I’ve come to recognize from years and years back, and I think any community in which these sorts of folks were the foundation shouldn’t turn sour very easily.

    Yet, I’m fairly sure your fears concerning the new venue’s effects on the old are well justified. As you said, this is a peculiar setup here, and a signature element is the long-form discussion that often takes place in these comments. On one hand, I don’t think it would go completely away if a forum were installed, but I can’t help but think a large part of the reason it exists in the first place is that there is simply no other place for such discussion to occur. As said, keeping the conversation in one place- here- gives it both exposure to anyone, passers-by included, who read these posts, and the chance for those same folks to join in, instantly, painlessly, and adjacent to the content in question. Even if it is sort of an awkward system for handling these sorts of discussions- Lord knows I can barely keep track of all the nested threads in a really dense conversation.

    I don’t think it’s really possible for this to continue at the same strength once another outlet- admittedly and especially due to it’s greater suitability- exists for this kind of thing. The amount by which it is decreased will be a mystery until it happens, and will likely vary greatly from post to post as different content catches the eyes of different users, who will inevitably have differing ideas of which tributary to utilize, and when, and how.

    And yes, a forum will be more insular and exclusive. That’s not an ‘if,’ it’s the nature and purpose of the system. If that’s undesirable to you or to the folks here, then that’s that. Whether or not it’s necessarily a bad thing is debatable; if you think you can predict a forum’s effect on these posts and their comments, and the peculiar community around it, and, having predicted it, accept it, then I don’t see much reason not to at least consider a different environment for new brands of input.

    The only thing I’d really caution you on is if the workload on you or the folks you have picked out. Just make triple-sure it’s something you can manage without graying all your hair. This isn’t something I say as if you hadn’t already considered it far more thoroughly than I could really understand, but more out of a mix of concern and bemusement; my day job alone leaves me exhausted, I don’t understand how you can pursue all your various interests and still manage to run this zoo.

    At the end of the day, I’d say just plot out what your absolute worst-case scenario for this entire endeavor is, and decide if what you realistically expect to happen is worth risking that. If so, then there aren’t many more places or many more people I’d trust more implicitly to make a real treasure out of it. And if not, then just leaving the present site as-is and having some play-by-post-ers on call somewhere is just dandy; if my schedule wasn’t what it was, I’d have been involved in it already.

  49. Melf_Himself says:

    You might consider copying RPS’s model, where the comments on their posts are automagically integrated into the forum (I gather).

    1. X2-Eliah says:

      And as a result, all of the forumspam their phbb/whatever gets also is displayed prominently on the article comment sections. Pretty miserable.

  50. Neko says:

    Speaking for myself, I probably wouldn’t find the time to scrape the forum for interesting discussions to join; I much prefer my current method of reading your post and then skimming down through the comments for anything to reply to.

    And I like your “dictator” moderation style. If there are explicit rules, people will find ways to bend then while still being as annoying as possible.

    It’s number 6, isn’t it?

  51. UtopiaV1 says:

    Hi all, just a quick word to say I’m still here, I never left, and you all don’t care about that (and quite rightly so). I do still like to read these posts, but lets not kid ourselves (heck, MYself, I’ll be the only one to read this), we are shouting into a crowded room of intellectual discussion and vuvuzelas here, so why fling a message into that?

    Maybe a dedicated forum would elevate this problem, maybe not, maybe I’m the only one who sees the problem, or maybe I’m the only one with a problem. All I know is: This site entertains me, and it’s not because I spend my time here trawling through a 200+ wall of comments to see what other people think about a Let’s Play.

  52. BitFever says:

    I must say I was very worried about the color set up until you said one of the facts was a lie :P

    I like the idea of forums a lot, and I hope none of your concerns become actual problems.

  53. swenson says:

    If you do decide to have a forum, I suspect you’re going to end up with two communities–one that primarily comments on the forum (and occasionally pops over to the blog) and one that sticks to the blog (and may never end up on the forum). I’ve seen that sort of thing happen before, at any rate. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing, necessarily. Plenty of people, in the case I’m thinking of, stayed on with both–it’s just that some people preferred discussion in forum format (while still reading some, perhaps not all, articles), while others didn’t care about the close-knit community side of it and just stuck with the article comments.

    I don’t know how it would work with a big community like this, but at least with the smaller one I’m thinking of, there’s never been any “elitism” problems–people tend to be nice anyway, so they treat people equally, whether they’re a blog person or a forum person or both. And when some people do make the jump to the other, they’re welcomed.

  54. Indy says:

    “And last month some people actually went to all the trouble of setting up unofficial Twenty-Sided forum.”

    Speaking of which… here it is!

    Of course, if Shamus’ forum takes off, I can see this board being phased out. Until then, come on over and join in the discussion.

  55. Kobold Artificer says:

    I would really like I forum here. I’ve long searched for a place to have a decent discussion on the internet without it falling into a burning wreck, and I think the little community here would be great to exchange anonymous messages over the internet with.

  56. General Karthos says:

    Speaking as a long-time reader, but infrequent poster, I’m not sure I love the idea of a forum. I have the same concerns as Shamus, and I really don’t want to see twenty-sided take a hit in membership or vibrancy of the community. Plus, I love the discussions in the comments. I’m sure most of those who join the forums will be just as intelligent and well-spoken in the forums as in the comments but additionally….

    I hate change in my daily routine. I’m not comfortable with it. Not to an obsessive level, but it definitely throws me for a loop from time to time. I still haven’t upgraded MSN messenger to the Skype service because I don’t like change, even though Skype is superior in practically every way to MSN Messenger….

    I’ll definitely register in the forums, and hopefully my concerns will be groundless.

  57. PSJ says:

    Hey!
    I’ve been reading the blog for nearly four years now, but rarely post–almost entirely due to a (probably irrational) hatred of text-based communication. I would love to see a forums open up so that some of us comment-introverts can engage in smaller discussions on more specific topics. It’s a shame I won’t be able to use yours, being retinally cone-deficient and all.

  58. RTBones says:

    With apologies to Mordin and Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan…

    These are the very trappings of the quandary of colloquium
    The method which will always stitch together the symposium
    Our civil congregation keeps the fabric of our dialogue
    The rapier wit defense against the tyranny of demagogue
    A mystic formulaic quip to trip the Switch of Irksome Pun
    These are the very trappings of the quandary of colloquium

    1. Shamus says:

      Well done sir, well done.

      1. Dev Null says:

        I was going to say that the one thing I’d want in a forum is the ability to subscribe to a post. One of the best things about Twentysided is the diversity, but that means I’m not always interested in a particular post. So I never end up keeping the comments feed in my RSS for long. Being able to do that selectively would be brilliant.

        Mr Bones has just given me a second thing; the ability to give a post a spurious, pointless, and utterly meaningless upvote / gold star / thumbs up. Because that really deserved one.

        1. BenD says:

          I, too, long for the ability to subscribe, and the ability to ‘like’ or star or thumbs-up or rain confetti or otherwise lurve upon a comment that is especially worthy. Though in this comment’s case, the bright yellow shine of Shamus’ attention does a pretty good job of that.

          I’d sign up for a Twenty Sided forum. I wouldn’t go there specifically to comment on a post, though; I’d do that here. I’d go to the forum to read more about a post, expecting there might be expanded discussion. And I’d go there to play-by-post also. (Wolf in the Playground, Round 3, Ruts?)

    2. Paul Spooner says:

      with the above apologies, and Prometheus as well.

      Pedantic wit, but literate, have drawn us admire him,
      His moderating conflagrations into content tires him,
      But in this place his puissant politic precludes Prometheian
      Refusal of the principle of pissing on the plebian.
      Though populace would nudge the policy to insularian
      He fights his fans flowing form both firey and contrarian.
      While reading words in code or prose he guides the topics now and then.
      He is the very model of a meek authoritarian.

  59. Steve C says:

    My thoughts are that a forum is not a good idea. Not because the idea is bad, but because forum the wrong tool for the job. The true idea isn’t even to create a forum. The true goal is to create a space for discussion that doesn’t quite fit the format of this blog.

    What’s the right tool for the job? I honestly don’t know. But there are many tools other than a forum to choose from. There are GoogleGroups, wiki’s, event calendars, subreddits, facebook pages, twitter feeds, discourse.org, Google+ the list goes on and on. I’m going to repeat what’s now becoming my catchphrase (which I only ever have cause to use here) is that The Medium Is The Message.

    The implication here is if you use a different format that the content will invariable change. Whatever format used will heavily influence the content that appears. You can already see that process at work above as people discuss; showing # of posts, showing signatures, using a karma system, how to prevent spambots, etc. Everyone can already see those sorts of things will impact the discussion but the forum itself will do the same only more-so.

    To me adding a forum to this blog is like wanting a more cinematic and epic story in a game, and therefor adding lots of cut-scenes and exposition to make it happen. It’s not going to work. The goal can work, but not with that implementation.

    1. Zukhramm says:

      And what exactly are the differences between a forum and the comment sections of a blog? The only real one I can see is that anyone can create one and choose the subject on a forum.

      1. 4th Dimension says:

        On forums you get updates when somebody comments. Also you can easily see when was the last activity.

    2. krellen says:

      If the goal is to create a place for TwentySided commentors to get together for Play-by-Post games, a forum is absolutely the right tool.

    3. Kevin says:

      Have you been experiencing “A Part of Our Heritage

  60. Atle Pedersen says:

    Don’t worry. I’ll read the blog, because it’s read worthy both in topic and in style, whatever you experiment with on the side.

    I think the blog itself is the key, the glue and the magic. And long experience with online debates, going all the way back to the BBS era, has thought me that the language and tone in the comments reflects the language and tone in the article/blog.

    Even controversial political topics can be handled quite well if the article handles the subject in a good manner. But in politics there is often an “those who disagree with me are stupid and/or evil” underlying tone that provokes strong responses.

  61. Chamomile says:

    I’m sure as a lurker who’s left literally tens of posts on your site, you are rabidly interested in my opinion. Well, today is your lucky day! I play tabletop games online a lot, and having a forum would give me a convenient place to pop in and say “hey guys, I want to play campaign X on Skype/Roll20/these forums,” which is awesome. Giant in the Playground players flake out half the time and roll20 players flake out all of the time, so hopefully a Twenty Sided Tale forum would be more cool?

    1. anaphysik says:

      Oh yeah, Roll20. I meant to check that out a while back… but didn’t have people free to try it with :(

      Normally I only get to tabletop after I take a 2-hour flight north to where most of my friends are >_<
      (#SoLonelyHere #ThankGravForInternetFriends)

  62. Moridin says:

    I’d definitely like to see forums from you, Shamus, if only for the Play-by-Post section, though I’m unlikely to join in on games at the moment.

  63. Are you planning to have some sort of banner for the forum? If yes, can I make one? Me, me, me please, pick me, o God please pick me…

    But seriously, if you need some artwork for the forum, I'd love to draw something.
    It could look similar to something I already made two weeks ago.
    LinkyLink

    1. Tony Kebell says:

      That’s pretty cool, I like it.

  64. Cybron says:

    Can’t say I feel a forum is necessary, but more power to you.

  65. TSi says:

    Hi,

    It would indeed be a good idea to have a forum for some special cases but I’m not sure this is what most people really need or want.
    Your blog really lacks a way for people to be able to globally search for comments by author/category/keywords/etc… and to get notified when people actually reply to them.

    When I joined, I was very surprised to not be able to save my nickname or tick a checkbox to get notified when people reply to my comments. With time, I also got frustrated to not be able to search for my oldest comments to see if I got indeed new messages as I couldn’t remember if I left a message on post #4 or #10 of a particular category/theme (and i still don’t know where they are and lack time to manually ctrl+f search every post).

    And why do some people have a special avatar (like anaphysik or Chamomile up there ) ?

    I’d love to participate a bit more but now I tend to leave a comment and check for replys only during a few hours/days until my rss feed updates with your new content.

    I think this is more important than a forum, even the simplest one unless you find a way to link forum users with comment authors.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      “And why do some people have a special avatar (like anaphysik or Chamomile up there ) ?”

      Those are gravatars.You sign up for one,and whenever you use that mail in a place that supports them,youll get your avatar shown.

    2. anaphysik says:

      “And why do some people have a special avatar (like anaphysik or Chamomile up there ) ?”

      It’s because I’m such an awesome, stand-up guy. Not like that Aldowyn fellow… no sir, not like Aldowyn at all.
      #AlphaProtocol ;D

  66. Duoae says:

    Hey, Shamus.

    Take a look at Gamerswithjobs (GWJ). They have site rules but also rule with an iron dictatorship’s fist…. Kinda.

    Anyway, what the moderators say (or decide), goes.

    I can see this working for TwentySided… as well as the general structure of the forums: i.e. front page posts (are the blog) vs (gaming general) the other stuff. Maybe you could have a coding section as well?

    Other than that, well, places like Ars Technica “separate” their front pages stuff from their forum stuff as they appear to be run on different servers and front end software but whenever they write a post it automatically creates a linked story/post in the forum… so that may be one way of getting around the issue of server load.

    Adding to that, regarding paying for all this stuff. Maybe do a similar thing to GWJ were you have an annual donation drive which helps pay for content and for the running of the endeavour. I’d be happy to contribute (I think I already donated twice when you were writing the first book ;) ) towards Twentysided if it means more/continued posts and Spoiler Warning!
    Of course, then don’t deny stuff to the un-donators as that’s not good business sense! ;)

  67. No need for rules on the forum or anything like that, you just need one line of text someplace: “Welcome to the forum, keep it civil!”

    1. Jace911 says:

      With invisible spoiler text that says “Or else.”

  68. Chris says:

    A frequent lurker / rare commenter’s thoughts:

    Having a forum could be cool, but when it comes to thinking about all the methods to keep the idiots to a minimum on it, remember that you can’t really completely idiot-proof anything because nature ALWAYS evolves a better idiot.

  69. Paul Spooner says:

    Given that:
    Commentors have already shown themselves capable of starting their own forums.
    Commentors want a forum for reasons not directly related to “shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale” content.
    Shamus does not want commentors drawn to the forum to discuss blog content.
    Does it follow that?:
    Shamus should start a “shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale” forum.

    That doesn’t seem to follow to me. If some of us want to start a forum and do stuff there, you can’t stop us. It doesn’t make sense to me to make an officially sanctioned forum for the purpose of NOT discussing officially sanctioned material. I’d be happy to hang out in a D20 forum, but the reasons and justifications for creating and maintaining it just don’t seem worth it to me.

    It just seems the reasons you’ve given don’t justify an official forum. Official forums are designed to unite the community. But in this case, they are uniting around the blog which is the thing you don’t want them to go there to talk about. If you’re making it for play-by-post campaigns, that can be done anywhere (Krellen, I’ve got a clean forum already set up for that, if you’re interested). People can go anywhere to discuss “videogames, tabletop games, etc. Coding and genre fiction” and it seems unreasonable to burden yourself to provide a platform for such generic discussion, and then moderate it all.

    Suggestion: If you’re going to make an official forum, make it explicitly about stuff that is directly related to your work and creative output. Since you don’t want to draw away blog comments this leaves:
    Software (you’ve released a decent amount of open source stuff).
    Narrative (books, comics, and the D&D campaign).

    Just my two cents. I’d be happy to participate in a forum, but It would be sad if it was made for the wrong reasons and then decayed a few years down the road as a result.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      “Commentors want a forum for reasons not directly related to “shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale” content.”

      How is “the ability to see the most recent comments on the topic” not dirrectly related to this blogs content?Which is the most common reason Ive seen people state for why they want forums here.Others in that vein are “Discussing an old entry that youre a late for” and “Discussing a tangential thing,like Shamus’s most recent tweet,or a game he is playing”.

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        Yeah, I worded that poorly, it should have been “Proposed Commentor needs met by the forum are not directly related to “shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale” content.”

        The point being, I agree that it would be fantastic to have a thread for each blog post, but (AFAIK, See “Concern 2” in the OP) that is currently NOT on the table. As I said in another comment (on the first page), adding “discussion of old posts” would completely invert my opinion of the value to an official forum. But at this point (to all appearances anyhow) Shamus does not want people discussing blog posts on the theoretical forum, and I suspect it would be moderated to that effect.

  70. Taellose says:

    Personally, I’m a fairly sporadic poster here – though I read just about all of your articles, watch many of your videos, and look through at least some of the comments -and likely would not spend much, if any, time on a forum. Which is not to say I’m opposed to the creation of one, as such.

    One thing I would really like to see, though, is some means of tracking replies in these comment threads. If I could subscribe to a comment thread so that an email was sent to me when further posts in it are made, I’d probably stay in more conversations for longer. As it is now, when I do comment, unless I’m REALLY interested in the subject, I’ll probably never remember to go back to the post and see if anybody answered me.

  71. postinternetsyndrome says:

    As an occasional commenter on this blog, I’ll say that I’m not very interested in forums for this site, for all the reasons you listed above. As you say, this format works fine and it appeals to me.

    Something interesting though, would perhaps be to have a sort of “activity board” or something that lists activity in old comment threads. What I mean is that discussion would still be confined to the comments on the blog posts, but that their contents would be searchable and watchlistable, through some sort of forum-like interface.

    I can imagine this requiring a lot more effort than just throwing up a php board of course, but it’s a thought. I also realize you might not be a big fan of necroposting, which is what such a system would be all about.

    (I once made a big huge comment on an old spoiler warning episode and I put so much energy into it that I occasionally check it out to see if someone walked by and answered (not happened yet). I don’t mind that no one answered, I was late to the party, but IF someone, some day, should happen to do, I’d like to hear about it.)

    EDIT: Well, seems several people already made that point, and in a much less confusing way than me. Just consider me a fan and this post a relic.

  72. I don’t really want forums. I’m sure they will be fine if you add them, but not necessary for me.

    What I want is for Twenty Sided to show what comments are new since I last visited. This would require some kind of account and tracking, but it would be immensely useful. Polygon.com does this on their articles, and it’s great.

  73. John Lopez says:

    I have run communities all the way back to the days of dial up BBS on a C64 with a 2600 baud modem. One of the things I have seen in successful communities (and the reason I think this one works) is having a *reason* to talk to one another.

    Here this is done because of the topic of a post provokes the users to react. On some comic sites the regular release of new comics promotes conversation. For a massive site like BoardGameGeek it is the constant release (and speculation about release) of new games.

    Almost as important: the old conversations die off. Long running threads can be interesting, but they pull power from the new commentary by being exhausting to participate in… and one of the most important rules of commentary is that everything interesting to be said is said in the first twenty posts. After that it is “I didn’t read the discussion so here is my repeat of the others” or the sparks of conflict as sides polarize.

    The *worst* thing I have seen happen is when there is a community, but nothing to actually discuss. Internecine battles erupt when being a part of a faction is the most interesting thing going on.

    Therefore I agree with your primary concern: the content drives the comments below the content and your most prolific commentary producers are also the most likely to flock to a 24/7 discussion system… and not comment here.

  74. The benevolent dictator style works better than you think, in fact, from my experience it’s the only style that really functions at keeping a community reasonable–that’s the style we use at Oo.net, which is a forum about Objectivism and hence is basically nothing BUT politics and religion/philosophy.

    The problem I see a lot of people have with forums is that they approach the matter as if they’re setting up a government and thus they have to create and achieve some kind of fair system where everybody has an equal chance. (That, and when you ban obstreperous yahoos, they start screaming about ‘censorship’. No, you’re still free to shout your nonsense all you like. You just can’t do it on THIS forum.) That’s not what you’re doing. You are setting up something that is private property and requires your time and effort to keep running. Heck, you’re not even a company trying to attract customers, you’re just some dude who likes talking with other people under certain conditions.

    The only time I’ve seen arrangements like this succeed well is when the people who have the most invested in it (and on a discussion forum like this, that would be YOU) are absolutely unapologetic about their expectation of return on their investment. Being fair is not in your best interests. Being a dictator IS.

  75. Jingleman says:

    Forgive me for not parsing all 200-something comments before saying: I wouldn’t want anything to change the tone of this little corner of the internet, but since I choose to sit out when Spoiler Warning covers a game I’ve yet to play, it would be nice to have more opportunities to join in the conversation. I’m not complaining about the current posting schedule or the last couple of SW game choices; on the contrary, I’m glad the show is going strong. But if a forum means that the community grows more active regardless of whatever’s on tap for the main blog, then that could be good for those of us who sideline ourselves to avoid spoilers.

  76. ZekeCool says:

    As a longtime reader and barely ever commenter, I would love to see a forum. I’m sure it’d make me more likely to post my thoughts, as I generally have the “screaming into the tornado” problem here. It’d be nice to get a bit more personal feedback. Plus I love using play by posts to brush up on my writing.

    Who’s up for a game of Pathfinder?

  77. Orophor says:

    Having run serveral forums, I can say that spam bots will easily be handled by including a module to check the http://www.stopforumspam.com/ database. As forum software goes, I like http://www.simplemachines.org/ but that is mostly because it is easy to use on a mobile device and updates are easy to do from the admin page.

    Personally, I comment infrequently and would likely not sign up for the forum, but have no objection to there being one or others using it.

  78. Tomcat says:

    as far as forums, rules and moderation goes I know of song some may appreciate on the subject

    Optimus Rhyme: Obey The Moderator

  79. X2-Eliah says:

    Oh yeah, also – it’s not a given that a ‘big’ blogging site has to move away from blogging software or, indeed, evolve forums. Frex, John Scalzi’s personal blog ‘whatever’ has an absolutely humongous readership/visitorcount (8 million views in 2012: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/12/25/eight-million-views-for-2012/), but it is still very much just your (seemingly) average wordpress blog with basic comments and the exact same moderation policy that you have (and with good result).

    Also, Shamus, actually, why don’t you do a recap of your visitor/view number stats? It would be quite interesting to read every 6/12 months or so.

  80. AJax says:

    I really like the comments section here but I wouldn’t mind to see a forum.

  81. Wooji says:

    While I’m not sure if a forum is a good idea or not I wouldn’t mind the possibility of a game matchmaking subforum where we oculd leave or find game contact info for other twentysideites for different games (minecraft servers, LoL summoner names, Battletags and similar stuff) since i apparently have to much gaming time compared to my friends and need ppl to play with =).

  82. Ben says:

    Hello……

    Professional lurker……a forum would be great if the blog “crossposted” so one could follow the various threads of conversation off topic there. Always enjoy the blog and comments!!

  83. dudecon says:

    Linking Blog and Forum: A Modest Proposal.
    Here’s an interesting idea, incorporating some computer programming and some writing.

    Write a plugin that can add a “Discuss in the Forums” link to any blog post or comment. Have it automatically quote the content as the first post. These links go in a special forum section for “blog discussion”, and clicking on the link is the only way to create new topics in the “blog discussion” forum section.
    If a topic has already been created, the link changes to “Respond in the Forums”, allowing the readers to see which posts and/or comments are already under discussion elsewhere.

    Then hide the link. No one can create a forum discussion unless the following criteria are met.

    Any blog post older than X days automatically gets this link. Younger posts will not create a forum topic. In this way, discussion can continue on older less frequented blog posts, but the forums can not draw comments away from the blog during the crucial first few days of discussion.

    Any comment with more than Y responses also gets this link. This is a way for people to “favorite” or “watch” a comment. If someone says something particularly cogent, interesting, entertaining, etc in the comments, they can subscribe to the thread in the forum (where the mechanism already exists), and watch the discussion unfold there.

    I know it’s not quite what you’re proposing in the OP, but it seems to meet the most requested features, namely: Discussion of Old Posts, and Subscribing to Comments.

  84. Artur CalDazar says:

    These days I don’t really comment much, although I do write up a lot of comments I lose confidence before hitting post.
    But I would still love to have forums were the community is the same as the one that browses your site.

    Point number three might be a bit of a problem but not one that cannot be dealt with.

  85. Deoxy says:

    Well, I’ve been reading and commenting here since just after DM of the Rings started, and I’ve watched it grow from “just a bit smaller than perfect” to “aw, it’s just too big for me to wade through all the comments anymore”.

    Sad for me, good for Shamus, encouraging that so many people see the greatness here.

    All that to say, forums with this group would be great! But then, it would be even more stuff I just don’t have time for anymore… :-(

  86. Wilhemina says:

    They freeze easily and it gives your mage a moment to breathe.

    To defeat the odds by overcoming the temptations to
    follow the crowd and spend, spend, spend is truly heroic.
    31 after hammering Syracuse 42-14 in its home opener.

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