Glyph wrote:Taking Reddit as the obvious prior art, a system like this would really need two things to work well: a sufficiently large & active user base to distinguish a signal to noise ratio rather than 'blips' of just a handful of users; and strong, active moderation to prevent brigading, outrage bait, pile-ons and other forms of bad mob behaviour. We don't currently have either of those things.
You're right -- We [i]currently[i] don't. But I think we will as I continue to roll-out more changes and make additional significant improvements to the overall experience and usability of SEIBERTRON. I'm a big believer in "if you build it, they will come." It will take time to right the ship, so to speak.
Glyph wrote:Do you intend this to be completely system-driven, like a social media recommendation algorithm, or would there still be a staff layer before stuff is actually posted out? The latter would have more safeguards - it'd function more like "bringing newsworthy stuff to the News Crew's attention" rather than "what's trending on Seibertron.com", but would avoid the system tweeting out something false / defamatory / flat-out vile to the wider internet with the site's name tagged onto it, just because a lot of users had commented on it. It's not like we haven't spent the last 10 years watching real-time case studies in how social media algos incentivise the worst behaviour in their users!
I agree with what you wrote. I'm sure there will be a significant learning curve here. It will need to be tweaked. But yes, heading more toward a social website platform is my intention and moving away from a standard "forum" experience that is significantly outdated. I just want to be able to get back to doing galleries. I loved doing that. It was awesome. But I can't right now because I need to build a new experience on SEIBERTRON. It's a lot of work for volunteers to post news. This has weighed on me for decades and I am determined to find a different solution. I can and should be contributing more to the news section (or at least more content like galleries), but I need to spend this time building the tools necessary to make it easier for everyone to help out.
Glyph wrote:IMO our biggest issue with news is the lack of active news staff, and I see how this system is intended to get around that; but the very same issue of a small user base makes it more prone to swings and extremes.
The news staff gets burned out. It's a lot of work, as I mentioned above. Do you have access to the news section? I'd really like to get your feedback on the process, Glyph, if you'd be interested in working with william-james and maybe even ScottyP or D-Max or any of the other staff members who have been around for a while to walk you through it so that I can get some more thoughts on how to improve the current process.
These ideas I have about the direction of the forums and turning SEIBERTRON more into a "social" platform are for later down the road. My goals first are to improve and/or fix the existing sections of SEIBERTRON (sightings, HMW, etc) while still working on implementing new features (S.T.A.R.S, Big Broadcast, etc) and bringing back some older features like screen capture galleries.
The phpBB forum system we use is from 2007. It's 18 years old. I have been hacking it apart for years and sucking it in more and more to work directly with SEIBERTRON. I have stripped out functionality of phpBB (like their session ID handling that drove me crazy for years) and have been making subtle behind-the-scenes changes to make it easier for me to work with their code (which is surprisingly really well written even 18 years later). I strongly despise their cached "template" / files system and that is something I want to remove as I don't think it's necessary on SEIBERTRON. I might keep it, but it causes more problems than I think it solves. I have been addressing issues with "slow" parts of phpBB by just updating the database queries to be more efficient (again a behind-the-scenes thing that none of you will ever see other than experiencing better load times).
Glyph wrote:Sorry to be the wet blanket! I know how I look here, but part of my IRL job is to think about the ways an exciting project could potentially go wrong. I post because I want it to succeed, not because I want to tear it down.
You're not a wet blanket and I appreciate you taking the time to provide all of the feedback you have for this site. It means a lot to me that you are passionate enough about Transformers and SEIBERTRON that you would take the time to provide such detailed feedback here on the forums and via email.
Glyph wrote:I don't think that's something that needs a code solution; it needs moderators to say "that's an interesting discussion, let me split that into its own thread where people will see it" instead of "please keep all posts about SS86 in the 651-page Studio Series thread." That then also makes it much easier to newsify just that small thread and keep the comments related to the article, rather than eventually filling up with unrelated stuff in the mega-thread. I feel that a news post should pretty much always be a separate thread in itself, not just one post in a long-running topic thread.
The mega-threads are definitely not working. I also don't know about the alternative which is a new thread for every Transmission (i.e. news). It was a lot of work getting people to stick with whatever rule we had at the time (i.e. news about Alternators Hound should have it's own topic) but it gets messier when there are multiple releases at a time or ongoing news about an event like BotCon back-in-the-day. I still don't know what the correct solution is for that nor do I know who will enforce it because that's a lot of work as well. Hence my desire to just figure out a different way to approach all of this. I have not liked the mega threads for over a decade but I don't know what the proper solution is either.
Glyph wrote:It would also be good to have a weekly summary post / article collecting "all the stuff that happened in the world of TF last week." (But those really need to be written by an actual person rather than auto-generated in order to have any kind of quality control! But it could certainly include something like "top 10 discussion threads from the last week" as well.)
There's absolutely a way to automate that. It's just putting the logic in place for it. I'm working on something very similar to that for the SEIBERTRON Store so that I no longer have to spend the time building out these newsletters that I do for my store. Automating those is very top-of-mind so that I don't have to spend 30 to 60 minutes building those either.
Glyph wrote:Seibertron wrote:Just need to come up with something clever for "Toy Galleries".
...But why though?
You're right. Maybe I don't. I just like the "branded" sections. Imagine if I had just called Heavy Metal War "Seibertron.com's Game" or "The Game at Seibertron.com". Other sites have Toy Galleries. TFW is unfortunately doing something with "Reflector" in the name of their gallery section, otherwise I'd run with something like that. Or maybe you're right and I just really need to take ownership of "The Toy Galleries" at SEIBERTRON because they really are something unique to this site.
Glyph wrote:Seibertron wrote:There's also a massive feature I'm working on that I haven't told you guys about yet. Let's just say "S.T.A.R.S." and "Robot Points".
Cautiously optimistic, I'm guessing something like reputation points or activity rewards.
You've got it. This is something I've been wanting to come up with for decades, in part to encourage user activity and mostly to figure out how to provide some form of a reward to volunteer staff. This new feature is basically going to gamify the entire website in a different way than HMW. I'm very excited about it and can't wait to reveal it.
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