What do you feel about the new forum structure?

[Costello]

Our decision to simplify the forum structure and use prefixes might seem like a shock at first.
But we believe it will make it easier to discover and identify relevant content.

What do you think? what's your opinion on this?
Debate!

 

[LeyendaV]

First, I wanna thank you for the hard work you are putting on the community, and for giving us a place to express our opinions and give feedback.

Personally, I think the previous structure was better in terms of organization.
For example, I spend most of my time on the Switch forums. When it comes to the scene of a console, having subforums for different kind of stuff makes it easier to find certain resources and guides.

Of course, that's just my POV about a specific part of the forum. Having everything merged can be better for other subs.

 

[Sono]

Just echoing my reply from the feedback thread for better visibility:


I think this change will end up well in the long run, once people get used to it.

- It discourages not tagging your thread properly, but - looking at 3DS subforum only as that's what I'm familiar with - I think it's much better than the previous system
- There won't be an issue anymore of people placing their posts in the wrong subforum, which means less moderator action required
- You won't have to click through a million subforums just to figure out that someone placed their creation in the wrong subforum, just because it fits in more subforums than just one. Now you can place multiple tags on a thread, which means you'll find it regardless.

There are other pros I forgot, but I think this change will end up for the better.

One downside I noticed though: I can't find a way to do either an AND or an OR search with tags. I feel that having tags, and not being able to do a combination search on them is a slight downgrade.


One thing I *strongly* suggest though: let people have some transition period. Either temporarily or permanently.
Still have subforums, but they would do the same as now clicking on the 3DS subforum for example, but some tags would be automatically selected with an OR combinator.

 

[Costello]

First, I wanna thank you for the hard work you are putting on the community, and for giving us a place to express our opinions and give feedback.

Personally, I think the previous structure was better in terms of organization.
For example, I spend most of my time on the Switch forums. When it comes to the scene of a console, having subforums for different kind of stuff makes it easier to find certain resources and guides.

Of course, that's just my POV about a specific part of the forum. Having everything merged can be better for other subs.

Thanks for your feedback.

Could you break down a bit what is bothering you about why prefixes aren't a suitable replacement for subforums?

You have an overview of all threads in one place, and if you want to filter by type, you can just click in the header to filter easily. (Previously you'd have to navigate to a different subforum)



For now the annoyance I can see is about new thread notifications. Some users might want to receive email notifications when new thread are posted under a specific prefix. This is something we could improve, definitely.

The reasons why we chose to change this are detailed in the V8 announcement. We understand it's a big change and we want to continue improving to find the sweet spot.

 

[LeyendaV]

Could you break down a bit what is bothering you about why prefixes aren't a suitable replacement for subforums?

Absolutely.
While it's true that the new structure will feel more natural once we get used to it, the previous one was "an extra step" into organization.

An example case: Finding the guide to hack your console for the first time. Entering the hacks subforum was the first step, then filtering by guides (in this particular case, that one had a stick).
Now, filtering by guides will bring all the guides, which leads to longer search times cause now all the information about guides is at the exact same level of hierarchy, regardless if it's the key tutorial to start hacking your console from the scratch of it's how to add more coins to X game.

If possible, I think a potential solution would be to filter by multiple terms. Example: If I click Tutorial, that brings all the Tutorial threads, but then I click ROM Hack and that cleans the filter and brings only the ROM Hack prefix.
If, in this case, that sequence could lead to the ROM Hack threads that are also part of Tutorial, I think that would solve basically every problem about this particular "issue".



I know the Filters menu do this already, but this way would be more intuiteve, specially for those who are getting used to the forum. And even among veterans, I'm sure most of them don't know about that.

Also, some folks (like me) are kinda dumb, and, at a glance, seeing (for example) three tags with the same red, three with the same cerulean and two with the same orange can lead to confusion. And now that tags are more important since we are sorting the forum using them, maybe thinking of a different color for each one could help as well.

 

[CeeDee]

Personally pitching in to say I definitely preferred subforums personally - made everything feel a bit more tidy and organized, ya know?