tell me what you think of splitting 'a&e' into a separate forum

[diebitter]

You gys do realise it's not likely to be a bunch of intellectual stuff about Fellini, right?

It's more likely gonna be Star Trek, Lost, Sopranos, Dusk till Dawn, One Crazy Summer, The Futons, Hendrix, Hemingway, Stephen King, and so on, right? (but there'll be Fellini too, if someone wants to talk Fellini).

'select few', my ass.

[Blarg]

I hated it when it was in here, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people were glad it moved. Sports made topics fly off the pages; it was almost impossible for a thread to be seen if you didn't go looking for it, because it could be a couple pages or more back in a very short time, and a thread from a day or two ago was so far back few people would probably bother to look.

Sports is way too popular a subject to keep in OOT. A&E isn't popular enough to be disruptive.

[Blarg]

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You gys do realise it's not likely to be a bunch of intellectual stuff about Fellini, right?

It's more likely gonna be Star Trek, Lost, Sopranos, Dusk till Dawn, One Crazy Summer, The Futons, Hendrix, Hemingway, Stephen King, and so on, right? (but there'll be Fellini too, if someone wants to talk Fellini).

'select few', my ass.

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There's little point to talking about Fellini here now, in the middle of What color is your poop? threads. I think the dumbness of OOT definitely dumbs down the A&E contributions.

[egocidal]

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Al,

You make a valid point about the difference between A&E topics and others such as politics/sports, i.e. it is more subject to just personal opinion without a right and wrong being able to be demonstrated. Nonetheless, such topics that are interesting to many just get lost in the avalanche of SIIHP and bathroom humour and other such posts, when they would get much more play and by those interested if they didn't get lost so quickly. Many posters just aren't willing to to look through 10+ pages of threads daily to see if one they've previously posted in or read has had some more, but not a lot, of further replies.

OOT has the most noise of any forum, and fears that it will get less traffic if a split is made are simply unfounded IMO.

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I am not really in the camp of "OOT will be ruined." I think parts of OOT would survive, at least for a bit. However, how long would it be before someone bitched about making a seperate "Music" forum? What about "Film"? Hell, why not "Books"? I don't want to search through 15 forums to see one topic that I want to look for when it doesn't involve poker, and I am sure not alot of other people do either.

[BluffTHIS!]

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Sports is way too popular a subject to keep in OOT. A&E isn't popular enough to be disruptive.

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But the reverse for A&E topics is true, i.e. they are disrupted by more popular sex and fart topics and such in OOT.

[DCopper04]

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You gys do realise it's not likely to be a bunch of intellectual stuff about Fellini, right?

It's more likely gonna be Star Trek, Lost, Sopranos, Dusk till Dawn, One Crazy Summer, The Futons, Hendrix, Hemingway, Stephen King, and so on, right? (but there'll be Fellini too, if someone wants to talk Fellini).

'select few', my ass.

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I didn't mean to imply that this new forum would only be "intellectual stuff."

db, you certainly stand to benefit a great deal from this new forum. You would get to write your reviews, and you wouldn't become discouraged by the mass of threads that might bury it. So I certainly expect you to be in favor of the new forum.

Someone like me, on the other hand, does not stand to benefit very much, if at all. To me, it would make no difference if a thread about Hendrix were in OOT or A&E. I would read it all just the same. I imagine many other posters are in the same boat that I am.

Why should I want to risk screwing up OOT for little to no benefit for myself? Until you can show me why having these threads in A&E instead of OOT would be better FOR ME, then I don't see why I should be in favor of a new forum.

[CrazyEyez]

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like mat said, a lot of people don't look because of volume too. if 1/20 threads are about a topic in which they hold interest, it's not likely they're going to bother looking at it. especially if they keep the forum defaults and have like 30 topics on the front page.

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An alternate solution would be to have a functionality where you can click a thread to have it not display (like recgroups.com). I think this would be a pretty sweet feature and make it possible for anyone to tailor OOT to their own interests.

(I've only read the first 101 replies - sorry if this was mentioned already)

[diebitter]

If you read it wherever it is, then you don't lose either. Let's start from that premise: You don't lose.


But other 2+2 posters that currently avoid OOT cos of the sheer volume/speed it runs at will benefit once they stumble across Ents. These may well get something out of it, and may be encouraged to post there.

Second premise: 2+2 posters would benefit, and may be encouraged to post


So for a given subject, you might get more posts. For any given subject you want to read about, is it better, on average to have more points of view and possibilities to learn stuff or discuss stuff, or less of these? I'd argue more.

Third premise: A subject is on balance more interesting to read if it has more posts


Put these premises together, and you get, at worse, the same (but more likely better) 2+2 experience for you, a better experience for other 2+2ers not currently using OOT, and more volume on the given subjects (so better bottom-line for 2+2).

[Aloysius]

Bluff - You make some good points, and it's true that there are people who don't go to OOT, sick of wading through the avalanche of non A&E posts, but would go to an A&E forum.

But overall, while it's possible, in a split-world, that overall traffic does not diminsh too much, I doubt it would increase at the same rate in the current OOT-only world.

OOT is currently a great forum - without A&E, it loses way too much, and would just not be as popular a place. And I doubt that the loss of new traffic OOT currently drives will be offset by the *new* A&E users who were not originally OOT users.

I think what happens is the A&E / OOT forums would have a high % crossover users, but 1) becase OOT is not as good less new posters come and 2) you might actually lose current OOT posters cause they think it's a pain to look at both forums; 3) new non-OOT A&E users (like yourself Bluff) will not be a big number, and new A&E users outside of 2+2 will be nil (unlike with current OOT).

-Al

[Eurotrash]

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EDIT: mods who are afraid of this forum? WTF? Why would anyone admit that?

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Because there are a lot of mods who think that being a mod makes them special and in OOT, they get treated just like everyone else.

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I think this needs to be quoted and bumped just in case anybody missed it [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

I like your opinions in this thread, Clark.