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Hi, I would like to submit a request to the moderation staff (Gary, Ross, and to an extent James).
I can't speak for the rest of the boards, but I spend a great deal of time in the Adventure Path subforums. These forums really help "make" the APs for me, and for many other readers as well. I know you recognize this too, as you've started explicitly instructing readers in the print product to go online and log on to the forums. (I'm referring to the Forward of CC#6.) This is great.
However, the forums are a mess. A thread will start with one subject line, and then meander into another. Sometimes, threads that started off well get buried in dozens of posts asking for people to share email addresses. Othertimes, the same question is asked a dozen times in a dozen threads. This is how human conversation usually goes, and it needs a steward to help make it useful.
There are true gems in the forums. Entire adventures. New encounter tables. New NPCs. Guides for how to tweak or fix encounters or plotlines. Pure gold for running an AP, and a great part of using the Paizo product.
I want to be able to get at that gold. I guess my vision for the AP boards is less "a place to discuss" and more "a giant wikipedia entry." My vision might not match up to your vision, but I'd still like to share mine.
One proposal would be to be dilligent about Forking and Combining threads. I know you don't like to delete/ignore posts, that's fine. But if you could help us combine all of the "my Economy in Kingmaker is out of control!" theads (and put the already-described answer to that problem in front of people), and also peel away all of the "can I have your email?" posts from an otherwise useful thread, then would be a huge help.
Another proposal is to find a way to enshrine the gold. Currently we have two systems: stickied threads, and favorited posts. Neither really accomplish the goal. For specific posts (or specific threads) that have great community-created content, I propose that we can nominate it for enshrinement. Perhaps if the post gets over 30 Favorites (or some other mechanic) it gets promoted to a special "AP contributions and FAQ" section. Then this special forum can be a one-stop shop that contains answers to common questions ("what advancement track do we use?") as well as preserve that really cool model of the Vekker's Cabin that someone made.
I will suggest that by being a lot more proactive in your moderation, specifically to encourage organization, particularly in the Adventure Path forums, would help realize greater value from your products.
Thanks for listening!
Chief Technical Officer
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One proposal would be to be dilligent about Forking and Combining threads.
We generally avoid forking and combining because those tend to change the conversations. Forking divorces conversation from its history, and combining makes it difficult for people who have followed one part of the conversation to figure out what they've read and what they haven't. (You'll note that our most common approach to redundant threads is to lock one and point readers to the other.)
Another proposal is to find a way to enshrine the gold. Currently we have two systems: stickied threads, and favorited posts.
I'd like to point out a third: lists. Lists give you the ability to identify the "gold" yourself, and then you can use a thread to draw attention and discussion to your lists. I think that's probably the best current solution for what you want.
Frankly, I think you're right when you say that you don't want a messageboard, you want a wiki. And I don't think trying to shoehorn the boards into the form you'd like is really the best solution for anyone. (We do have future plans that I think you'd like, but they wont see the light of day for quite some time.)
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Paizo doesn't have the staff to really dig for gold in the forums. My suggestion is you start a wiki and keep track of the best suggestions. Link to it on the forums and keep the forum thread active. You can probably find other volunteers who are willing to help you with it.
I think you will find tracking this sort of thing takes a lot more time that you think.
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Here is an excellent example of a wiki page devoted to an adventure path with many contributors. I found it as I was preparing for my Shackled City campaign. If we had such a page set up for each adventure path, it would be awesome.
A few people have suggesting listing, fave'ing, etc. but that's more useful for after you've already found something. I got the impression the OP was looking for a way that people can separate the wheat from the chaff when they are still looking.
Now I think this could *only* work for the AP forums (certainly not forums covering multiple, unrelated products), but a collapsible listing of the most-favorited/most-listed posts within an AP forum is something that would make it a bit easier to find the gems. It also would be something that would be a one-time cost in coding rather than an ongoing cost in moderation time.
Other things, such as 30 GMs all posting email addresses to get a PDF someone made, would become a practice of the past if/when a private messaging feature gets introduced.
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There are true gems in the forums. Entire adventures. New encounter tables. New NPCs. Guides for how to tweak or fix encounters or plotlines. Pure gold for running an AP, and a great part of using the Paizo product.
I want to be able to get at that gold. I guess my vision for the AP boards is less "a place to discuss" and more "a giant wikipedia entry." My vision might not match up to your vision, but I'd still like to share mine.
I don't know if it is a moderation request or a feature request... but there are some really good thoughts here that deserve consideration.
At the heart of the matter is that the AP forums need different features from the rest of the forums to be of maximum utility to players and GMs. They need some features that exist on other forums, like the ability to manage images (for maps and art, which people provide in abundance). An unsorted forum might have been fine in the neginning, but the Runelords forum is truly daunting now, and it would be really great to have a subforum to browse for advice on certain chapters, or user-made content. In most cases, the threads are easily categorized!
Honestly, I think sub-forums with reasonable categories would reduce a lot of clutter. The AP forums are an added value for the customer that actually appreciates in value with age. Cultivating them a little and continuing to plug them in the APs (*and hopefully, in the Runelords AP hardcover release)
I don't think any other adventure content in all of RPG-dom receives that kind of community support, and it might benefit Paizo to shout that from the rooftops (while supporting it with technical features). If APs are (as they say) Paizo's bread and butter, maybe they deserve a little extra feature love like the rules forum got with FAQs.