Important bulletin board changes

[Cz]

Hi everybody,

I'm currently working out the plans for some more changes on the bulletin board, and would like to say a bit on the why, what and when. I would especially like you to be aware of the "why" part, as it's very important to the future of this bulletin board.

Why?
It is no news that this bulletin board take up a lot of resources - i.e. time - for the community team, which currently consists only of yours truly. I do get great help from the ARK CR team with moderation (and other tasks), but having volunteer moderators also creates some administration work, so it's not totally free resources.

This time could've been spent elsewhere, on other tasks, like reading all the threads (I read some, but far from all), digging up information, posting information, running competitions, being in-game, etc.

Getting time for all these other tasks was the reason for cutting many forums some time ago. While it helped, it didn't turn out as efficient as we hoped. Users of the bulletin board have become nicer, and mostly follow the social guidelines, but there's still too much off-topic posts.

These off-topic are split into two groups: Off-topic for the entire forum (e.g. personal conflicts, or complaining about moderation or Funcom), and off-topic for the specific forum. I guess the former will never be completely gone, but we can cope with the current level of it. If it becomes a bigger problem, we will simply be harsher in handling it. The latter we now hope to solve by simply adding more forums.

Adding more forums is almost like going back to the old layout, and I can hear people asking why we changed them in the first place then. To answer; At that time, we didn't have the resources to handle it, nor the resources to do much about it except take an "easy" way out. Now the users are being nicer, we have more moderators - who have proven they can handle the task, and I've gotten some other things taken care of that were simply growing over my head some months ago. Back then, reducing the forums gave less to do. Now, expanding them will hopefully have the same effect.

An important note though is that if this doesn't ease the task of running the bulletin board, other measures will have to be considered. One option is harsh moderation with a zero-tolerance policy. Another is closing it all down, handing it over to a fan site (which I know many consider a good idea anyway). Of course, I might get more people on the team, or tools to make it possible to turn it all over to ARK CR, which would help me a lot.

What?
The changes consist of three parts:
1. Splitting the forums into two groups - Community forums and Funcom forums: The Funcom forums will be the forums we consider our direct responsibility. The Community forums will be what we consider purely player to player interaction. Though Funcom people are of course allowed to post and participate in the Community forums, you should never expect it.
2. Renaming the forums: To give each forum more of an in-character feel for what it represents, we're going to change the names on almost all of them. E.g. the Beginners' Corner will be named Morning Star, after the space station where you create your character.
3. Adding and refocusing forums: We will add several new forums, including one social / off-topic one (named Reet's Retreat), and refocus one of the existing ones (the Role-Playing forum will be strictly in-character, and another forum will be added to cover the OOC part).

When?
As soon as possible. Tuesday or Wednesday this week, unless something gets in the way.

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To avoid making this thread grow to the length of an average nightmare, I'd like to keep feedback and questions to private messages. I'll reply to important concerns and questions here.

[Cz]

Got a great suggestion for the Beginners' Corner, as that forum needs to be more visible. "New Arrivals" is the new name.