Maybe a forums rework is need it?

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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First of all, i do not know if this is even possible and the right place to Post it. Just something that sometimes feels overwhelming and time consuming.

I’ll try to make this Short and understandable.

Take X Y Z and devs/forum users.

X creates a NEW topic. The topic seems interesting for a Couple of users including Y and Z. X receives some replies on his topic, one of them being from Y…now Z is not on the same page with Y and a contradictory conversation starts. A lot of Times it happends that this contradiction ends up with Trolling/name calling/topic closure, only because Y and Z have different opinions.

Now the bad part comes for the devs and forum users. Usually this thing between Y and Z goes on for days/weeks and in most case either self expires or is being closed by a Moderator.

Why not have the conversation between Y and Z optional and have the Main topic Clean, something like YouTube/Facebook. I was thinking of somekind of “message/reply” style topic interaction where Y and Z could reply to eachother without Messing up X’s Main topic, while still having their chat opened for all users that enjoy some good Popcorn.

Maybe this could make reading on this forums a lot less stressfull/distracting for the devs and other forum users. Topic could finally have some content apart Having Y and Z all over the place, and, maybe a dev/mod would even take their time and reply to X’s topic.

I Had my Account suspended a Couple Times for going a mile to far, but i also find Y and Z conversations useless and mainly offtopic(unfortunately, atm i find myself between those Y’s and Z’s). You might say, just skip it, sure no Problem…if it would only be a Couple of posts, usually it goes for 10+ replies from Y and Z( those Walls of text).

In other words, if you are a normal Reader and not there for the popcorn, you kinda read a bad book…sometimes interesting content…but without a Happy Ending.

So,
Why not Upgrade the forums with some QoL Features?

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I do get confused about what I was reading in original post buy the time I read 60 or so in a 160 post string. Not picking sides and I enjoy reading alot of the posts. Sometimes can’t tell who is backing what at times it seems people have changed sides from their original opinion. Generally agree with points from both sides unless it’s a I hate this or that rant. Having a separate string of posts for people that just want argue more than be constructive would be fine with me.

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I was expecting that :slight_smile: , sorry for it.
Was trying to see if it is possible to have replies more compact, in Order to have an easier time to go through ontopic replies. Check youtube messaging for a example.
For example i reply to a video, you reply aswell. Now the third Person comes in and replies to my reply in the Video. His reply should be optional for you to read.

Makes more Sense?

PS: i’ll get you to understand me, one way or another, in this life or the Next and so on :wink:

Edit: i do not know why i always end up with These Walls of Text. Maybe because of doubting that i will be understood.

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I have in the past been a forum moderator, an administrator as well as a forum rat / lurker.
While it has been some ten years since I wielded those powers, I don’t think what you are asking is possible.

It’s an interesting idea.

I just don’t think the software is capable of this action.

Which would then mean a person, Mod or Admin would need to “adjust” things.
These people are for the most part volunteers, even if they work for the company. They most likely have other duties and obligations.

It is for this reason that I think any idea which would require more effort from a volunteer would fail.

Moderation and Administration are NOT easy tasks.
It may look easy from the outside, but believe me it is a difficult job indeed.

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@Coty I wasn’t talking about your current post witch has merit. But some of the very long posts that go on. I am a one finger texter on my phone. Don’t always catch typos and auto fill and not about to talk to this phone.

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The software they’re using on these forums probably wouldn’t support a feature where “replies to replies” could be shrunk and expanded the way e.g. Reddit or Youtube comments section does. It would likely require migrating to a whole new forum platform, or at least installing a huge load of new cyberware into the current one.

As much as I appreciate it that Funcom still has traditional forums, rather than stuffing all discussion to sink into the forgotten abysses of modern social media platforms, I’m not sure whether such a major overhaul would be worth the effort.

But I do think @Coty’s idea is not bad per se. It would quite probably improve readability a lot if sidetracked discussions were automatically rerouted to their own paths.

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Ooo topic not yet closed.

Hope is reaching higher Levels!

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Sorry to be the party pooper, but @droch-aon and @Kapoteeni got it right. These forums run on Discourse, which does not support threaded comments and most likely won’t:

I don’t see Jeff Atwood changing his mind about the design principles of Discourse:

And I also don’t see Funcom investing time and effort into migrating the forums to a different software.

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Why you Had to link me that? :))

Really hopeless now :crazy_face:

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I know this is old but it seems relevant maybe?

There certainly is a ton of ways to do this sort of thing - dunno about the forum application being used here. AI is to the point where it could easily map our replies and code them based on relevance to the initial topic then priority sort an interactive graph for us to use - that could expand in any and every direction whatever your particular interest - the base node of course being “Funcom” and first children nodes being their products with animated rotations and zooms. I’m sure everyone has seen static DB examples like these:

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This sort of 3D polymorphic graphing is mature and the AI is now pretty much there for it to be implemented for something like this if anyone ever got the notion to do so. Inline forum texts is such a tired old metaphor for group conversations… :confused: I hope someday something different will replace it.

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Impressive necro! :skull: :smiling_imp:

Br00TCn1

I mean, I get that AI and ML are all the rage these days. A project just isn’t sexy if it isn’t AI/ML – or blockchain – but people keep forgetting that you can rarely solve people problems with technology.

If you read the original post, it talks about the problem of not being able to follow a topic because of pointless derailments and toxicity. Ain’t no tech going to solve that, because it’s a people problem, a problem caused by people being people.

Pretty much the only way to keep any kind of forum clean and civilized is through moderation. Part of that is having moderators, but a larger part is cultivating a self-moderating community, and maintaining a certain culture in that community.

This, of course, is hard to do and it’s never permanent. I have no idea if there’s a way to bring the community back to what it should be after it’s gone toxic, or what that way is, but that’s a completely separate topic.

What I do know is that the only AI that could solve this problem in a definitive fashion would be an AGI, and if you ever build one, don’t forget to share some of your wealth and fame with us mortals :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Screenshot_20211210-223635_Samsung Internet
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Yeah, he talked about walls of text. Imagine an initial post is a node (floating rotatable dot with subject as text), each reply to that post is connected to that post as a flyout node. A reply to a replay however (and that’s were the weeds get think) shows as a node to the reply node and not the original post. A malleable color-coded star-cluster layout if you will. The only reason for the AI is to size the nodes as more or less relevant to it’s parent node. Nothing in-line that people have to scroll through.

There would be a navigable 3D star cluster in some portion of the UI and a text box that either opened in traditional fashion like you’re reading now when a node was selected, or a mouse over pop-out of the contained text in that node. People could mouse over the Original Posts and then mouse over the flyout nodes to read the replies. No walls of text. No noise, only signal - unless of course the OP was noise.

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And BTW, I believe we have statistical proof that form and function do indeed direct people’s behavior. Many many studies and lots and lots of data on the causes, affects, and differences between Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook for example. So many like this out there:

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Yep… if any change needs to happen is an autolock function after 30 days since the last reply.

I’m pretty such the forums have this function, but doesn’t work sometimes.

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Replace all people with AIs?

At the very least I’d be interested to see how long it’d take before the AIs learned to derail discussions and adopt toxic behavior if they didn’t have human role models to guide them in the wrong direction.

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