unforum

[Elijah Snow]

Forums. Love Em'? Hate Em'?

[SpaceBass]

Can't stand 'em. Especially this one.

[Ozy_y2k]

ARG forums are crap. For that matter, the ARG community generally is crap. Ooo, in fact, the problem comes right down to the fact that most of the ARG players out there are crap, as are the PMs and all of the puzzles! Actually, to be honest, most PEOPLE are crap. No, no, wait, ALL people are crap.

What's that? Meds? Oh yeah, I guess I did forget to take something this morning.....<gulp>.....ah, that's much better....



I love EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!! Forums are the BEST!!!!!!!!!! Will you be my friend????

[kimer]

[aliendial]

Well I have to say the best thing about this forum is the community that uses it; I personally dislike threaded discussion. But the alternative? Yahoo was not much better (at least you did not have to pop in and out of threads), but the best way was having devoted mods (i.e. people without other personal obligations) who could maintain a Trail that held the whole game thing together. And you can't always count on that happening.

In truth I come back to the culture and the community - intelligent, hard working, sharing, open to newbies, the lazy and the lurkers as long as everyone is on good behavior. THAT environment is what makes a forum work.

And for that, I must say thanks to Space, Steve, and his other admins that keep a bit of a lid on it here, but otherwise let us have our fun!

[Ozy_y2k]

Okay, all snark aside, I'll try to throw out at least one semi-serious response to what I expect Elijah originally intended as a "serious" META thread.

Forums, like everything else in ARGYworld (ARGdom? ARGology? ARGostomy?) are continually evolving to better serve the needs of the player base that this sort of thing attracts and as such have gotten much better at meeting those needs. Back in the pre-ARGeozoic era, during the Dark Ages of the Beast, we all had to make do with a truly craptacular interface on Yahoo! Boards which sucked monkey eggs as far as providing such innovations (now taken for granted) as threaded discussions, easy access to file attachments, etc. and what have you.

Then, on the Seventh Day, ARGweh spoke from the heavens, and lo, there was the phpBB forum software, and yea verily, it was open-source and easily adaptable, and the ARGYverse looked upon it with favor, and all was good. From this wellspring, well, sprung such things as our beloved Unforums, the dotconnectors and deaddrop forums, and other stuff hither and yon. (But mostly yon.)

(Of course, around this time a splinter group of rebels broke away from the main ARGYocracy and decided to form their own Collective. Complete with custom-designed, proprietary software, which was largely constructed to meet similar, but different, player needs. Their system, also, seems pretty sturdily designed in terms of getting to the core of accomplishing what it was meant to accomplish.)

The next major innovation, the "ARGN Ring", was a collection of like-minded websites, like guysguise and the old cloudmakers.org and ARG Planet Italy, spewed from the fevered imaginations of diverse webmasters and attracting their own special sorts of lunatic-fringe loyalists, which, when all assembled together, formed a complementary interlocking network of one-stop internet ARG mall shopping, and access to a number of useful resources like cypher breakers and encoders, jpeg encrypters, and a little Cinnabon kiosk right there in the middle. The other neat thing about the ARGN Ring was that, if you showed it to someone on videotape, that person would die seven days later. Um, no, wait, maybe that's something different.

ANYWAY, but, like, fer shure, you know, we are still protean as far as communities go. Does the success of the ARGN Ring and the Unforums mean that we don't need to further evolve and seek out new adaptive forms of self-expression? That we no longer need Boldy Go Where No ARG Has Gone Before? Hell nah! And therefore we will soon see.....

"ARG Trek II....The Wrath Of Eh! Steve!" Soon to come to a major multiplex near you. (Yes, YOU. Okay, no, not YOU. The other guy. Him. Standing behind you. Yeah, chuckles, I'm talking to YOU.)

And THAT's what I think about THAT.

Ozee

[dmax]

ARG forums? I like

- that it sounds like you have stomach cramps when you talk about em
- that they have the latest Britney gossip
- the free coffee, although it gives me stomach cramps

[Elijah Snow]

Just to clarify...

I am in no way discounting the people who participate, make up, or run these forums. I'm only asking how forums as a tool could be improved upon.

After reading a couple of posts, and my original question, I could see how that might be misinterpreted. I just wanted to clarify.

ES

[Diandra]

Tool

[Elijah Snow]

Maybe I am fixated on "Tools", Dia. I mean look at my quote!

Thought I'd throw some ideas out.

One of the features of threaded forums that I find frustrating is the ability to find old material. The search option is great, but it only shows entire threads where the material may be. For folks coming in late to a game it may be the only way of keeping up. I know I've thought twice about posting ideas for the fear that they had already been discussed.

Many industrious folks create Guides, Trails, and Who's Who docs out of the forums, and these go a long way. However, as someone who worked to keep one of these source materials going on S4E, it can be very time consuming.

So with all this in mind, does anyone have any ideas on how to improve the current systems, or are they just fine the way they are?

Thoughts?

Oh, by the way, I'll throw this out for others who may have the time and talent. When I was working on the S4E who's who I thought about creating a bot (like ALICE) who could be accessed by players at any time to ask "Who's this joker?" or "What is OL's Junkyard?". I thought it might give a rather mundane task a little ARG spice, and allow "newbies" to get up to speed quickly. Alas, there are only 26 hours a day...

ES

[catherwood]

[vpisteve]

At the very bottom left of the search page, click the Display Results as: "Posts" radio button. That gives you the individual posts.

[Elijah Snow]

[vpisteve]

NP.

Hmm, maybe we need an Unforums Tips and Tricks thread posted somewhere. These forums have a lot of great features that don't jump right out at you.

Get right on that, Space, will ya??

[SpaceBass]