Should I tighten up the forums?

[Dominic]

Too much snark does not add "flavor". It adds, well, snark. I read BurningHammer.com for its news, which is genrally pretty good. The forums are a damned flame-pit along the lines of ATT during the bad old days. But, the BurningHammer is one of the easier to use pages out there. Forum descriptors are no the place to show snark chops.


Dom
-amazed at how bad some wrestling pages are.

[138 Scourge]

I wouldn't say the category description things are "snarky" exactly. Maybe some of the real real early ones (The sightings thing that said "Hey, who cares? from way back, perhaps, but it's been changed long since). "Snarky" implies more of a negative gripey connotation than the current descriptive bits have.

[JediTricks]

I would say my humor is quite different from that of the TF wiki community, not snarky or overly anti-snarky (which is almost always more snarky than the snark it's railing against ). Anyway, it's there to give this joint a voice, and to amuse me enough to keep paying for it month after month.

[Shockwave]

I like it. It gives this place personality. It's... real. TFW has "official" descriptions on their forums to the point where the place feels like a beauracracy. Here the descriptions sound like one of our conversations which gives it a more human feel. We're people, not recordings or beauracrats. I like it and I think if the comments go this place will feel more.... I dunno... generic?

[Onslaught Six]

RID wasn't a different design team, was it? And technically it's during BW. Or the characters come from then. But this isn't the place to have that argument (Again!) so I say we put RID in the Other Stuff place and be done with it.

Yeah, it was a different team, and it was part of the Cincinnati design house no less. It was also in design a year before Car Robots/RID - a line which was released in Japan at the end of Beast Machines and here a cycle later.

...Weren't those the guys that did the rest of BW? Now I'm utterly confused.

-amazed at how bad some wrestling pages are.

It's wrestling. What do you expect?

[Dominic]

The descriptions are not even close to TF Wiki level obnoxious. But, I find that being overly conversational in a description can make the description harder to read/understand.


As for wrestling, I rather like wrestling. And, the pages are *really* bad, complete with obvious places for links to help people buy things....but no links. They also seem to assume that users will sit through videos that are part of navigating the page. If not for the fact I *really* want to see Matt "Doink the Clown" Borne wrestle again this month, I would have given up. (J-Busta being there does not hurt either.)


Dom
-considering offering his services to one of the promotions...free.

[Onslaught Six]

The descriptions are not even close to TF Wiki level obnoxious. But, I find that being overly conversational in a description can make the description harder to read/understand.

Says the man who claims that any reasonable adult on the forums should be able to understand a merged sightings/trade forum. Be consistant! Are any of the headings confusing enough to understand on their own? We know what's in the forum when it says "Generation 1." G1 stuff goes in there! I mean, really, nothing more needs to be said.

As for wrestling, I rather like wrestling. And, the pages are *really* bad, complete with obvious places for links to help people buy things....but no links. They also seem to assume that users will sit through videos that are part of navigating the page. If not for the fact I *really* want to see Matt "Doink the Clown" Borne wrestle again this month, I would have given up. (J-Busta being there does not hurt either.)

I like it too, but some of the fans are duuuuumb. And I say this as someone who used to admin a wrestling-related forum. (Actually, I still do, I mostly just troll now though.)

Dom
-considering offering his services to one of the promotions...free.

That, sir, is a slippery slope. I've a friend who films the local promotion for "free" (he gets compensated for DV tape and DVDs/cases) and it's kind of a lousy gig.

[Dominic]

I have not met any truly stupid wrestling fans. Define "stupid" in this context. Do you mean "cannot see where kayfabe ends and real life begins"? Do you mean "smarks who cannot see where kayfabe ends"? Do you mean "flame-bating troll ass holes"? What forum did you mod? Not BurningHammer, I hope.

Either way, I would be working with a local Federation to make their page a bit easier to use. I would be trying to build a portfolio, and they would get a more navigable site. If it turned into something more, fantastic. If not, there would be a sunset provision, (completion of the page, or at least the page's basic format), so it would not be an ongoing project. I live very close to an old Kowalski school. And, another local Federation, (the one I am going to see Doink at in a few weeks actually), has close ties with the WWE. (It is actually run by John Cena Sr.) Given that NEFX is (probably) not happening this year, i want to do something to build myself up creatively and build a portfolio.

Says the man who claims that any reasonable adult on the forums should be able to understand a merged sightings/trade forum. Be consistant!

A comined forum should not be terribly hard to understand. And, being snarky in a post is different than being snarky in the description of a forum.

If I was a new-ish fan, I would (hopefully) understand the concept of buy/sell/trade. But, the descriptions of G1 or BW would leave me saying "what the hell are they talking about?". And, the more a page does that, the less likely I am to stick around.


Dom
-has his phone charged in preparation for a black out.

[JediTricks]

I like it. It gives this place personality. It's... real. TFW has "official" descriptions on their forums to the point where the place feels like a beauracracy. Here the descriptions sound like one of our conversations which gives it a more human feel. We're people, not recordings or beauracrats. I like it and I think if the comments go this place will feel more.... I dunno... generic?

Totally generic, yes! I mean, we're running an unskinned forum system, aside from the site logo at the top, it looks identical to everybody else's PHPBB, mainly because nobody could come up with a solid idea of anything better, and that's fine, but yeah, if we don't say SOMETHING about who we are, we end up saying nothing.

...Weren't those the guys that did the rest of BW? Now I'm utterly confused.

I believe they fractured the BW team to do BMAC, but both were done by Cincinnati instead of Rhode Island, and they had a different dynamic with Japan. But Car Robots/RID wasn't done by Cincinnati, IIRC.

The descriptions are not even close to TF Wiki level obnoxious. But, I find that being overly conversational in a description can make the description harder to read/understand.

I do agree with you there, which is why they have bolded sections for callouts, and are kept to 2 sentences or less.

As for wrestling, I rather like wrestling. And, the pages are *really* bad, complete with obvious places for links to help people buy things....but no links. They also seem to assume that users will sit through videos that are part of navigating the page. If not for the fact I *really* want to see Matt "Doink the Clown" Borne wrestle again this month, I would have given up. (J-Busta being there does not hurt either.)

I liked wrasslin' when I was a teenager, I remember Doink from his original run even, but around the time I got out, the characters got pretty boring, less colorful, more homoerotic, and it turned into a machine designed to sell figures that are all on the same body but with different, barely-recognizable heads to overstimulated kids who can't even use the figures for the wrestling moves they want to emulate. So it surprises me exactly this much |.| to hear that the kids who monkey with wrestling forums and wikis make it shitty.

Says the man who claims that any reasonable adult on the forums should be able to understand a merged sightings/trade forum. Be consistant! Are any of the headings confusing enough to understand on their own? We know what's in the forum when it says "Generation 1." G1 stuff goes in there! I mean, really, nothing more needs to be said.

Presactly!


Alright, we're basically discussing only the minutiae of the situation, which suggests the larger aspects seem to have a green light (or at least not a vocal yellow or red), so I'm going to go for it right now.

[138 Scourge]

Well, that works just fine. And I like the new description tag for "Animated". It's funny and sad because it's true.

What do we do with "Prime" once it's on the air, by the way? "Other Now Lines"?