runouw.com

I think most of us can agree that some forums are pointless, the organization is weird, and that there's other discrepancies with the forum. So to fix this once and for all, I typed up a list of what the forum should be like. Any objections can be mentioned here, as well as in the poll, at the bottom of this post. Ven, OJ, and I all already have agreed on this in case you were curious.
Proposed Changes

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Main

• News
  
• Rules
• Welcome
• Site Discussion
  
  • Graveyard
    
    • Events [Halloween, Winter, Runolympics, April Fools 2015 forums become are moved into here as subsub(idk how many subs that is)forums)]
    • Other [Flash Player Showcase, Story Discussion, Raymond's Return, Runouw.com Anime Planning & Examination]
• Forum 23 - Combine the level mod forum with this and move it out of site discussion so staff can see it easier.

Level Portal

• Level Portal Designing General - [suggestions, duels, statistics, resources, discussion, etc.]
  
  • SM63 Level Designer [contests, tips, tutorials, etc]
    
    • SM63 Collections
      
    • SM63 Series
  • LL Level Designer
    
    • LL Collections
    • LL Series
  • Level Moderator Forum
• Level List
• Super Mario 63 Levels
• Last Legacy Levels

Runouw's Games

• Super Mario 63 General [no change]
  
• Last Legacy General [effectively gets rid of the 3 pointless generals]
• Other Games

Other Games

Artwork

• Flash Player Showcase - Graveyard. A lot of it's contents do not fit in gaming nor the game showcase.
• Programming

• Game Showcase

• Media
  
• General Artwork
  
  • Stories - Combine all the different story forums into 1 subsubsubforum and just tell people to tag it from now on with some kind of tag system similar to this

Off-Topic

• Gaming
  
  • Minecraft
    
  • Pokemon
  • Nintendo
  • Valve - Valve's a ♥♥♥♥ company and it only got it's own forum because of the circlejerk of how great it was. Everything in it can easily just be put in the general gaming forum.

• Off-Topic
• Forum Games (begrudgingly)
  
• Fortress of Awesome
  
  • Runouw.com Anime Planning & Examination - the fact it still exists is astounding. Graveyard it.

• Serious Discussion

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To summarize:

• Add "events" forum and "other" forum to the Graveyard, and organize the graveyard a bit using those new forums.
• Move Forum 23 out of the site discussion forum and put it in Main so staff can see it better. Also, merge the level moderator forum with it. This is completely insignificant to non-staff.
• Get rid of the SM63 and LL forums, replace it with Runouw's Games. Have a SM63 general and LL General in it to discuss the game itself and not levels. Also have other games subforum which is a merged version of the entire other games forum that will be deleted.
• Rename Level Portal General to Level Designing General, put any general threads such as contest theme suggestions in it, also will be a place for stats, the universal duel arena, tutorials, LD tier list, get rid of needed threads and or combine them. Put the SM63 LD forum and the LL LD forum in it as well, the current LL levels forum will be renamed to Level Collections to match SM63, and a level series forum will be made for LL.
• Flashplayer showcase completely graveyarded. It's useless, can't deny it.
• Stories subforum will have all it's subforums combined into subforum and people will be encouraged to tag it from now on.
• Valve forum merged with gaming forum.
• R.A.P.E.Runouw anime and planning graveyarded after like 5 years of inactivity.

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VOTE HERE!

No shame because


Yes this is peer pressure, yes I approve these changes, yes the fact that LL stuff is still included in the proposed layout means you should all avoid using the LL forums and let them die in peace.

i agree but i have one issue
please get rid of the raymond game forum, that ♥♥♥♥ is the most embarrassing thing i've ever done and at this point it's not even relevant to look at when the timeline summarizes it well enough

Well, if you propose a bunch of independent changes you basically force us to say "No" even if we would disagree with one of them. In other words, it would be far more effective to split the poll into each essential subject respectively. Apparently I also agree with most changes (especially the ones that don't pertain me directly :>) but I have further suggestions:

• Tell me, for what reason exactly is the Graveyard a subforum of Site Discussion? You can just move it into the Board Index, beneath Site Discussion (and above F23 for you staffers), it wouldn't damage there in any way and would be more comfortable.
• An alternative plan could be having "Graveyard - Events" and "Graveyard - Other" as two direct subs of Site Discussion. "Events" contains LDCs and Runouw Votes along with the other subforums (no extra subforums for them!) and "Other" contains all sort of expired announcements or trash topics like e.g. PY's "You're all so ♥♥♥♥ mean".
• I actually have doubts if LL series is ever gonna be used seriously, considering the already low activity on the SM63 series subforum. I would be okay with leaving it as the way it is.
• Move the level list thingy ("Go to the level list! ... [numbers] redirects in total") somewhere into the portal section if that's appropriate.
• Merge all the three LL general forums (Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc.) into one if you aren't planning that already.

And my most important thing:

Once we already doing a structure overhaul, please finally clean the Level Designing forums from locked trash topics such as unfinished series or topics for already known glitches etc. If you don't want to delete them already, please give them a separate locked subforum or a place in the graveyard. Thank you.

Vendai wrote:you should all avoid using the LL forums and let them die in peace.

I was waiting for clarification on this, I assume now they've officially died. We don't even host LL contests there anymore.

Supershroom wrote:Well, if you propose a bunch of independent changes you basically force us to say "No" even if we would disagree with one of them. In other words, it would be far more effective to split the poll into each essential subject respectively. Apparently I also agree with most changes (especially the ones that don't pertain me directly :>) but I have further suggestions:

If you have disagreements with one thing, as far as I am concerned that is something that needs to be addressed and you SHOULD vote No.

Supershroom wrote:Tell me, for what reason exactly is the Graveyard a subforum of Site Discussion? You can just move it into the Board Index, beneath Site Discussion (and above F23 for you staffers), it wouldn't damage there in any way and would be more comfortable. An alternative plan could be having "Graveyard - Events" and "Graveyard - Other" as two direct subs of Site Discussion. "Events" contains LDCs and Runouw Votes along with the other subforums (no extra subforums for them!) and "Other" contains all sort of expired announcements or trash topics like e.g. PY's "You're all so ♥♥♥♥ mean".

Because we don't need forums people rarely need to visit clogging up the index. It's better off in site discussion for the sake of keeping the index shorter.

Supershroom wrote:I actually have doubts if LL series is ever gonna be used seriously, considering the already low activity on the SM63 series subforum. I would be okay with leaving it as the way it is.

Whether it is or isn't, I really do not care. It is to match SM63, plain and simple.

Supershroom wrote:Move the level list thingy ("Go to the level list! ... [numbers] redirects in total") somewhere into the portal section if that's appropriate.

I was going to do that last night but was too tired and forgot tbh.

Supershroom wrote:Merge all the three LL general forums (Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc.) into one if you aren't planning that already.

...did you read the list?

And my most important thing:

Supershroom wrote:Once we already doing a structure overhaul, please finally clean the Level Designing forums from locked trash topics such as unfinished series or topics for already known glitches etc. If you don't want to delete them already, please give them a separate locked subforum or a place in the graveyard. Thank you.

That is already about half the intention, even though I didn't directly say it anywhere. "get rid of needed threads and or combine them" is meant to say that.

Supershroom wrote:Well, if you propose a bunch of independent changes you basically force us to say "No" even if we would disagree with one of them.

Yup, that's wholly intentional. If you have any qualms whatsoever, we want to see what you have to say.

Supershroom wrote:

• Tell me, for what reason exactly is the Graveyard a subforum of Site Discussion? You can just move it into the Board Index, beneath Site Discussion (and above F23 for you staffers), it wouldn't damage there in any way and would be more comfortable.
• An alternative plan could be having "Graveyard - Events" and "Graveyard - Other" as two direct subs of Site Discussion. "Events" contains LDCs and Runouw Votes along with the other subforums (no extra subforums for them!) and "Other" contains all sort of expired announcements or trash topics like e.g. PY's "You're all so ♥♥♥♥ mean".

Because it's generally not something people need quick access to, and this is the most relevant location for it; also, the entire point of this is to clean up and condense the Index page. We've been in the process of a graveyard cleanup anyway, because there are (or were) a lot of spam topics that should have been deleted in the first place. LDCs and RVs and generally just significant/important threads will go to the Graveyard when locked, otherwise insignificant locked topics like the one you mentioned will either remain in their original subforums or be deleted entirely. We don't have much reason to put them in a special place.

Supershroom wrote:

• I actually have doubts if LL series is ever gonna be used seriously, considering the already low activity on the SM63 series subforum. I would be okay with leaving it as the way it is.

This was proposed to make the layout more consistent with what we already have for SM63. This is also to help facilitate the move for any people who might be coming over here from the old LL forums, and also to open up more options for people if LL eventually becomes a bigger thing.

Supershroom wrote:

• Move the level list thingy ("Go to the level list! ... [numbers] redirects in total") somewhere into the portal section if that's appropriate.
• Merge all the three LL general forums (Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc.) into one if you aren't planning that already.

Both of these are already in the proposal. Check under "Level Portal" and "Runouw's Games".

Supershroom wrote:And my most important thing:

Once we already doing a structure overhaul, please finally clean the Level Designing forums from locked trash topics such as unfinished series or topics for already known glitches etc. If you don't want to delete them already, please give them a separate locked subforum or a place in the graveyard. Thank you.

Locked topics, as I mentioned before, are going to stay in their subforums if they're not important. I can bring up a sort of mass cleanup of threads like that, but I don't really see any reason to do so. Maybe if we put an expiration date on threads like unfinished series, since users are asked to PM a level mod once they have enough levels to post, and after a certain point of inactivity it can safely be assumed that they won't?

Thank you for bringing this stuff up, by the way. It's exactly the kind of discussion I want to see happening. And the more quickly we get through these discussions, the faster we can enact changes and fixes that everyone's on board with. (also please cast a vote in the poll just for the sake of having data)

Karyete wrote:

Vendai wrote:you should all avoid using the LL forums and let them die in peace.

I was waiting for clarification on this, I assume now they've officially died. We don't even host LL contests there anymore.

Vendai wrote:I still think we need to actually figure out what's going on with LL. Runouw, if you're reading this:

• The forums are dead.
• The game is dead.
• The contests are lacklustre. Seven entrants at most, and that's a stretch.
• There is a ton of redundant LL stuff here... still.
  
  • There are three Last Legacy portals. Three.
• Attempts to salvage the fanbase have been left entirely up to quite possibly the least capable people on the forums.
• A lot of us are of the opinion that the LL site in general was a bad move, and that these are things we needed to get sorted months, possibly years, ago.

I'd love to be wrong about any of these.

I don't think they've "officially" died yet, but at this point, it's hardly up to Runouw to decide that anymore. Sorry, but the LL forums seem like they were just way too optimistic and ambitious of an idea to work, especially for a game that was so early in development at the time and for a community that was already small to begin with. Keeping the community centralized here has been working far better.



EDIT: Holy ninjas batman

also

Brando wrote:I don't actually mean no I just felt like there wasn't much of a point to the poll since there's no negative repercussions to going ahead with this. I get that you guys want to make sure with everyone before doing things but this case actually felt like if you had gone through with it from the start either no one would care much or if they did notice a problem it'd be so inconsequential it could just be immediately changed.

me as well, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone complained how we give the users no voice.

Also, speaking of combining threads like Raz mentioned, I just want to clarify one thing:

Raz wrote:

Level Portal
• Level Portal Designing General - [suggestions, duels, statistics, resources, discussion, etc.]
  
  • SM63 Level Designer [contests, tips, tutorials, etc]
    
    • SM63 Collections
      
    • SM63 Series
  • LL Level Designer [contests, tips, tutorials, etc]
    
    • LL Collections
    • LL Series
  • Level Moderator Forum
• Level List
• Super Mario 63 Levels
• Last Legacy Levels

Runouw's Games
• Super Mario 63 General [no change]
  
• Last Legacy General [effectively gets rid of the 3 pointless generals]
• Other Games

A lot of unnecessary duplicate threads exist between the SM63 LD and LL LD forums (most notably Contest Theme Suggestions), or simply should be in both but are for some reason only in SM63 (LDC Hall of Fame, Alternate Music Co-op Library, Tier List, Community Help & News, etc), and we want to merge/move those threads into Level Designing General so that they're more accessible to everyone.

Raz wrote:Stories - Combine all the different story forums into 1 subsubsubforum and just tell people to tag it from now on with some kind of tag system similar to this

I think this is a good idea, personally. Having four different subforums for stories seems a little overkill, especially considering it doesn't seem that popular.

Personally, I say go for it. As the quote from brando states, there's no downsides to the whole thing, and any problems anyone has would be easy to fix.