The Forum Reorg Thread [2008 Edition]

[Arun]

As you might have noticed, the forums have been substantially reorganized and as part of this move, three new forums have been created: Semiconductor Financials & Strategy, Processor & Chipset Technology, and Handheld Technology.

All of these subjects already had forums where they could be discussed up to a certain extend, but the subjects got lost in the noise and they often didn't achieve the quality that I think is possible given the knowledge and expertise of the various contributors to the Beyond3D forums. We aren't worried about the initial activity of these forums as much as by their growth rate and the quality of the discussions.

These three new forums as well as 3D Technology & Algorithms will now also sport more aggressive moderation, with the clear intention of maximising the signal-to-noise ratio. We hope that this will encourage industry professionals and high-value posters in general to contribute more, which still pleasing the rest of our audience and hopefully improving the perceived experience for lurkers and posters alike.

So that's the marketing pitch for the new forums and the separation between 3D Architectures/Chips and 3D Technology/Algorithms. There were other minor changes too, which we did think about a fair bit, such as merging the Video and the Displays forums. We also got rid of the gaming part of Handheld Talk and merged that in Console Games with the full approval of the gaming staff, on the basis that the audience wasn't so different and we could achieve better growth rates that way.

So that's it for now, we look forward to your feedback on these changes as we also monitor the overall results in terms of activity and signal-to-noise ratios. We hope this is a good start to 2008 for Beyond3D and we look forward to doing some great things this year! We definitely don't want some of the mistakes from 2007 to happen again.

 

[Skrying]

Do you guys really feel a need to have so many sub-forums? I understand the goal but the final product to me is nothing more than confusion. Sometimes the line between which forum you should post in is so fuzzy that I spend 5 minutes wondering about that alone. Does doing this really increase the amount of "useful" posts/posters finding there way to Beyond3D? Some of these forums and especially sub-forums go entire weeks without posts in them.

 

[Arun]

Okay so first - excluding Semiconductor Financials & Strategy, we haven't increased the number of 'core' (sub)forums. We changed 3D Tech/3D Algorithms so that became 3 forums, but Displays & Video was also merged.

The three new forums are supposed to serve niches, and personally I definitely think there's an audience for that and we could get some existing members more active there and grab new ones too. In addition to that, there are a few other forums aimed at specific niches:
- 3D Beginner's Questions
- GPGPU Technology & Programming
- Folding For Beyond3D Team #32377
- CellPerformance@B3D
- Industry Jobs
- Site Feedback

We're happy with those six, maybe one or two could fit as subforums instead of full forums but right now we've got reasons to keep it this way. Then there are two other subforums which are much more debatable:
- Politics & Ethics of Technology
- Unix, Mac, & BSD (3D)

I do very seriously question the point of the latter personally, because if anything having a dedicated subforum for it makes other people capable of replying in these threads unlikely to notice them. Both have decent historical reasons, I'm not convinced they still make a lot of sense though so consider them to be under review, I guess.

As for hesitating in which forum to put something, in the current layout there are two potential hesitations I can think of:
- 3D Architectures & Chips vs 3D Technology & Algorithms vs 3D Programming & Tools.
- 3D Companies & Industry vs Semiconductor Financials & Strategy

I honestly think once you get used to it the current layout should make that choice very obvious, but I'm obviously biased here and I also benefit from having moved a truckload of threads between these few forums today. We'll see how it goes - I *am* a little bit worried about what new members will do when they try figuring out where to post though, but if that turns out to be a problem I'm sure there's a way to make it a bit more obvious.

 

[Dominik D]

I still don't understand why there's a clear line between embeded/open platforms. Instead of being platform agnostic, you have PC Games separate from Console Games. In the age of multiplatforms this doesn't really make sense. Especially with handheld and console games merged.

Furthermore difference between Console Technology and Console Forum seems unintuitive at times since most discussions are company-ABC-related anyways or they should be somewhere else. Some examples from Console Technology:
"RSX architecture and cost..." - sounds like "3D Architectures & Chips" talk
"Naughty Dog & Epic Interviews about PS3 development & SPEs ..." - just a news about ND
"Yes, but how many polygons? - An artist blog entry with interesting numbers" - ok, this one is hard

In general there's no one place for user contributed "industry news" related to something else than one specific game and they end up in many different places based on the tastes of authors. There was a day when I wanted to start a new thread, but got overwhelmed with the talk of industry specialists contributing here and completely unintuitive distribution of topics and gave up. Every time I see a new thread, I scratch my head: doesn't it fit more in XYZ section? No, I must be wrong, moderators didn't move it...

 

[SugarCoat]

I still don't understand why there's a clear line between embeded/open platforms. Instead of being platform agnostic, you have PC Games separate from Console Games. In the age of multiplatforms this doesn't really make sense. Especially with handheld and console games merged

My worry with console and pc gaming talk merged would be a plethora of vs threads popping up.

 

[StefanS]

My worry with console and pc gaming talk merged would be a plethora of vs threads popping up.

Indeed, there're quite a few people on both sides that don't play that well together. That's why we decided that to keep them separate even way before the latest reorganisation.

 

[Squilliam]

Silly comment below

(What about changing the console section into a gaming section and putting Pc Games and Pc hardware talk under it as a subforum or at least group them so they appear next to each other on the forum. I didn't know we had a P.C games forum for a couple of days because it was hiding down at the bottom.)

Edit: I changed my resolution and it makes sense now :$

Woops

 

[silent_guy]

My biggest complaint about the forums is that it is impossible to see if a forum has received new posts when its sub-forum also have received new posts. This is somewhat annoying because I don't care one bit about any of the sub-forums of 'Core Forums'.

So when some lone soul posts in "Video Technology, Displays & HTPC" (a sub-forum that, no offense, should be abolished or moved to some non-3D purgatory), the 3D Hardware, Software & Output Devices forum shows up as being updated. Not a big deal when you have a big internet pipe available, but when your internet setup is slow and your browser doesn't have the ability to issue double clicks to mark a forum as 'read' (*cough* iPhone *cough*), it's a real pain.

Other than the grass is green, the birds are singing, and after 2 weeks of buckets of rain, there must be at least 10 feet of fresh snow in Lake Tahoe. So don't worry about it too much.