I have a good amount of experience with forums. I’ve been in many forums, however this one has a huge flaw in it’s categorization. And it has to do with suggesting ideas.
The problem is that the only place to suggest ideas is on a stickied thread. Why is this a problem? because the only place to post suggestions is in a thread, and your suggestion will eventually be lost in the sea of replies that the thread will receive, and / or not even be noticed due to there already being a ton of replies. Think of it like this: If a youtube comment has 300 replies, most comments will reply to what the original commenter said, because that’s what originally intrigued them to post a comment. They might also reply to the 1st or second reply, or they might reply to the most recent reply, because that’s what they’ll see first. However, no one is going to reply to the 150th reply because it is so deep that no one will see it.
However, with threads, the OP gets to have their post be the topic that everyone in said thread will follow. This will allow popular ideas to gain traction, and unpopular ideas to fall off. Consequentially T10 will get an idea on what forum goers want the most.
A solution would be to create a new category of forums called " Forza Motorsport 6 suggestions ", this would prevent the standard forums from being flooded while still allowing people to make a thread that everyone in the topic will follow.
The current set up is garbage and extremely behind when compared to other forums ( battlefield forums for example )
And yes, one of my idea threads was locked about 10 minutes ago
Don’t judge
I have no shame
:edit:
I’m not lashing out on the mod who locked my forum. You were simply following and enforcing the guidelines that I was oblivious too. I am simply stating that the current way everything is being handled is terrible.
:edit 2: in this new section there could also be 3 sub - sections. One for general feedback, one for car ideas, and one for track ideas.
As far as I am aware the Turn 10 staff whose job it is to find “car ideas” want to look in one thread and the person whose job it is to find “track ideas” want to look in one thread etc
Think about you having the job of picking the next track to add to FM7’s roster and you have been told “make it the one they want the most”.
Where do you look? Well you could search the forums far and wide…or you can read one thread. Maybe you could read it for an hour a day and keep track of where you are up to.
Put the ideas in a forum and they are harder to find … IF your job at Turn 10 is to look for track ideas raised by the players.
I wish I had time this evening to go over this at length. The samples revealed today of behind-the-scenes messages we get are almost mirrored by the misguided suggestions I see over and over about forum management. So some quick points:
Battlefield’s forums are laid out in the same way as FM.net so I see no advantage there.
As SatNiteEduardo referred to, I know first hand what it takes to compile user suggestions, and that was parsing out just one thread. I also know from all the hours I spend merging duplicate threads that the number of pages here would be at least 20% more than we have now, pushing existing threads even further back. And had we had a separate thread for every poster who had a new idea, populated by the same people who had their own thread on the same topic scattered throughout that many more pages, and you had suggested, “Can we tally these?” I would have laughed and then delivered some choice words in response. Back pages are the black hole, not the thread stickied prominently at the top of the forum.
Put it this way: If you were really interested in the practice of multiuser support of ideas, why did you not seek out the similar expressions already posted in the forum and upvote them rather than creating your own thread?
then why not just create multiple sub categories? one for overall suggestions, one for track ideas, and one for car ideas.
Because I am your average person, and I have more things to do than just spending time on a forum looking for threads with similar ideas. See, that takes time and effort, time i’d rather spend just getting my outright point across.
Besides, an upvote would have done nothing. If I where to reply, then that would bring the forum back, but if it where past a certain age I would then be resurrecting a forum which is generally frowned upon
And while BF4 forums don’t necessarily have a subsection for ideas, they allow people to post their ideas in thread format which is better for community discourse. I can imagine that for someone at T10 whose job is to simply compile community feedback a sense of organization would be preferred, however, if they where to add more forum sub sections ( as stated in the above reply ) they could get their organization while still allowing community members to have proper discourse on the topic at hand.
How many different car and track ideas can there be? Given how many possibilities there are its a nightmare to allow multiple threads. But having posted on the BF4 forums I do not think the benefits are really there. In fact on most forums for other games anything you post just vanishes off the front pages very quickly.
I do agree that discussion is lacking given how wishlists are handled here but at the end of the day the devs want 1 thread per suggestion type so that is how it is done.
My personal preference would be that there be a wishlist thread where we are all encouraged to post our wish but that separate threads be allowed for discussion (but not at the expense of the wishlist). That is not allowed so things don’t get discussed. There are good and bad consequences of that. Such is life.
Lack of time is understandable but if you can’t afford the time to upvote an existing discussion and you think it would have done nothing anyway, what’s the point of suggesting it?
Completely deleting subforums that existed in the past, tend to clutter up the forums as well. Never understood the need to leave out the drag racing sub forum…