The default view is a necessity because it shows us all new topics in every category at once. It’s just the countless art submissions are covering up the normal discussions.
The default view is a necessity because it shows us all new topics in every category at once. It’s just the countless art submissions are covering up the normal discussions.
Let’s all have a think and sleep on how this could work (within the Discourse feature set). We have to consider how everything works together, not just individual problems. I would like to hear from others as well, as I’m hesitant to change how things work on the request of one member.
Let’s think to the future for a moment: with the release of the new Panzer Dragoon Remake and a possible Zwei and Saga remake; what would happen if we got a hundred more people coming to these forums?
What if 50+ new art submissions were submitted at once? That would mean we would have 50+ art topics burying the normal topics.
It’s just hypothetical and we most likely won’t get that many at once, but it’s not impossible. But even 20+ would be an excessive amount amongst the normal topics in the default view.
My thoughts are that promoting discussion should be of the utmost importance on a forum, so making it easy to find topics and jump in should be the goal here. To that end, I agree with Legaia and judging by the amount of comments that the art topics get they don’t instigate conversation themselves.
Perhaps the best way to proceed would be to make the contributions category private for moderators, as it is primarily moderators that create these topics. We can then use these posts to keep track of contributions, and when they’ve been added to the site perhaps an ‘Updates’ topic could be updated (perhaps this could be where all updates to the site are posted too?).
And if anyone other than a moderator posts art etc in their own topic, well, that’s fine too. We can tag these (I think) to keep track of them. It means looking in two locations (‘Contributions’ category and ‘Contributions’ tags) but perhaps the trade off is worth it.
I don’t think art posts are less worthy of their own thread than other topics.
A relevant question: do people get value from the art topics we admins share from Twitter on the public forum, e.g. this Saturn mod topic. Because, if I made these topics private, as @UrbanReflex suggested, you would no longer have the opportunity to comment on them here.
I don’t want to discourage non-admins from sharing art, but how we admins do things could potentially be revised.
Why not make them private, but then have another single art topic that contains all of the art, that way we can still comment on them. Then you could privately keep track of the submissions, while posting them all in one single topic that could be stickied at the top…?
Or would that be too much of a hassle to go back and forth between the two?
So, you’re suggesting duplication - that we post the art in a private topic and a public post in a shared art topic? Possible, although a little messy for admins. I would like to hear what other admins such as @Draikin have to say since they have to work within the system, and we already post in quite a few places.
I’m also wondering if this “problem” is relevant only because there has been a reduction in the number of non-art discussion topics. If the non-art discussion topics are something people want to promote, people should make more of these posts so the topics are bumped to the top.
If they were private, would it then not be possible for me to post art? Or would I have to send it to Solo Wing first?
@000 I think they’re saying member contributions would work the same way, but art that admins post from Twitter would be treated differently.
I absolutely want to avoid contributions via personal private messages or chat. Contributions need to be seen by multiple admins.
I’m not entirely sure of all the things you mean, I’m not used to the forum (yet?).
But it seems easy to scroll past all art topics if someone is really not interested.
Yes, I too find it easy enough to scroll past the contributions topics. All of the topics are marked with a (hopefully) appropriately coloured square which maps to a category so I find it easy enough to pick out topics related to Panzer Dragoon, Sega, Other Games, etc discussion.
It’s also worth noting that on our Facebook page, art posts often get a number of comments. So I think the lack of discussion in the art topics here is largely due to the lower activity rather than because they don’t warrant their own discussion thread/topic. Perhaps the solution is simply for members here to make the effort to reply to art topics more often in order to start a conversation around the art?
I don’t find this too much of an issue myself, but I can see the separate private art threads for moderators and one public thread for everyone being the optimal solution, aside from the fact that it makes things (even) more time-consuming for us to manage. Might also be worth asking the question if anyone hasn’t already seen the art elsewhere before seeing it on the forum?
Yes, and that is a real concern - we should look at streamlining the contributions pipeline where possible so that what we’re doing provides real value and respects the time of those who volunteer to work on the project. It is perfectly acceptable for us to say no to additional work. We need to think about how well the contributions pipeline scales over hundreds of contributions.
We would need to post the art in the public forum to ask that question, which is a good argument for making these topics public.
Hi everyone. After some investigation, I’m going to trial a new way of handling these art submissions.
I’ve created a new topic called The Fan Art Contributions Topic for singular pieces of fan art.
Each piece of fan art is in a seperate post and contains a checkbox labelled “Published” at the bottom, using a checkbox plugin for the forum software. Once we’ve published the art on the website and social media we’ll check this box. Let’s see how well it works in practice.
So whenever I want to post art here, I post it in that thread now instead of making a new thread?
Yeah, let’s try this approach. But so long as it’s posted in the Contributions category we’ll know to put it on the site in any case.
I’ve merged all of the existing single fan art topics into a new topic called The Old Fan Art Contributions Topic. I’ve also moved @Azel98’s art into a single topic and deleted a few of them that offended some users on Discord. Let me know if you have any concerns.
If you’ve got new single pieces of fan art to submit to the website, they can go in the new Fan Art Contributions Topic or in a new topic in the Contributions category if the contribution is likely to generate further discussion - we’ll reorganise it (if required) in any case.
You can Go ahead and Delete them By Art Gotten Much Better Today then in the past.