What THREADS have you been LOCKING?

Try bookmarking What Board Games have you been playing? .

Right now I can see there that Washington's War, Yomi, Survive, Resistance and TI3 were played over the weekend.

Bullwinkle wrote:

dave wrote: Seriously, no talk about the forum rearrangement (not to mention interface change)?

Regarding the interface, I'd planned on waiting a few days to see what shakes out. Usually these things come out without all the changes and the mods need time to make those final adjustments. I'm assuming the multiple-page threads will switch the page numbers from vertical back to horizontal, for example, and that we'll get previewing of postings back, too.

What browser and OS are you using. The post preview is on, and the page numbers are horizontal. Anyone else getting vertical page numbers

As far as the locking of threads goes, I don't understand if we're expected to use multiple threads or massive threads. I can see the value of individual threads for certain things such as boardgames(although I agree that some discussion will be lost), but we certainly don't need individual threads for things like iOS games.

Well some discussion may be lost, but some will be gained. Some people that felt comfortable with replying to the thread with one or two sentence, might feel less comfortable starting a new thread with one sentence, at least until they see that other people have done the same. People that might not bother to open "The What Have You Been Playing" thread, may very well open a thread with a game title in it and join the conversation.

We'll see what happens with iOS. The forums evolve kind of organtically. We split, merge, expand and contract. When we first started, there were two forms for AT games (contemporary and classic) and no place to disscuss anything other than board games (like movies, beer, video games). iOS games weren't even blip on the radar yet.

Well there's costs and promises to everything. I really value the community that the Fort has created. From what I am hearing, so do you all.

However, we are kind of up against the wall right now to either grow or die. And by grow, I mean simply keep pace with attrition. While those threads may have fostered a sense of community and been a comfortable place for regulars to chit chat, it also gave the impression that the site was a tight clique of about a dozen people chatting in 5 threads. That is both off-putting and intimidating to new members. On the rare occasion that a new person took the plunge into one of those threads, they were mostly ignored, or run over in some ongoing discussion, or the incomprehensible (to an outsider) exchange between long time members.

Furthermore, it gave the exact same impression to advertisers and publishers - 12 dudes on a dead site.

So the bottom line is really the bottom line. This site hasn't broken even since it started. It's been running on member donations and my allowance money for three years, and I'm getting to the point where I really need new shoes. I also refuse to keep going back to the donation well. So - GROW OR DIE.

The promise of this change is that since this is a boardgame site, boardgamers will find it. And when they do, if they see a thread entitled say, YOMI, or SURVIVE, or even HBO GAME OF THRONES, they might open it. Since it's a thread with people talking about something they are interested in and know about, it would be pretty easy for them to jump in and join the conversation, without feeling like they have to break into a group of close knit friends who have had an ongoing 500 page conversation for the past year and a half. The site will grow.

The cost is that the new, individual threads may be a little less warm and a little less chit-chatty. We do want to keep that community aspect of the Fort, but maybe we can find another way, and another place for that to happen. I hope we can. You're smart guys. Check out the forum index, think about it. Maybe carve out a place in the LOUNGE section.