I am trying to screw up the courage to post a “players wanted for PBVideochat game” here, on this very message board. Ought I to just dump it in the Role-playing Games category? Or would it be better to create a sub-category for “player seeking” and other recruitment threads for games not played on this forum?
It seems fine for threads seeking to organise games to be played in the PBP categories to remain in those categories: that’s convenient and clear. But “Wanted” ads in the general RPG and Boardgames will quickly drop off the bottom of the page, and it might not be obvious to the users who (in my fond imaginings) a passively on the look-out for such things how (and that it might be worthwhile) to search for them.
Yes, we do. All of us!
I heartily endorse this product or event
I don’t know or care
I don’t want it, but I’m not against others having it
The problem with such comprehensive arrays of survey questions in that they short-circuit debate and discussion, and thus condemn the thread to sink into obscurity, plunging down the page like a hammock well weighted with shot carrying its corpse to the deeps.
To answer with questions: what is the present alternative?
(A thread in “role-playing games / play by post” saying “looking for players for (such-and-such game)”.)
What does this offer that’s better than that?
(A single place for people to look for games, so that they don’t get lost among postings for ongoing games.)
How is it worse?
(At any given time, the majority of the threads will be obsolete because the game has started and is no longer looking for players.)
What else might one do?
(I could pin a topic to the top of the Play by Post category while recruiting was going on. Not sure if other mods can do this but it seems like a reasonable thing.)
Okay, that seems to have worked. Should I try pinning a “Player wanted” topic to the top of the RPGs category and see what happens to the user experience? Or ought we to think this through first?
I don’t mind at all, but does it limit visibility of other things? By default we see three threads in each section. Could that be 4? Then we could have a pinned one on each if needed?
A pinned post will only stick to the top of its category listing in your view until you have read it. So pinning want ads would at worst force each user to read them once.
I think. “Welcome new users” is not at the top of this category for me.
Well, that does seem like a bother. They’re something I would never ordinarily look at. With this setup I would either have them steadily pile up till I couldn’t see anything else, or be compelled to look at them, will I nill I. That would take them out of “I don’t mind them being there for other people” to their being an unwelcome nuisance, like popup ads, I think.
Pins can be given time limits. Perhaps we could make it a custom to leave them pinned for only a week. Thus they would be unlikely to accumulate to any extent, at least not often.
How many people are interested in play-by-post RPGs (and thus have not muted the entire category, as I did with Cool Ghosts on the SU&SD forums), but at the same time don’t want to see invitations to new games?
Why make it a sub-category? A full RPG PBF Recruitment category would keep these separate from the current RPG thread, preventing it from becoming cluttered, and would be easy to ignore for those not interested.
Ah, it’s going into play by post. I don’t think I have a significant objection to that. I was thinking of it as going into the general RPG category, where I would run into it often enough to find it a nuisance. Sorry about that!