I see a trend growing on Chief Delphi that makes me kinda sad. I am seeing a rapid rise in the number of games compared to the number of technical and helpful topics. I personally feel that this is against the core purpose of this forum, and that it is causing the slow degradation of this forum.
I am not against the idea of games, I would just prefer there to be less of them. I have participated in them in the past and it was fun. However, I see no need for multiple “FRC Mafia” Threads to exist at the same time. It is distracting for new users of Chief Delphi and moves people away from the core reason why this forum was founded.
This forum was founded to help every team that needs help with anything FIRST related from gearboxes to chairman’s videos, not to see who can count to 10,000 before the mods say something. The quality of this forum overall is degrading rapidly because seeing the high number of these threads makes new members (and even some veterans) to CD think poorly of this website because that is how it appears.
Personally, I have the Games topic muted, and this is a solution for veteran users, but this only affects me. As I have stated previously, New members see the games above the actual valuable technical discussions because they are getting the most responses. I am not sure the best way to solve this issue, but I hope to see less of these threads in the future.
Although I participate probably too much in these games, I see how this could be annoying. Maybe there’s a way to auto mute these or keep them out of the latest unless you explicitly want them?
Is there a way to actually ban users in threads like “Ban the person above you!”? It’s weird how the same people that are “banned” keep posting in that thread…
However I can see the ability to ban users in other threads being abused very quickly. Probably best to not add that feature.
Users can mute specific categories in their preferences. It doesn’t help if the games are mixed in with other stuff. For example, if you mute Games/Trivia, you go from this:
This is the correct answer IMO. You can also mute individual threads (at the bottom of the thread). Maybe the games topic should be muted by default? Is that possible?
There is a history of games on CD. Look up thread necromancer or tpam. Just in the old layout they we’re more isolated.
Users really shouldn’t be obligated to sign in and configure their profile to filter out the “noise.” It’s raises the barrier to entry for participation in the forum, and makes the site less useful to lurkers and other infrequent users. One of the bigger downsides to the Discourse move, in my opinion.
I would certainly agree to muting certain categories right off the bat for new users. But if so, I think there would also need to be a sticky post that let them know these categories were muted, with instructions on how to unmute them. I know I, personally, never look at the categories view, just the latest view. As a result, if these were muted for me, I never would have even known that category existed.
Agreed about muting these by default, possibly with a sticky explaining managing muted categories.
I would note that I think this was the default behavior on the “New Posts” page on old CD, which I think is the nearest analog to the current “Latest” page.
I have participated in many of these threads and I think that it is very oversaturated. Games like mafia I’m more okay with but things like moderator counting are kinda just lame. The ban the person above you thread has also gotten like this where people will say the same thing like 6 times in a row. Threads like 1 to 10,000 are also kinda boring and dumb. I think we should have a discussion for what threads we should keep and what threads we should just lock and put aside.
Just looking at the first few games that show up in the category I would support keeping the mafia games, the caption contests, and 4 letter word ladder. The rest of the threads I would support just locking and being done with them because the posts in there aren’t really creative at all. Word association is the only one I’m kinda iffy on because it’s generally okay but at this point basically everything has been said.
I absolutely agree with keeping the more engaging games. Personally, I participate in the 4 letter word ladder game because it’s a great brain/vocabulary exercise.
As a new user, id have to disagree with this. While there are many (probably too many) games, i actually found this very helpful when getting to know the website. I immediately jumped into the games when i first started on this website. And while that wasn’t the main reason i joined, it helped me to become comfortable with the website. I now contribute to multiple technical discussions, but the games category helped me find my way when i first joined.
I agree that it shouldn’t be the only reason people use the website, but i also don’t think they should be gotten rid of or lessened.
IIRC, the number of games threads, and how often they are posted in, always jumped as Competition season came to a close. Caused by the sudden abundance of free time, and the lack of new Technical/Help/FIRST related topics to be discussed, outside of the few Off-Season endeavours. We just didn’t see this as often on the old site as the “Offtopic” Fora were filtered by default.
Of course, my method of always seeing the new topics is to use the RSS Feeds for the categories I most care about, but I’m one of the few who still use RSS. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree tweaking the defaults may be a good thing to do, especially to specify the public image for new folks who show up here.
As to the games themselves though, personally, I’m happy that there’s some fun going on. It encourages students who may not otherwise engage in the technical side to at least get some exposure to its existence.
Is there a need for all of them? Probably not. Do most of them give me a laugh? Yes. Are they harmless, in and of themselves? Personally, I think so.
As long as the peas don’t touch the carrots (ie the memes stay to reddit), I’m not complaining. #summerCD
Look I’m all for game threads existing. I personally have them muted because I don’t have much interest in participating in them but I get why people enjoy them.
But saying that people should “post to [technical] threads more and give them likes” is kind of ridiculous. The nature of many technical threads is to take a bit of time to create a helpful response. The nature of many game threads is to just post as fast as possible. There’s no way a technical thread could ever keep up with something like Moderator Counting because, well, you’re just counting.
Also are you seriously going to pull the censorship card? wow
The issue isn’t about the fact that games exist on the website, it’s that when a new user loads up the website they’ll be presented a view similar to that in the screenshot in the original post. When someone new is checking out Chief Delphi, I’m sure they’re more interested in conversations about robotics rather than “Questions Only, Team A vs Team B, BAN the person above you, 1 to 10,000, Four Letter Word Latter”.
In that screenshot there 8 threads shown, and 7 of them are games.
There are plenty of other areas on the internet to play games, let’s keep Chief Delphi about robotics.
I think an optimal solution would be to hide the games category by default, but I’m not sure if that’s 100% possible. (@Brandon_Martus ?)
