I'm sorry I can't let go of the previous guide because it was so good and I love it to a painful extent.
I really think you guys should do a scan of Theriasis' guide and pick out a few things from there. If you get past the... "saltiness" or whatever people want to call it, there were some very good points. About balance. About not using some excuses. About not going "better creepers" but you only suggest that they do +10% damage. About not attention crying with making your thread title like this, ___===+++ NEW POTIONS +++===___.
I'm sorry I can't let go of the previous guide because it was so good and I love it to a painful extent.
I really think you guys should do a scan of Theriasis' guide and pick out a few things from there. If you get past the... "saltiness" or whatever people want to call it, there were some very good points. About balance. About not using some excuses. About not going "better creepers" but you only suggest that they do +10% damage. About not attention crying with making your thread title like this, ___===+++ NEW POTIONS +++===___.
As Sunperp would (probably) say, those are all perfectly valid suggestions, despite how... idiotic some of us may see them as, and thus there's no reason to add them to the guide.
A suggestion that does not follow anything but the rules is also perfectly valid, despite the end results being less purposeful or intellectual than eating soup with your spoon upside-down. Despite Sunperp's "let them post what they want," if this thread wasn't meant to affect how people make suggestions there wouldn't be a thread to begin with. However, the Guidelines are different from the Guide, even if the reasoning for its existence is... eh... So there's got to be a shift.
Yes all of what Acknid is mentioning has value, but again, things are a bit different here. This is not about teaching people what to think. It's about teaching them how to think. It's not about teaching them the content. It's about teaching them how to come up with the content themselves.
Sure, suggesters can be very error-prone. They'll misbalance things. They'll come up with something dumb. That's why point #7 for creating/maintaining a suggestion exists. To cause them to question the value of an idea and what it's trying to accomplish before putting it out for the world to see. Sure, suggesters will make bad excuses. That's why #6 exists, and why #5 of the critics' bit exists. The number one reason for bad excuses is simply the suggester being unreceptive or dismissive to criticism. And the critics pushing when it'd be better to just leave does not help.
Addressing the disease is a lot better than addressing the symptoms. That's what we can do here. It's not going to be a long list because it won't have to be, if we actually know what we're doing.
Sure, suggesters can be very error-prone. They'll misbalance things. They'll come up with something dumb. That's why point #7 for creating/maintaining a suggestion exists.
They're also multiple account-prone. #7 doesn't really dive into anything too detailed. Sure, it says to give a "why" instead of a "why not", which makes a fartload of sense, but stuff like "killstreeeks" or "tanks with free capes!" is a failey fail fail way to go. It doesn't matter how much freedom you have in a forum, you make a thread like that and it's just gonna fall hard.
Giving me a warm blanket with "be free, do what you want" written on it might feel good at first, but it doesn't mean it'll lead to a good end result. Hence the realism section of the first two guides. I'm still narrowing my eyes at the mods for banning someone who poured out months of effort to make the last forum guides. That's super low. That's like being fired from a job then immediately having your mouth taped shut before you can explain yourself.
I'm still narrowing my eyes at the mods for banning someone who poured out months of effort to make the last forum guides. That's super low. That's like being fired from a job then immediately having your mouth taped shut before you can explain yourself.
If someone is banned on this forum, they are banned for violating the forum rules in a substantial or repeated manner. No amount of good deeds will give any forum user a pass when it comes to adhering to the rules. The old guide is still available, it is just no longer a pinned thread. It has already been explained in this thread why the old thread was unpinned and this simpler thread was established -- the old thread was being treated as a set of "unofficial" rules by a small group of regular posters in this forum section and its pinned status was beginning to cause more problems than it was solving.
If someone is banned on this forum, they are banned for violating the forum rules in a substantial or repeated manner. No amount of good deeds will give any forum user a pass when it comes to adhering to the rules.
That's fine, I can't imagine someone would ban her just because they were bored. My point is that if I made a massively long guide, and then just out of nowhere my guide gets unpinned and then I get banned so I can't even say anything I would probably find out where every mod lived. Even if someone was destined to be permabanned, I'd at least give some heads up before doing that (the unpinning part, not the banning part) to someone's megaguide...
Guess that explains a possibility why she wasn't brought in to make the third guide...
They're also multiple account-prone. #7 doesn't really dive into anything too detailed. Sure, it says to give a "why" instead of a "why not", which makes a fartload of sense, but stuff like "killstreeeks" or "tanks with free capes!" is a failey fail fail way to go. It doesn't matter how much freedom you have in a forum, you make a thread like that and it's just gonna fall hard.
Giving me a warm blanket with "be free, do what you want" written on it might feel good at first, but it doesn't mean it'll lead to a good end result. Hence the realism section of the first two guides.
This isn't about freedom. It never was. That whole "let them post what they want" and all of what turned into this is... a bunch of weird logic that depends a lot on premises that I'm pretty sure neither of us really believe in.
This thread is not saying "post whatever you want." This thread is not saying "don't post this, this, or this because it'll go wrong." This thread is directly encouraging people to figure things out themselves. If they honestly follow all the steps and try to put in effort, they won't post "tanks with free capes" because they'll realize that they have little reason to actually want that idea in the game. That the reasons are insubstantial. That their suggestion would get no support not because it's frequently used, but because the idea itself is flawed. And if they do post something, and it still doesn't work due to ignorance or what have you, then they'll listen to feedback, learn, and come back with another idea without being that upset. Or they'll leave.
If I'm wrong about all this, and it's not this way, then let's shift the guidelines until that's how it works. None of this is set in stone. We can figure out what we need to until these short lists are actually effective, if they're not now.
The more we keep fighting it the more we just repeat the same arguments based on premises that neither implied side seems willing to acknowledge if they even understand. I've had to hold myself back seven or eight times from contributing my views on the argument, and I have pages upon pages of things I'd like to say but simply haven't said. Because I know regardless of what I say, it's unlikely to change anyone's minds. The guidelines and their apparent methods are incredibly optimistic. I was never one to believe that purely positive reinforcement could actually accomplish anything. But it's what we have. This thing exists now. Let's make the best of it.
Just gonna bust out the truth. The forum needs some serious quality control. This place is now just a hot wasteland where people bump obvious alt-account threads and let the good threads sink to the bottom because there is a painful amount of people here who can't spot a joke thread if it punched them in the mouth and destroyed their emotional balance forever.
If I was a mod, these threads would be deleted faster than any man can blink. "Chestplate elytras?" is one thing, "Let's integrate Call of Duty into creative mode!" has no reason to even exist. There's like 3 troll threads sitting on the front page as of this very post, whether people choose to believe this or not. Yes, I get it. You can't just go locking every thread that's bad, but I have never ever seen any other forum just not respond to people who are so ungodly obvious.
This is why the last guide was so popular. Despite it's nastiness, it told things how it was. Rather than being textbook formal and telling people want they wanted to hear so they felt warm and bubbly inside.
This place is now just a hot wasteland where people bump obvious alt-account threads and let the good threads sink to the bottom because there is a painful amount of people here who can't spot a joke thread if it punched them in the mouth and destroyed their emotional balance forever.
In virtually every single case, when a regular forum user has accused another of being an alt account, they were absolutely wrong. The admins are the ones who determine whether an account is an alt account and have tools that regular forum users do not have access to. The false alt-account accusations were becoming a large enough problem that it is now against the forum rules to do that.
As far as threads that appear to be joke threads are concerned, we are not going to do anything with them until we are absolutely sure that the OP is trolling or purposely posting a joke or flamebait thread. Again, there are many, many instances where forum users have called someone out for posting a joke thread when it wasn't clear at all whether that was the case. This is also now against the forum rules due to regular, repeated abuses of people falsely calling others out as joke thread posters.
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If I was a mod, these threads would be deleted faster than any man can blink. "Chestplate elytras?" is one thing, "Let's integrate Call of Duty into creative mode!" has no reason to even exist. There's like 3 troll threads sitting on the front page as of this very post, whether people choose to believe this or not. Yes, I get it. You can't just go locking every thread that's bad, but I have never ever seen any other forum just not respond to people who are so ungodly obvious.
If you think someone has posted a troll thread, just report it and move on, and let the forum staff determine whether that is the case. Just because you don't like a suggestion or think it is a poor suggestion, doesn't make it against the forum rules. We are not going to lock suggestion threads just because a majority of the forum users do not like the idea.
Picking this quote out. Yeah, with critics. But the guide wasn't for critics. With the people it was actually aimed towards, the last guide was reasonably unpopular. You can call it 'real' if you want, that doesn't change the fact that it wasn't working. It fundamentally failed its very purpose, even if it told things exactly as they were.
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As far as threads that appear to be joke threads are concerned, we are not going to do anything with them until we are absolutely sure that the OP is trolling or purposely posting a joke or flamebait thread. Again, there are many, many instances where forum users have called someone out for posting a joke thread when it wasn't clear at all whether that was the case. This is also now against the forum rules due to regular, repeated abuses of people falsely calling others out as joke thread posters.
Some of these users are giving themselves away. I guess if someone says something like "this is a serious thread guys!" Then uh yeah, I think you know what you're dealing with. If someone is going "we need to combine half-life 2 with this game because both games are made of good" and they keep changing the poll answers, then hmmmmm... Now I know why people speak of the Facepunch forums so highly.
If you think someone has posted a troll thread, just report it and move on, and let the forum staff determine whether that is the case. Just because you don't like a suggestion or think it is a poor suggestion, doesn't make it against the forum rules. We are not going to lock suggestion threads just because a majority of the forum users do not like the idea.
That's fine, but when nothing is done about a guy who hides behind a proxy and keeps making budder guns suggestions, he never stops.
Picking this quote out. Yeah, with critics. But the guide wasn't for critics. With the people it was actually aimed towards, the last guide was reasonably unpopular. You can call it 'real' if you want, that doesn't change the fact that it wasn't working. It fundamentally failed its very purpose, even if it told things exactly as they were.
No, if you read through both guides, you'd see even non-critics making comments about how much they learned from it. I've seen newbs swear by the guide and recommend other posters to read it. This is horribly one-sided. Yes, it was mostly critics that clung to that guide, but even the nastier 1.0 guide changed the way some newbies posted. Those guides still explained things. It wasn't random text slapped together.
That guide didn't "fail". If that's the case, none of the guides succeeded. Because the amount of people that just skip this stuff and assume they're ideas are good and make unsupported threads is astounding.
No, if you read through both guides, you'd see even non-critics making comments about how much they learned from it.
Obviously some of them read it, but if you ever looked (or still do look) at the forum, you can quite clearly see that on the whole these guides never stopped bad suggestions. Counterexamples will not work here when we can quite clearly see the actual proportions - you're just talking about exceptions to the wider rule.
I've seen newbs swear by the guide and recommend other posters to read it. This is horribly one-sided.
It's not one-sided, it's the truth. I don't much care what you've seen happen sometimes. I've seen it to. I'm talking about the overall effect.
You make it sound like everything was great with the old guide and only now everything has gone downhill. It's not true. Few people cared about what the old guides had to say, if you took a cursory glance at the front page of this section back then you'd have no choice but to concede it. And it's the same now.
Yes, it was mostly critics that clung to that guide, but even the nastier 1.0 guide changed the way some newbies posted. Those guides still explained things. It wasn't random text slapped together.
Did I say it was random text slapped together? I don't seem to recall.
Obviously it changed the way some posted, it didn't change enough though.
That guide didn't "fail". If that's the case, none of the guides succeeded.
Yes, that's a reasonable conclusion.
Because the amount of people that just skip this stuff and assume they're ideas are good and make unsupported threads is astounding.
I would like to see some empirical data on how the number of people who just skip all guides compares to the number of people who read the old guide and decided they didn't like it. Unfortunately for you, there is none. Your statement that the old guide was great and the problem was just that people didn't bother to read it is purely conjecture.
Regardless of troll threads, or whether or not the old guide was good, can we just get some actual quality control? A lot of threads like fundamental details, making them almost impossible to actually discuss in a meaningful way. And several user just ignore you if you ask fro those details so you can get a more complete picture of their idea.
How about a warning system, with a moderator warning an author with a thread that has no discussion value, and giving them a couple tips on what can be added to make it worth posting on. If said author doesn't at least attempt to better their thread in a couple days, the thread gets locked for being too vague to discuss anything on it.
I can't really see that being unfair to anyone, and it would weed out the absolutely trashy, one-sentence "add this pl0x" threads front he top page, and prevent bad threads from being endlessly bumped by people too stubborn to read what others have already posted, and continuously posting the same thing.
Okay, so this is the direction this discussion really needs to be headed in. I personally believe that suggestions should really be allowed to rise and fall on their own merits by themselves, rather than having moderators policing what's good and what's bad. This inevitably leads to many different interpretations of rules on what can be considered as 'good' or 'bad'. This really isn't a conversation we can without somebody actually suggesting, word for word, what should be added to the rules to make something like this happen. Saying 'we could have something like this' isn't useful because the idea itself is very prone to being vague and up to interpretation, therefore we should really dismiss it until somebody can come up with an unequivocally perfect version of such a rule that everyone can agree on. One which could not possibly lead to incorrectly locked threads. I, and I think I speak for the staff of this forum when I say this, don't think such a rule can exist, and so we need proof that one can exist in the form of an example, or the idea is null. We had this very issue with the vague thread rule. That's why it was removed, to the dismay of many a critic. To have any kind of quality control we need to all be able to agree that quality control rules cannot be left up to interpretation, and if nobody is able to write up a clear cut rule, we can't allow such a thing to exist at all.
To you and others it might seem obvious what constitutes as undetailed. But you will all probably have slightly different ideas. Even if you did all agree, the issue likes more in the principle of the thing - something like that could happen, even if it doesn't. Worse yet, posters won't all agree with the consensus of the staff and the critic elite. For this reason, there is no use in having a consensus interpretation of a vague rule. Even if every mod agreed on how to use that rule, if the rule itself is vague, posters will absolutely have a case to protest. And so we go back in circles with the same issue.
Much as I'm overall opposed to quality control, I do see its merit. Letting things rise and fall on their own is certainly virtuous, but it works much better on Reddit than it does here, since you can vote posts up and down. Here it's just down to who posted last. That's why Mojang doesn't read these forums, realistically. It's thus natural that people would instead want to keep quality posts at the top by simply removing the bad threads. I just see too many issues with doing that, as I've explained in detail above.
Okay, so this is the direction this discussion really needs to be headed in. I personally believe that suggestions should really be allowed to rise and fall on their own merits by themselves, rather than having moderators policing what's good and what's bad. This inevitably leads to many different interpretations of rules on what can be considered as 'good' or 'bad'. This really isn't a conversation we can without somebody actually suggesting, word for word, what should be added to the rules to make something like this happen. Saying 'we could have something like this' isn't useful because the idea itself is very prone to being vague and up to interpretation, therefore we should really dismiss it until somebody can come up with an unequivocally perfect version of such a rule that everyone can agree on. One which could not possibly lead to incorrectly locked threads. I, and I think I speak for the staff of this forum when I say this, don't think such a rule can exist, and so we need proof that one can exist in the form of an example, or the idea is null. We had this very issue with the vague thread rule. That's why it was removed, to the dismay of many a critic. To have any kind of quality control we need to all be able to agree that quality control rules cannot be left up to interpretation, and if nobody is able to write up a clear cut rule, we can't allow such a thing to exist at all.
To you and others it might seem obvious what constitutes as undetailed. But you will all probably have slightly different ideas. Even if you did all agree, the issue likes more in the principle of the thing - something like that could happen, even if it doesn't. Worse yet, posters won't all agree with the consensus of the staff and the critic elite. For this reason, there is no use in having a consensus interpretation of a vague rule. Even if every mod agreed on how to use that rule, if the rule itself is vague, posters will absolutely have a case to protest. And so we go back in circles with the same issue.
Much as I'm overall opposed to quality control, I do see its merit. Letting things rise and fall on their own is certainly virtuous, but it works much better on Reddit than it does here, since you can vote posts up and down. Here it's just down to who posted last. That's why Mojang doesn't read these forums, realistically. It's thus natural that people would instead want to keep quality posts at the top by simply removing the bad threads. I just see too many issues with doing that, as I've explained in detail above.
The thing is, there is sort of a rule for this already.
Sensible, well thought-out and legible posts help other members understand what is being explained.
Nothing else is said. This appears to be a rule on quality. If your post is not sensible, well thought-out, or legible, if other members do not understand what you are explaining, you are breaking a rule. Granted, this is up to the interpretations of the moderators:
"The forum rules are a general guide about what we do and do not expect from members, it is not an exhaustive list and moderators will sometimes make decisions independent of the rules."
Obviously some of them read it, but if you ever looked (or still do look) at the forum, you can quite clearly see that on the whole these guides never stopped bad suggestions. Counterexamples will not work here when we can quite clearly see the actual proportions - you're just talking about exceptions to the wider rule.
I don't see any difference with this new guide. Bad suggestions are still coming in. Some users just skip guides because they think they know what they're doing.
It's not one-sided, it's the truth. I don't much care what you've seen happen sometimes. I've seen it to. I'm talking about the overall effect.
The last guide covered everything. Where did the "failure" part come in? If people skip important stickied threads and go on to make a thirst bar thread. It's not the fault of the guide. It can't take over someone's willpower and make users read it.
You make it sound like everything was great with the old guide and only now everything has gone downhill. It's not true. Few people cared about what the old guides had to say, if you took a cursory glance at the front page of this section back then you'd have no choice but to concede it. And it's the same now.
Again, I'm not seeing any glowing, positive difference with this new guide. I don't think any guide makes a difference at this point, since we're now getting hit with more and more joke threads. Guides can't stop those. Only mods.
I would like to see some empirical data on how the number of people who just skip all guides compares to the number of people who read the old guide and decided they didn't like it. Unfortunately for you, there is none. Your statement that the old guide was great and the problem was just that people didn't bother to read it is purely conjecture.
If someone reads Theriasis' guide and goes "this guide is mean so I'm gonna stay in 'bad poster' mode because of that >=[", that's the fault of the goofy poster, not the guide. In fact, the guide wasn't as mean as some people like to think. At least the 2.0 one wasn't.
You've provided nothing here, your post is not constructive or otherwise useful. At best you thought it'd be funny.
So that guide failed because bad suggestions existed during the time it was stickied? If so, that's a very flimsy line of reasoning. That's kind of like saying "Well yeah, the place got shot up because the 'no weapons allowed' sign didn't have a better font!"
I don't see any difference with this new guide. Bad suggestions are still coming in. Some users just skip guides because they think they know what they're doing.
The new guide is not supposed to prevent bad suggestions. Users have the right to post poor suggestions if they wish. So long as the suggestion has at least some discussion value, it will be allowed to remain open. The new guide exists solely for those who wish to read it, but it is completely optional. The only thing that is official and mandatory are the rules pages.
Again, I'm not seeing any glowing, positive difference with this new guide. I don't think any guide makes a difference at this point, since we're now getting hit with more and more joke threads. Guides can't stop those. Only mods.
I am seeing just as many poor threads now as before, and as I stated previously, most of the threads that forum users designate as joke threads are not clear enough to the forum staff to do anything with them except to monitor them. We are not going to start locking threads just because some people don't like the suggestions.
Sensible, well thought-out and legible posts help other members understand what is being explained.
Nothing else is said. This appears to be a rule on quality. If your post is not sensible, well thought-out, or legible, if other members do not understand what you are explaining, you are breaking a rule. Granted, this is up to the interpretations of the moderators:
"The forum rules are a general guide about what we do and do not expect from members, it is not an exhaustive list and moderators will sometimes make decisions independent of the rules."
This seems to be a general rule on the readability of posts rather than a rule on suggestion quality. Zero to do with the quality of an idea, as far as I can gather. The point is to make sure that people make posts that actually make sense so a discussion can be had. Counter-examples welcome.
I don't see any difference with this new guide. Bad suggestions are still coming in. Some users just skip guides because they think they know what they're doing.
I made quite clear in my post that bad suggestions still exist. Unpinning the old thread was just one step.
The last guide covered everything. Where did the "failure" part come in? If people skip important stickied threads and go on to make a thirst bar thread. It's not the fault of the guide. It can't take over someone's willpower and make users read it.
I think I made quite clear the specific issue of the old thread vs this one has nothing to do with whether people are reading it and everything to do with if people are learning from what they're reading. Which they don't do in a super long guide which also makes them feel like trash. I know you'll say it's just 'too real' and whatnot, but that doesn't solve the problem.
Again, I'm not seeing any glowing, positive difference with this new guide. I don't think any guide makes a difference at this point, since we're now getting hit with more and more joke threads. Guides can't stop those. Only mods.
You can't denounce every thread you don't like as a joke.
If someone reads Theriasis' guide and goes "this guide is mean so I'm gonna stay in 'bad poster' mode because of that >=[", that's the fault of the goofy poster, not the guide. In fact, the guide wasn't as mean as some people like to think. At least the 2.0 one wasn't.
I'm glad you think it's their fault, but sitting on a high horse and blaming them doesn't solve the problem. I'm trying to tell you why this thread can in the future solve the exact problems you're complaining about, and you're retorting with "it's their fault their posts are bad anyway."
Frankly, I'm not concerned with whose fault you think it is. I'm telling you a solution, you're just pointing fingers.
So that guide failed because bad suggestions existed during the time it was stickied? If so, that's a very flimsy line of reasoning. That's kind of like saying "Well yeah, the place got shot up because the 'no weapons allowed' sign didn't have a better font!"
I made a big long post explaining why the old thread failed, I'm not making another big long post to explain why your conclusion here has zero to do with what I actually said.
So I'll keep it short: everything about this guide is built on the notion of the target audience. The old guide failed because it had no such notion. This thread is a positive new direction because it recognises that people didn't care to pay any attention to a dissertation on all of the nuances of ideas for a 2011 block game which also happened to make them feel terrible for not paying it attention sooner.
You can write me an essay on why the old thread was great and it's all those posters' faults for being thin skinned. But that doesn't change the truth. You can either swim in a sea of bad suggestions knowing that you are virtuous and it's all their fault for being bad, or you can actually try to solve the problem.
The way I see it, neither guide prevents users from posting bad suggestions. They're always going to exist, and since the developers don't visit this site for ideas, it's not a big issue. What a guide does do is help those who want to make a good suggestion make it better, and help critics provide better arguments for improving suggestions. Now, for the former case, there are more people on this forum than people give credit for that actually want to make at least a decent suggestion. However, often these are first-time posters to the suggestions forum, and they don't have much experience. They are willing to read a guide and get a few pointers, but the massive guide is daunting to read and many aren't willing to spend 15 minutes reading it in its entirety. For them, this new guide is perfect; it's 100% objective (even if that means it's a little boring) and gets the biggest problems new posters might have out of the way.
However, there are a few who'd like to go above and beyond: the "overachievers," so to say. These people don't want to make just a decent suggestion, they want to make a good or even great one, à la Cubic Chunks or Colored Glass. These people want an exhaustive list of dos and don'ts, and aren't intimidated by the other guide. Now, as these people aren't common enough to warrant it, I don't think the old guide should be re-pinned, but it should be linked to at the bottom of the guide as a "for further reading" link, such as the ones you would find in an encyclopedia or educational article. The same goes for FTC.
The way I see it, neither guide prevents users from posting bad suggestions. They're always going to exist, and since the developers don't visit this site for ideas, it's not a big issue. What a guide does do is help those who want to make a good suggestion make it better
This is a much better way of framing it. I think overall we've sort of done the whole point of these guides a disservice by making them another sticky that everyone is expected to read. Let people read them if they want to make good suggestions. If they make bad suggestions with issues the guide covers, link them there. If they aren't interested, let their thread fall on its own.
Critics kind of tend to cause the problem themselves by dogpiling on bad suggestions and keeping it at the top. Just look on every obviously bad suggestion you can find. After you've gotten through the swathes of critics reiterating the same obvious points (just once is fine, everyone), you'll just find people commenting on how the post was dumb, a troll, etcetera.
And then after they've done that and created the problem, they see all the bad suggestions on the front page and decide that moderators need to deal with the problem. I don't understand this infatuation with the idea of policing suggestions this way, why can't critics let the criticisms be given once, see if the OP responds, and if not just leave the thread?
I know a few people in this thread have shown a desire for the kind of policing I'm talking about, and I'm by no means saying that you specifically are causing this issue, this is just what I've observed in general. A lot of people seem to bump bad threads seemingly to assert how terrible the thread is, and then act like it's the mods' fault.
Well this derailed from what you were saying, jdc. Nice post though, you hit the nail on the head. Not sure if I agree with linking the old thread though. I don't see much harm I suppose, I just worry it will end up maintaining the aura of elitism in this section. You know, "Go read the good guide, it's linked in the sticky", whereas without linking to it nobody should really be expected to read it at all. It's something I'll have to think about more.
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While I think that overall policing of suggestion quality is a bad thing; I do think some containment and limitation is a good thing.
Creativity flourishes under limits and stagnates under availability; afterall.
With this said; while I don't think that demanding X paragraphs, Y parameters, Z grammar is appropriate for a wide sweeping ruleset; I do think a generally accepted form to reasonably mold an idea to isn't out of the question.
As a critic; I reserve every right to give a detailed reason why a suggestion fails my personal criteria. Whether I'm in the right or out in left field is not part of that discussion (though I do see it forming a red herring; but hey, it's tangentially related to the topic; so why not?) But my personal criteria (or a mod's) shouldn't be part of the rules at large.With that said; can we put some effort into formalizing a very loose bare-bones design document for how a suggestion should be presented (something that if the poster used it exclusively and carelessly; it'd cover just enough detail to not be locked for "vague")?
I'm sorry I can't let go of the previous guide because it was so good and I love it to a painful extent.
I really think you guys should do a scan of Theriasis' guide and pick out a few things from there. If you get past the... "saltiness" or whatever people want to call it, there were some very good points. About balance. About not using some excuses. About not going "better creepers" but you only suggest that they do +10% damage. About not attention crying with making your thread title like this, ___===+++ NEW POTIONS +++===___.
A suggestion that does not follow anything but the rules is also perfectly valid, despite the end results being less purposeful or intellectual than eating soup with your spoon upside-down. Despite Sunperp's "let them post what they want," if this thread wasn't meant to affect how people make suggestions there wouldn't be a thread to begin with. However, the Guidelines are different from the Guide, even if the reasoning for its existence is... eh... So there's got to be a shift.
Yes all of what Acknid is mentioning has value, but again, things are a bit different here. This is not about teaching people what to think. It's about teaching them how to think. It's not about teaching them the content. It's about teaching them how to come up with the content themselves.
Sure, suggesters can be very error-prone. They'll misbalance things. They'll come up with something dumb. That's why point #7 for creating/maintaining a suggestion exists. To cause them to question the value of an idea and what it's trying to accomplish before putting it out for the world to see. Sure, suggesters will make bad excuses. That's why #6 exists, and why #5 of the critics' bit exists. The number one reason for bad excuses is simply the suggester being unreceptive or dismissive to criticism. And the critics pushing when it'd be better to just leave does not help.
Addressing the disease is a lot better than addressing the symptoms. That's what we can do here. It's not going to be a long list because it won't have to be, if we actually know what we're doing.
If you are planning to make a suggestion, please read this.
If you want to know more, you can read this.
For those who complain about post-Beta generation, you might want to see this.
They're also multiple account-prone. #7 doesn't really dive into anything too detailed. Sure, it says to give a "why" instead of a "why not", which makes a fartload of sense, but stuff like "killstreeeks" or "tanks with free capes!" is a failey fail fail way to go. It doesn't matter how much freedom you have in a forum, you make a thread like that and it's just gonna fall hard.
Giving me a warm blanket with "be free, do what you want" written on it might feel good at first, but it doesn't mean it'll lead to a good end result. Hence the realism section of the first two guides. I'm still narrowing my eyes at the mods for banning someone who poured out months of effort to make the last forum guides. That's super low. That's like being fired from a job then immediately having your mouth taped shut before you can explain yourself.
If someone is banned on this forum, they are banned for violating the forum rules in a substantial or repeated manner. No amount of good deeds will give any forum user a pass when it comes to adhering to the rules. The old guide is still available, it is just no longer a pinned thread. It has already been explained in this thread why the old thread was unpinned and this simpler thread was established -- the old thread was being treated as a set of "unofficial" rules by a small group of regular posters in this forum section and its pinned status was beginning to cause more problems than it was solving.
- sunperp
That's fine, I can't imagine someone would ban her just because they were bored. My point is that if I made a massively long guide, and then just out of nowhere my guide gets unpinned and then I get banned so I can't even say anything I would probably find out where every mod lived. Even if someone was destined to be permabanned, I'd at least give some heads up before doing that (the unpinning part, not the banning part) to someone's megaguide...
Guess that explains a possibility why she wasn't brought in to make the third guide...
This isn't about freedom. It never was. That whole "let them post what they want" and all of what turned into this is... a bunch of weird logic that depends a lot on premises that I'm pretty sure neither of us really believe in.
This thread is not saying "post whatever you want." This thread is not saying "don't post this, this, or this because it'll go wrong." This thread is directly encouraging people to figure things out themselves. If they honestly follow all the steps and try to put in effort, they won't post "tanks with free capes" because they'll realize that they have little reason to actually want that idea in the game. That the reasons are insubstantial. That their suggestion would get no support not because it's frequently used, but because the idea itself is flawed. And if they do post something, and it still doesn't work due to ignorance or what have you, then they'll listen to feedback, learn, and come back with another idea without being that upset. Or they'll leave.
If I'm wrong about all this, and it's not this way, then let's shift the guidelines until that's how it works. None of this is set in stone. We can figure out what we need to until these short lists are actually effective, if they're not now.
The more we keep fighting it the more we just repeat the same arguments based on premises that neither implied side seems willing to acknowledge if they even understand. I've had to hold myself back seven or eight times from contributing my views on the argument, and I have pages upon pages of things I'd like to say but simply haven't said. Because I know regardless of what I say, it's unlikely to change anyone's minds. The guidelines and their apparent methods are incredibly optimistic. I was never one to believe that purely positive reinforcement could actually accomplish anything. But it's what we have. This thing exists now. Let's make the best of it.
If you are planning to make a suggestion, please read this.
If you want to know more, you can read this.
For those who complain about post-Beta generation, you might want to see this.
Just gonna bust out the truth. The forum needs some serious quality control. This place is now just a hot wasteland where people bump obvious alt-account threads and let the good threads sink to the bottom because there is a painful amount of people here who can't spot a joke thread if it punched them in the mouth and destroyed their emotional balance forever.
If I was a mod, these threads would be deleted faster than any man can blink. "Chestplate elytras?" is one thing, "Let's integrate Call of Duty into creative mode!" has no reason to even exist. There's like 3 troll threads sitting on the front page as of this very post, whether people choose to believe this or not. Yes, I get it. You can't just go locking every thread that's bad, but I have never ever seen any other forum just not respond to people who are so ungodly obvious.
This is why the last guide was so popular. Despite it's nastiness, it told things how it was. Rather than being textbook formal and telling people want they wanted to hear so they felt warm and bubbly inside.
The other guide at least still exists, that's all I need. Again, I'm not dissing what Badprenup made.
In virtually every single case, when a regular forum user has accused another of being an alt account, they were absolutely wrong. The admins are the ones who determine whether an account is an alt account and have tools that regular forum users do not have access to. The false alt-account accusations were becoming a large enough problem that it is now against the forum rules to do that.
As far as threads that appear to be joke threads are concerned, we are not going to do anything with them until we are absolutely sure that the OP is trolling or purposely posting a joke or flamebait thread. Again, there are many, many instances where forum users have called someone out for posting a joke thread when it wasn't clear at all whether that was the case. This is also now against the forum rules due to regular, repeated abuses of people falsely calling others out as joke thread posters.
If you think someone has posted a troll thread, just report it and move on, and let the forum staff determine whether that is the case. Just because you don't like a suggestion or think it is a poor suggestion, doesn't make it against the forum rules. We are not going to lock suggestion threads just because a majority of the forum users do not like the idea.
- sunperp
Picking this quote out. Yeah, with critics. But the guide wasn't for critics. With the people it was actually aimed towards, the last guide was reasonably unpopular. You can call it 'real' if you want, that doesn't change the fact that it wasn't working. It fundamentally failed its very purpose, even if it told things exactly as they were.
Some of these users are giving themselves away. I guess if someone says something like "this is a serious thread guys!" Then uh yeah, I think you know what you're dealing with. If someone is going "we need to combine half-life 2 with this game because both games are made of good" and they keep changing the poll answers, then hmmmmm... Now I know why people speak of the Facepunch forums so highly.
That's fine, but when nothing is done about a guy who hides behind a proxy and keeps making budder guns suggestions, he never stops.
No, if you read through both guides, you'd see even non-critics making comments about how much they learned from it. I've seen newbs swear by the guide and recommend other posters to read it. This is horribly one-sided. Yes, it was mostly critics that clung to that guide, but even the nastier 1.0 guide changed the way some newbies posted. Those guides still explained things. It wasn't random text slapped together.
That guide didn't "fail". If that's the case, none of the guides succeeded. Because the amount of people that just skip this stuff and assume they're ideas are good and make unsupported threads is astounding.
Uh it really, really didn't...
Obviously some of them read it, but if you ever looked (or still do look) at the forum, you can quite clearly see that on the whole these guides never stopped bad suggestions. Counterexamples will not work here when we can quite clearly see the actual proportions - you're just talking about exceptions to the wider rule.
It's not one-sided, it's the truth. I don't much care what you've seen happen sometimes. I've seen it to. I'm talking about the overall effect.
You make it sound like everything was great with the old guide and only now everything has gone downhill. It's not true. Few people cared about what the old guides had to say, if you took a cursory glance at the front page of this section back then you'd have no choice but to concede it. And it's the same now.
Did I say it was random text slapped together? I don't seem to recall.
Obviously it changed the way some posted, it didn't change enough though.
Yes, that's a reasonable conclusion.
I would like to see some empirical data on how the number of people who just skip all guides compares to the number of people who read the old guide and decided they didn't like it. Unfortunately for you, there is none. Your statement that the old guide was great and the problem was just that people didn't bother to read it is purely conjecture.
You've provided nothing here, your post is not constructive or otherwise useful. At best you thought it'd be funny.
Okay, so this is the direction this discussion really needs to be headed in. I personally believe that suggestions should really be allowed to rise and fall on their own merits by themselves, rather than having moderators policing what's good and what's bad. This inevitably leads to many different interpretations of rules on what can be considered as 'good' or 'bad'. This really isn't a conversation we can without somebody actually suggesting, word for word, what should be added to the rules to make something like this happen. Saying 'we could have something like this' isn't useful because the idea itself is very prone to being vague and up to interpretation, therefore we should really dismiss it until somebody can come up with an unequivocally perfect version of such a rule that everyone can agree on. One which could not possibly lead to incorrectly locked threads. I, and I think I speak for the staff of this forum when I say this, don't think such a rule can exist, and so we need proof that one can exist in the form of an example, or the idea is null. We had this very issue with the vague thread rule. That's why it was removed, to the dismay of many a critic. To have any kind of quality control we need to all be able to agree that quality control rules cannot be left up to interpretation, and if nobody is able to write up a clear cut rule, we can't allow such a thing to exist at all.
To you and others it might seem obvious what constitutes as undetailed. But you will all probably have slightly different ideas. Even if you did all agree, the issue likes more in the principle of the thing - something like that could happen, even if it doesn't. Worse yet, posters won't all agree with the consensus of the staff and the critic elite. For this reason, there is no use in having a consensus interpretation of a vague rule. Even if every mod agreed on how to use that rule, if the rule itself is vague, posters will absolutely have a case to protest. And so we go back in circles with the same issue.
Much as I'm overall opposed to quality control, I do see its merit. Letting things rise and fall on their own is certainly virtuous, but it works much better on Reddit than it does here, since you can vote posts up and down. Here it's just down to who posted last. That's why Mojang doesn't read these forums, realistically. It's thus natural that people would instead want to keep quality posts at the top by simply removing the bad threads. I just see too many issues with doing that, as I've explained in detail above.
The thing is, there is sort of a rule for this already.
Think Before Posting
Sensible, well thought-out and legible posts help other members understand what is being explained.
Nothing else is said. This appears to be a rule on quality. If your post is not sensible, well thought-out, or legible, if other members do not understand what you are explaining, you are breaking a rule. Granted, this is up to the interpretations of the moderators:
"The forum rules are a general guide about what we do and do not expect from members, it is not an exhaustive list and moderators will sometimes make decisions independent of the rules."
If you are planning to make a suggestion, please read this.
If you want to know more, you can read this.
For those who complain about post-Beta generation, you might want to see this.
I don't see any difference with this new guide. Bad suggestions are still coming in. Some users just skip guides because they think they know what they're doing.
The last guide covered everything. Where did the "failure" part come in? If people skip important stickied threads and go on to make a thirst bar thread. It's not the fault of the guide. It can't take over someone's willpower and make users read it.
Again, I'm not seeing any glowing, positive difference with this new guide. I don't think any guide makes a difference at this point, since we're now getting hit with more and more joke threads. Guides can't stop those. Only mods.
If someone reads Theriasis' guide and goes "this guide is mean so I'm gonna stay in 'bad poster' mode because of that >=[", that's the fault of the goofy poster, not the guide. In fact, the guide wasn't as mean as some people like to think. At least the 2.0 one wasn't.
So that guide failed because bad suggestions existed during the time it was stickied? If so, that's a very flimsy line of reasoning. That's kind of like saying "Well yeah, the place got shot up because the 'no weapons allowed' sign didn't have a better font!"
The new guide is not supposed to prevent bad suggestions. Users have the right to post poor suggestions if they wish. So long as the suggestion has at least some discussion value, it will be allowed to remain open. The new guide exists solely for those who wish to read it, but it is completely optional. The only thing that is official and mandatory are the rules pages.
I am seeing just as many poor threads now as before, and as I stated previously, most of the threads that forum users designate as joke threads are not clear enough to the forum staff to do anything with them except to monitor them. We are not going to start locking threads just because some people don't like the suggestions.
- sunperp
This seems to be a general rule on the readability of posts rather than a rule on suggestion quality. Zero to do with the quality of an idea, as far as I can gather. The point is to make sure that people make posts that actually make sense so a discussion can be had. Counter-examples welcome.
I made quite clear in my post that bad suggestions still exist. Unpinning the old thread was just one step.
I think I made quite clear the specific issue of the old thread vs this one has nothing to do with whether people are reading it and everything to do with if people are learning from what they're reading. Which they don't do in a super long guide which also makes them feel like trash. I know you'll say it's just 'too real' and whatnot, but that doesn't solve the problem.
You can't denounce every thread you don't like as a joke.
I'm glad you think it's their fault, but sitting on a high horse and blaming them doesn't solve the problem. I'm trying to tell you why this thread can in the future solve the exact problems you're complaining about, and you're retorting with "it's their fault their posts are bad anyway."
Frankly, I'm not concerned with whose fault you think it is. I'm telling you a solution, you're just pointing fingers.
I made a big long post explaining why the old thread failed, I'm not making another big long post to explain why your conclusion here has zero to do with what I actually said.
So I'll keep it short: everything about this guide is built on the notion of the target audience. The old guide failed because it had no such notion. This thread is a positive new direction because it recognises that people didn't care to pay any attention to a dissertation on all of the nuances of ideas for a 2011 block game which also happened to make them feel terrible for not paying it attention sooner.
You can write me an essay on why the old thread was great and it's all those posters' faults for being thin skinned. But that doesn't change the truth. You can either swim in a sea of bad suggestions knowing that you are virtuous and it's all their fault for being bad, or you can actually try to solve the problem.
The way I see it, neither guide prevents users from posting bad suggestions. They're always going to exist, and since the developers don't visit this site for ideas, it's not a big issue. What a guide does do is help those who want to make a good suggestion make it better, and help critics provide better arguments for improving suggestions. Now, for the former case, there are more people on this forum than people give credit for that actually want to make at least a decent suggestion. However, often these are first-time posters to the suggestions forum, and they don't have much experience. They are willing to read a guide and get a few pointers, but the massive guide is daunting to read and many aren't willing to spend 15 minutes reading it in its entirety. For them, this new guide is perfect; it's 100% objective (even if that means it's a little boring) and gets the biggest problems new posters might have out of the way.
However, there are a few who'd like to go above and beyond: the "overachievers," so to say. These people don't want to make just a decent suggestion, they want to make a good or even great one, à la Cubic Chunks or Colored Glass. These people want an exhaustive list of dos and don'ts, and aren't intimidated by the other guide. Now, as these people aren't common enough to warrant it, I don't think the old guide should be re-pinned, but it should be linked to at the bottom of the guide as a "for further reading" link, such as the ones you would find in an encyclopedia or educational article. The same goes for FTC.
Want to see my suggestions? Here they are!
I am also known as GameWyrm or GameWyrm97. You can also find me at snapshotmc.com
This is a much better way of framing it. I think overall we've sort of done the whole point of these guides a disservice by making them another sticky that everyone is expected to read. Let people read them if they want to make good suggestions. If they make bad suggestions with issues the guide covers, link them there. If they aren't interested, let their thread fall on its own.
Critics kind of tend to cause the problem themselves by dogpiling on bad suggestions and keeping it at the top. Just look on every obviously bad suggestion you can find. After you've gotten through the swathes of critics reiterating the same obvious points (just once is fine, everyone), you'll just find people commenting on how the post was dumb, a troll, etcetera.
And then after they've done that and created the problem, they see all the bad suggestions on the front page and decide that moderators need to deal with the problem. I don't understand this infatuation with the idea of policing suggestions this way, why can't critics let the criticisms be given once, see if the OP responds, and if not just leave the thread?
I know a few people in this thread have shown a desire for the kind of policing I'm talking about, and I'm by no means saying that you specifically are causing this issue, this is just what I've observed in general. A lot of people seem to bump bad threads seemingly to assert how terrible the thread is, and then act like it's the mods' fault.
Well this derailed from what you were saying, jdc. Nice post though, you hit the nail on the head. Not sure if I agree with linking the old thread though. I don't see much harm I suppose, I just worry it will end up maintaining the aura of elitism in this section. You know, "Go read the good guide, it's linked in the sticky", whereas without linking to it nobody should really be expected to read it at all. It's something I'll have to think about more.
While I think that overall policing of suggestion quality is a bad thing; I do think some containment and limitation is a good thing.
Creativity flourishes under limits and stagnates under availability; afterall.
With this said; while I don't think that demanding X paragraphs, Y parameters, Z grammar is appropriate for a wide sweeping ruleset; I do think a generally accepted form to reasonably mold an idea to isn't out of the question.
As a critic; I reserve every right to give a detailed reason why a suggestion fails my personal criteria. Whether I'm in the right or out in left field is not part of that discussion (though I do see it forming a red herring; but hey, it's tangentially related to the topic; so why not?) But my personal criteria (or a mod's) shouldn't be part of the rules at large.With that said; can we put some effort into formalizing a very loose bare-bones design document for how a suggestion should be presented (something that if the poster used it exclusively and carelessly; it'd cover just enough detail to not be locked for "vague")?
OFFICIAL POSTING/REPLYING GUIDELINES
UNOFFICIAL POSTING GUIDE (PRT)
UNOFFICIAL REPLYING GUIDE (FTC)