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 d-usa wrote:
It seems that the least confusing solution would be to change "Geek Media" to "Other Hobbies & Interests: Movies, Comics, Sports, History, ETC" and "Off-Topic" to "Politics, Religion, and Current Events". It seems that this would create a system that is a lot less confusing to everybody and also contain the cancer to one sub-board.

To be completely clear here: these two forums are organized and labeled precisely as Yakface & Lego chose to implement them. If they choose to change them, as a result of the feedback or for any other reason, they'll do so. But there's nothing to be gained by continued posting here.

To clarify, the driving force behind creating the split in the two forums is because of me, and overall I think it is working quite well.

To give some background: when the OT forum was originally made by Russ back in the day, it was noted as being the place to discuss anything that wasn't miniature game related, but it specifically mentioned stuff like 'video games', 'movies', 'books' as examples. In other words, the idea was that it would be a place to discuss stuff that geeks (us) wanted to talk about but wasn't related to miniature gaming. However, it became clear that something else people like to discuss (or rather 'argue about') is: news/politics/religion. And because these topics tend to generate so much heat (i.e. constant responses), they tend to stay at the top of the forum. Combine that with the fact that the world is never at a shortage of hot-button news topics to discuss, means news/politics/religion discussion drowns out almost every other type of non-miniature thread.

I can say for myself, that I literally have no interest in discussing news, politics or religion. In fact, I actively try to avoid these topics in my general life because they tend to bring me down. So it saddened me that there wasn't a place on my website where I could read and discuss stuff I'm actually interested in (TV shows, books, movies, etc) without having to wade through dozens of topics, that even just reading their subject headings, can be a huge downer.

When we (the mods and Admin) were discussing making the new forum, there were discussions and disagreements about what to call it, and there was definitely talk about the potential confusion that you guys are expressing. But at the end of the day, I think the forum name and mission of 'Geek Media' expresses the main goal of what we're trying to have go on in that forum. Are there a few topics in the forum that some people don't consider 'geek' or 'media'? Sure. But for the most part, it is the safe place of fun, cool, non-gaming topics that I want it to be.

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As for the question of why do we even bother allowing news/politics/religion topics in the OT forum at all (or why not just say 'no crap posting')? There are a few reasons.


1) Some people really, really like to discuss those things. I'm not one of those people, but obviously the OT forum is filled with people who like to do exactly that, so there's at least that reason to keep that as an option on the site.

2) There is the belief that if we didn't allow a specific place for news/politics/religion discussion to occur, it would slowly infect other areas of the site, because of point #1, people really, really like to discuss those types of things and they'll find a way to do so.

3) If we wanted to have only a single OT forum, but tried ban topics that make people 'crap post', where exactly would the line be drawn? Religious discussion is pretty easy to define, but where politics ends and general discussion about news stories begins is a very blurry line. So even if we said 'no politics or religion discussion', pretty much any news story could quickly devolve into exactly the same type of heated discussion because people have very different viewpoints on life and how people should live.

4) We already do our best to try to get people to not make ridiculously OTT assertions (aka 'crap posting'). The problem is, news/politics/religion topics tend to be very divisive. So unless we tried to ban those topics all together (which would be problematic as illustrated in points #2 & #3 above), there is no easy way to have people 'just get along' when it comes to the real life issues that completely divide our societies. Hell, people get pretty riled up talking about Space Marines and Orks, so its no surprise that when they're talking about things that actually affect all of us they wouldn't have strong opinions they want to express.

Thanks for the input Yak.

IMO the thing that is frustrating isn't the separation, it's that the separation isn't consistent. Most of the time things like the sports threads or the "OMG look at this huge nerf gun" end up in off-topic, but not always. So if you're interested in that kind of thread you want to pay attention to OT, but also to GM just in case one gets randomly thrown into GM instead. And that's true even if you have no interest in the rest of the stuff in GM. It's also true if you have no interest in the religion and politics stuff and just want to see things like giant nerf guns, you have to pay attention to OT and the "general geek stuff sometimes, but mostly movies/tv/etc" section. It's like if you are really interested in 40k list building discussion and want to read all of the relevant threads, but also have to pay attention to the AoS YMDC forum just in case a 40k list thread ends up there.

I'll point out video games as a contrasting example. All of the video game discussion is in the video games section, except maybe the occasional bit on GW IP games ending up in other GW forums, and nothing else is. If you're interested in video games you know exactly where to go to find all of the threads on them. If you aren't interested in video games you can safely ignore the video games section. You could get the same kind of consistency with OT/GM if you do something like this:

Religion/News/Politics/Debates: argue about serious real-world issues here.

Geek Media: movies, tv, books, etc.

Off Topic: everything not covered by another section.

All of the flame wars get their own section where only the people who are interested have to look at them, geek media can be limited to actual media discussion instead of collecting random topics, and off topic can have all the random frivolous stuff like "what makes you happy" and "look at my giant nerf gun".

 Peregrine wrote:


Religion/News/Politics/Debates: argue about serious real-world issues here.

Geek Media: movies, tv, books, etc.

Off Topic: everything not covered by another section.

Listening to Yakface I can understand the thought behind Geek Media better and I agree that separating the contentious sections from the OT is a good idea. I do think that Geek Media would probably be better served by expanding it instead of creating three sections, which I think would be served by the thought I had earlier.

Make Off-Topic "religion/politics/current events" and just expand Geek Media to "other hobbies and interests" which would cover the Geek Media already present and then add stuff like history/sports/nerf guns/etc. I think it would create a much more stress free OT section for people not looking for the more contentious OT topics.

But it's yak's board. I appreciate that it exists and I'm happy that he is willing to explain why he does things the way he does and he is willing to give us this section of the forum to provide feedback. Which is more than can be said about many boards out there.

 d-usa wrote:
I do think that Geek Media would probably be better served by expanding it instead of creating three sections, which I think would be served by the thought I had earlier.

I think if video games are going to have their own sub-forum movies/tv/etc probably deserve one too. There's certainly a lot of threads on the subject, enough IMO to justify having a separate forum.

Again - drawing comparisons to on-topic subfora is unwarranted because they constitute the actual content of the site. Looking over two subfora for topics completely incidental to the purpose of the site is negligibly frustrating (unless perhaps one posts here mostly for the off-topic discussion) and does not overcome the benefit of a more flexible approach regarding this inherently broad range of topics, which furthermore entails no other trouble. IIRC the videogame subforum came about originally so that posters interested in multiplayer games could coordinate and has evolved from there; no point about how the rest of the board is structured should be based on that. That subforum survived the latest reorganization because video games - like board games and card games - are still games, after all.

Thanks Yak for posting your rationale.