I want them to be useful, though! using the above as an example, during survival there is a huge effort to figure out the strains together. that should absolutely be searchable!

Technically feasible to ignore some posts / threads / forums, but what I'm trying to get at is that I'd like the forum to be place for high quality posts, and instead of figuring out where to ignore, I'd rather encourage and reward for quality posts in a way that we could make rules against something like a "claim" thread and having other avenues for that means you won't need them.

Beyond that, this same search functionality powers the admin back end (and our filtering for CSAM, etc) and so we have to index every post, even if it doesn't return specific forums in the on site search.

Forum points aren't going to be a thing anymore on the new forums -- I'll figure out a different way to use those items / points as a carrot for something else, because clearly they aren't working the way I intended.

They were meant to be for encouraging real discussion and social interaction on the forums, and multiple people here saying they need those threads to earn those points to a pretty big self own on my own part. They don't put pressure on creating quality content, but quantity content in order to keep up / earn them.

So, lets take them out of the equation for thinking about how to approach this, and lets keep in mind that we need to index all forum posts for spam and admin reasons.

[edit]

You admit that you rarely participate, though! I'm taking feedback and looking for suggestions on how to capture what you're looking for (interactions between users, feeling like the site is active and moving, and giving another avenue for earning event items) in a way that isn't people posting 'claimed!' tens of times in a row in the forums.

Yes! And what I'm saying is that I don't think that the forum is the right place for those interactions, for a few reasons, but starting with wanting a functional search for our forums that isn't 80GB because it needs to index thousands of threads (which will need to do if we filter out those posts publicly or not!) that say 'claimed'.

If the function of those posts is to be able to get / give something in the event, that is something we can replicate with code and pairing people up, or something similar, an event that sends you directly to someones profile, etc. i think we could find a way!

Is it that you're doing something that feels like posting, is it the interaction with other users, is it that users come to your house after you post?

Having a button on a general thread that lets you add an icon for people to go to, for example, achieves the same purposes without 10 pages of just the word 'claim'. I'm curious why that is an important aspect of this to keep?

If I look at the threads that are ongoing right now, perhaps less than 5% of the posts have anything other than 'claim', but i'd rather these threads be a cozy place to both interact with the event (claim a spot in someones queue, get a visit to your profile instead of it being automated) and chat casually than a graveyard (to me) of posts that it's not really easy to strike up a conversation with people in!

we dont' have to limit ourselves to how it works now!

something like this, and i apologize for my very poor mockup 😭 but something like this feels more social to me than just posting a word over and over in a thread, but maybe that feels more social to everyone else than I realized!

Sorry, I said this in another post

and it wasn't very clear - I like the survival biting threads, everyone is attempting to find the solutions together and that requires some amount of discussion in addition to jumping on the next person who posts they're looking for the strain you have.

That would be the idea, and that queue would move up (you would have to action on someone in it - maybe not the person immediately before you, but if the queue is moving along you shouldn't be that far behind -- or we can reverse it! the person at the front of the queue is the last person to ToT, but that might create a weird race condition). You could get notifications that brings you back to the topic you queued up in, where hopefully people are chatting about their days or favorite casseroles (lasagna) or something