🔍 Improvement: Forum points now reward starting conversations. We retired the old random-chance forum-point system (where you'd occasionally get a point for any reply, including one-word forum-game posts). Now: the first new topic you start each day in a Social Scene forum earns you 1 forum point. If five different people reply to your topic, you get a +3 bonus. Staff and recognized users still award +1/+3/+5 on great posts anywhere. This was always meant to reward activity and building community on the forums, and this is more in line with using it as a carrot to drive activity.
👑 New Feature: Five new forums for movies, music, books, games, and life! We've revived the Social Scene category with five new homes for the stuff you actually want to talk about: 🎬 Screen & Stage (TV/movies/streaming), 🎵 Sound Booth (music/concerts/podcasts), 📖 Library (books/comics/manga), 🎮 Game Night (video & board games), and 🌿 Life Outside Subeta (photos, hobbies, what you're up to). Start a fresh topic in any of them and tell us what you've been into.
🎨 Visual Update: Prompt cards in Social Scene forums. Each Social Scene forum now opens with a "this week, try writing about…" card with three rotating ideas, a prominent "Start a topic" button, and a list of the freshest recent threads — to help break the mega-thread reflex and make it easy to start something new.
- 📖 Improvement: New "How Forum Points Work" guide page. There's a full explanation of how to earn and spend forum points, including what changed and how staff recognition works, at /help/forum-points.php.
I have no idea what to post about once a day to get this forum point. I don't really post in the social scene section of the forums, as everyone's opinions are valid when it comes to entertainment of any kind.
I don't even post on the forums much unless there is an event/contest/giveaway. I even had a heck of a time earning forum points from the forum games section.
I see the social scene becoming a dumping grounds for dead threads overloading the cache on the forums.
I do like the idea of giving points to other users for their contributions to the threads, but again, considerations for giving points is all subjective and personal for the user that is giving the points. Maybe forum points could go back to the way they were but the forum games sections and events sections could be excluded from earning points. That way, those sections won't be overrun by users posting their for the forum points alone. Those threads are a great way to accumulate forum posts for the achieement though. :)
Hey there, I want to give feedback on the Forum Points overhaul and the recent trajectory of the site. I appreciate the efforts to revive the forums as they have always been the heart of the site. I think the overhaul is misguided and, quite frankly, awkward. I feel like I don't have to point out the social challenges you open up by gamifying creating threads and writing things staff members will like. I have seen far smaller spaces with healthier and organic activity by simply giving out one of their "forum points" once per day for posting once. I don't think that discourse needs to be gamified.
Forum culture is dear to my heart, and an active forum is NOT one that has many posts. I think it's deeply misguided as a healthy forum culture lives from people responding to each other with adequately high-quality responses. I personally also dislike prompting conversation with generated impulses. This barely fuels any discussion but leads to a shallow, unappealing forum culture. I urge you to rethink what you want these forums to look like, what you want people to talk about and design around the focal mechanics of the website. You have plenty of volunteers and caring community members – do one focus group at least.
I also am concerned about a lot of the recent features. I know AI-assisted coding enables one to create a bunch of surface-level features that seem cool, but there has been a surge of random features without further notice. I would like to request a proper roadmap or at least a list of features that are planned to be refined in the future. I know Subeta will always be a growing organism, but a community deserves to know how exactly their favourite space will change.
I second everything Lyonid said, much more eloquently than I could have! Especially this: "I feel like I don't have to point out the social challenges you open up by gamifying creating threads and writing things staff members will like."
Something like this is always going to be subjective. I'm trying to reward something that can only be subjective (is a post "good") - thats' what the forum points are for. The feature to spread out teh ability to hand them out is an attempt to spread out the functionality, and I'll be watching how it looks for the points to go out.
I'm a much bigger fan of this than the random, and so I'm going to go forward with this test. I'll be watching the threads - but so far - no spam! Just things I've really enjoyed engaging with and I encourage you to go as well, and if that isn't your thing that is fine and I hope that folks who earn points for what this is meant to encourage (and I will be watching for spam!) get points and sell them. This is a currency specifically meant to create activity in the forums, I dont' like how it's been implemented in the past (random posts just doesn't feel right) and this is my swing at improving that system. As always, I'll be reading the feedback and making improvements!
This just means no way to earn points for a lot of users in the future.
actually i think the biggest issue is this does not give any incentive for anyone to reply to threads. just make them. if you want to reply, the slight chance of a reward to get items locked into a special forum based currency is gone. all you replying does is reward OP for your contribution. that feels bad
"Revival" is a kind of a weird word for death.
Was the problem that there weren't enough posts? Why are the only options to either give forum points randomly or to reward them only for making new posts? I'm not worried about spam at all. I don't care how interesting the majority of posts are, either. Since it's now my (our) responsibility to earn forum points for other people by responding to their posts (or to, what, impress the More Important People enough with our silly little posts), interaction in Social Scene sounds like a chore and a half. Here's hoping the people who are enjoying it start racking up the points and sharing the contents of that shop with the rest of the economy.
This doesn't seem very inclusive. I don't like people being excluded, which is what made random nice.
i just dont get how there are so many people saying "hey, we are your users and this idea sucks" and the response is "well I like it"
where have you seen this system work to the user bases benefit/be well received? what about this situation is what you like? is it the mass amount of disgruntled users saying "cool, now my forum use gets nothing or earns prizes for someone else"?
this system could work if the entire other parts of the forum point system wasnt thrown out with the bathwater.
so... what does replying do now? nothing? then why would people replying topics anyway...
It's good to reward users for starting topics, however... It's also good to reward users for bothering to repeatedly engage with those topics.
So I actually just answered to a topic as the 2nd user. Would answering again, as the forth or even 5th make the count go up/trigger? Or will a returning user not be recognized in the row.
I wrote in a "listing" topic, but actually there can be real discussions going on with therefore returning chatters.
I think perhaps you misunderstand something pretty vital about running a community website, Keith.
This isn't your site. This is your users' site. You are beholden to us, not the other way around.
Why spend so much energy working on fixing up the code just to drive the site into the ground because you like the idea of a feature? You haven't explained why you like it, either. Clearly, you must have experienced this feature somewhere already to be so certain that you like it. So where have you seen this, in action, actually work?
I know a lot of us are old and hate change now, but seriously, sometimes just roll with it instead of getting so rude. If it doesn't work out it'll inevitably change again, for now why be mad that you have a guaranteed way to earn at least one forum point a day? Something that used to take post after post after post (I would usually only get them on the holiday threads like "kiss the user above" etc) we now have a foolproof way to um, exploit. Enjoy it while it lasts is what I say. Off to make my daily post...
So replying to topics gets us... nothing o_0 Keith, im sorry but not everyone has the confidence or social skills to start a topic and just hope a few people reply to it when there will probably be TONS of topics, or the comfodence to know what to write starting a topic. I think most people would be fine with having an established system for forum points, the problem is then what's actually even in it for people to be motivated to REPLY so the OP can get additional points? It needs to be more balanced because only rewarding people who start topics is ridiculous and unfair especially to users who are a little more socially awkward.
I'll acknowledge Keith's reasons for liking this system, but I'm still curious as to why only new threads in Social Scene get rewarded, and not the areas of the forum focused on Subeta itself. Since his comment refers to this as a "test" (although I'm not seeing it called a test anywhere else, so I'm not really sure what that means), is the intention to eventually make forum points available for new threads in other areas of the forum? If not all of them, since things like the forum games and holiday claiming threads seem to be frowned upon by staff, at least the areas like pets, general, and creativity where I would think discussion would be welcome and encouraged?
Sorry I'm not expressing myself well, basically just saying that I'll like this change a bit better if we can at least get points for posting new Subeta-related topics. (Although it still really rubs me the wrong way that a few hand-picked users get to reward points, because understandably they'll be more inclined to give points to their friends, and it just feels like getting points will be a cliquish popularity contest. Hopefully I'm wrong!)
I started a topic, so let's see what this brings. But I'm honestly sceptical? Because there is no reward for replying.
Small sidestep: but the "most recent unread bubbles" in the forums, is it a bug that they are now always showing (and not like before when they would only show up with unread posts) or is it a decision that they are now always there (even though they link to the first post when no new posts)? Bug report was made 2 months ago. I still find it quite difficult now to see which topics have new posts and which don't.
Id rather just have the random chance for points. maybe just change it so you have to post slightly longer posts to get a point. i dont know.