I'm struggling with the mockup as well. The proposed new system seems hideously complicated compared to posting in a claim thread. I still don't see how something this complicated would work for Vesnali where we have to collect floating flowers to give to other players.

I didn't even know 'necro-ing' was a thing. I would be really upset about getting a warning for something like that. Was there any sort of notification that this became a rule?

its always been a rule, as far as i'm aware.

Oh gosh. Well I'm glad I'm finding out now! I'm not sure how I missed that haha.

I've been lurking and to me, this seems it could be the best, least complicated option. But it needs a tiny tweak: let the people who make those incredibly helpful holiday guide threads mark/tag their threads as guides.

That way you can exclude holiday forums from search except for any thread within that forum that's tagged/marked as a guide.

idk how feasible it is coding-wise but I figured I'd toss that out as a possibly less complex tweak than making a whole new "holiday activity exchange" feature.

it's always been a rule but it was increased from 3 months to 6 months a while back (like, probably a couple years ago at this point?) except for suggestions which is 15 months and p&b/feedback which have no limit.

it was also supposed to be the case that topics past their time limit would be automatically locked so no one could accidentally necro it, but afaik that function never actually went into effect.

I'm relatively new to the site and this is my first major site event, but just from looking through this thread alone I feel like I need to pitch in.

For starters, I'm also having trouble understanding the mockup. It seems much more complicated than it needs to be, and will probably be a barrier to people using the forums in general instead of a reason to do so.

Secondly I think a huge reason the forums aren't seeing 'quality' posts (with quality being subjective here, which is another issue entirely) is that things are just far too strict in terms of what we can and cannot talk about, necro-ing of threads (and as mentioned playing the game of Get a Warning for Necro or Get a Warning for Duplicate Thread so people just don't post), and threads ending at 1k posts. Necro-ing at less than ~a year and ending threads at 1k posts is something I've pretty much never seen on any other website and I'm sure it's a relic of the time at which this site was originally built, and restricting what we can talk about is normal but everyone else seems to understand that's what's going to lead to people using discord and other services to talk more freely.

Third let's go back to the idea of 'quality' posts. There's not a lot here to encourage that; if you don't already know people it seems tricky to get into a lot of threads and chat, and some people are just naturally introverted. I mostly post what you would consider 'low quality' posts, and only because I needed posts for the Blue Building and for achievements. Because there's just not a ton here that would encourage me to do otherwise versus other sites, and part of that is Subeta's low general population of users. On other sites there's more user-driven content that revolves around wider aspects of the site, whereas here it seems if you're not an artist, in to CW's, or otherwise into very specific aspects of the site there's just not a lot to do outside of the posting what you got from Shinwa or doing 'claim' in the holiday threads. Unfortunately I can't really see a fix for that outside of staff or volunteers running stuff to encourage more diversity in the forums overall but I'm not sure how feesable that is.

To me it seems like what you're asking for is a bit of a unicorn and you're never going to get the perfect solution you're looking for. I think the best way to achieve what the original post is asking for is to make claim threads their own subforum within the overall holiday forum and have the indexing exclude that specific section as others have suggested. Anything else feels too complicated and like it'll just stop people from using the forums and turn to things like the Random ToT button on the front page (if those even exist for other holidays?) or going into the forums to find someone random if they don't have friends to help out and that is obviously less than ideal all things considered.

also, responding to that mockup in particular, i think i get what you're going for but it looks like the way you have the "queue" system set up at the top there is that you can CHOOSE a user in the queue to [do holiday action] with.

however the vital thing about claiming threads is that it is guaranteed that YOU are doing the action with the person who queued up IMMEDIATELY BEFORE you, and you are having the action done TO YOU by the person who queued up IMMEDIATELY AFTER you. otherwise there isn't necessarily an equivalent exchange, which is important because these are functions related to achievements, so you want to guarantee that your counter is going up when you participate.

i don't mind the queue itself being sort of a sideline to a broader forum topic where people can just sort of chat about the holiday or whatever else is relevant in that context (though idk what that would necessarily entail for every holiday); but it can't be a pick-and-choose situation, or else not everyone is promised to get out of it what they put in.

to my understanding, the issue with that is that the claim threads use up a lot of data for (what Keith considers) 'low value' content regardless of whether or not it appears in a search, and thus he is trying to replace it in its entirety with something that (ideally) has a smaller footprint. i still personally think your and Jess's idea is the best practice and that putting that potential effort into actual on-site activities is the better use of that energy, but i'm assuming that's why he'd prefer to make a whole system.

Ah, gotcha! Though even in that case, he'd still have a safe filter to wipe the spammy holiday forum data after a period of time (3 months?) and keep the ones that are actually important (the ones flagged as guides). :x Assuming he wants to wipe that data to begin with. Deleting it might open a whole other can of beans (like causing issues for contests that are being looked into for breaking rules and not giving out prizes, etc.).

That said, I don't mind the claim threads, but they're not something I participate in. The extent of my own holiday forum activity is posting on the Survival topics to get infected faster. For any other holidays, I nudge a friend who sporadically plays so we can exchange flowers/kisses/what-have-yous, or I use the random option when available, or I return whatever events get sent my way. (I think I was exchanging flowers with you this year? Or kisses? I don't remember, but I remember your username!)

Heck, the forums as a whole are something I don't regularly participate in these days. Not because of the quality of posts, but simply because I don't always have the time (let alone energy) to communicate with others. It's not a forum-only thing, I'm that way on Discord too.

The mockup Keith made for a thread-specific holiday activity exchange could be nifty. That way, people could chat and lurkers could also engage with the people in that thread without chatting. I could see that working, but that system would take forum engagement out of the equation completely. Which for me personally isn't an issue to begin with, but folks do chat and hang out and make friends even via the "claim!" topics so... I don't know. I don't believe there's really a clean, simple way to remove these kinds of forum topics without axing a hefty bit of actual forum activity (and, by proxy, social activity between users).

Quote by Keith

lol hello on this board also. What does the "lists by a per-thread topic" part mean? I mostly understand the image but am not 100% sure what it is depicting.

I think the way it's being explained the queue would work about the same way as the "claim". So at the top (the user images in the orange bar) would be a handful of users, and you click one of them, which means you action them, and then you replace them in the queue so you're one of the next X # of people who get clicked? Is that right?

Ah okay! So each individual topic (in the holiday forum only?) would have a queue you could join! You could join one at a time I'm guessing (kinda like the timer needing to roll between clicks) but can still chat on all of the topics? And the discussions could range topic-to-topic so there's still low-pressure options that are something more than "claim" 1000 times lol. I mean, that seems like a good compromise / combination to me!

I think with the explanation of the mock-up, I like it too.

I don't love claim boards, I just use them because I don't know if anyone would do an action on my profile (trick-or-treat, dance, etc) otherwise, but they aren't the most fun and can feel spammy after a while. I wouldn't miss claim threads if they were gone.

I can think of two groups of players who will be affected by this. (1) People who suffer from anxiety about posting in the forums (2) People who have difficulty with small talk. (I have an intellectual understanding of the purpose of small talk but it doesn't come naturally to me.)

Masquerade and Morostide will be fine because there's the Random option for these two holidays. There's no Random option for Vesnali, though. If we are forced to post in topics we'll go to user run games such as Ping The Person Above or 1, 2, 3..... EXPLODE!

Going back to this forum search feature you are working on. What are you going to do where special forums are concerned? The Gold Account forum is only for GA holders but not all players have a GA 365 days a year. Then there are the private forums belonging to forum groups.

Is there possibly a way to repurpose the mysterious melody feature but in this way people can opt into being kissed, egged, TP'ed, ToTed? Let's people still have the low pressure engagement situation but also cuts the claims. Or put them in a separate temporary non-indexed forum?

I could be wrong, but I don't think you have to chat to be able to join a queue. So like folks who aren't comfortable chatting can still click in and get a notification when they've been actioned. I think?

Hopefully we will be given instructions if this system is brought in. The other option for Vesnali is flowering random people and hoping they will flower us back.

I would assume we'll be given guidance to the system when it's ready to roll out! I think it would work for Vesnali, we would need to find the floating flowers and then we could click into the queue. The code would likely reflect the current system in some way, where when we clicked in we would go to the page where we select which flowers to leave.

I love those threads, because it's more or less the only time I post and thus can earn forum Points! ;-)