It's incredibly annoying that the event forums have been closing the day after an event ends. It leaves very little time to wrap up any contests/hangouts/whatever. Even if I end a contest a day or two before the end of a particular event, I still need to receive replies from folks who may not be able to get on everyday, particularly on a holiday weekend where many folks are vacationing or spending time with family (myself included!).

Previously, event forums have stayed open for an extra three or so days following the end of a holiday event. I'd like to see this length of time return for future holidays, and I'd like to be able to see posts I made in those forums after the fact back in recent posts like they used to be.

I find myself ambivalent about this.

By the Rules about user-run contests, the owner of the contest has to have distributed the prizes within 30 days of the end of the contest. It's weird to me that any board that allows contests/games closes sooner than that. OTOH the Rules also say that you must have rules, end dates, and prizes stated ahead of time, so perhaps they are being strict about the owner of the contest actually keeping track without actually doing anything to enforce this? I dunno.

Maybe if staff want the forums page to be clean and users not be confused about whether or not the holiday is still ongoing they could tak an extra step. Add an additional rule that if you want to run a contest or game on the holiday forum itself you must also link to a non-holiday forum where contests and games normally would go. Or they could lock the entire board so posts can be seen but nobody can post. That way the evidence of the contest remains, but nobody is confused. The remaining parts of the contest can continue as Comments or sMail.

I like this suggestion, it would be nicer to keep up with all of the events and contests in their original threads. Maybe the event forums can be titled with a date (Vesnali May 18 - 26) and the forum itself can go three or four days longer, if they’re worried keeping the forum open will cause confusion.

Full support for keeping the event forum open for a week after the holiday is over. No new topics could be made, but you would be able post on existing ones to wrap contests up, or to give people a heads-up that the convo will be moved to a topic in Chit-Chat, or wherever. Not everyone is on Subeta daily and Vesnali fell in a really odd time with college finals and school in the US just being over about the same time as Vesnali.

Part of the issue is that the forums aren't just closed. afaik, they're wiped completely. You get caught up in IRL things, you didn't make a backup of your contest topic because it was supposed to be a small fun thing. The forums are wiped, so you have no accurate gauge of things any more, but someone decides to report you anyway because hey, you didn't follow the rules and you didn't give out prizes.

On that note, I'd also suggest giving the event forums their own contests subforum but I can see that being a mess to manage with how active the event forums can get.

Don't they give like a week's warning ahead of things closing or...? I mean, either way, this has my support since I haven't had the time to sit down and play Subeta due to my own RL matters (job hunting, Mom's knee replacement/ongoing physical therapy, etc) so... that week went by very quickly.

The forums being open for a week after would be appreciated.

Full support. I kinda vaguely remember a time when the forum was open for several days after an event, not just 24 hours, and I don't really know why that changed?

Like, I wasn't partaking in any contests for Vesnali but I can completely understand. Sure you have to have a definite end date, but in that case you can either end a few days before the event and thus not get the most out of it or end the day of and then have to remember to keep track to hand out prizes which is difficult without an actual thread to back it up.

I like the idea of the subforum for the event having the dates so people aren't confused, staying open for a week afterwards so people can wrap up contests, and disallowing new threads but allowing posts so people can ping and all that. Because yea, irl gets in the way sometimes and people forget and normally it's not a big deal but with event forums getting totally wiped it's just a pain :/

If memory serves, usually the reminder is kind of last-minute?

News reminder for Vesnali ending & event forums closing was the day before Vesnali ended. News Masq reminder was also the day before the holiday ended. News Survival reminder was 3 days before the holiday ended.

(Also I love your HA ;; )

Ah, fair points. I haven't really been on actively since before Survival.

(Thank you. c: )

Support.

I always thought 24 hours was too short a time, but I've never run a contest/game during an event so never posted about it.

Wait, waaaaat when did it change to 24-hours? That's definitely not enough time. 3 days is a perfect amount of time if someone is allowing the event to go all the way until the end. Especially if it overlaps with a national holiday

^ this always seemed like a good idea to me too tbh.

I support the idea of it being open for a few more days after an event. I also support the idea of a contest subforum that could be moved into a larger "event contests" subforum in the regular Games forum after the event to allow for better wrap-up.

OTOH, I like that event posts are expunged after the event, because a million recent posts that just say "claim" aren't doing anybody any good.

I've never run an event contest, but 24 hours sounds unreasonable. Stuff happens, and people may not be able to get things wrapped up in such a short amount of time.

Is it possible for event forums to be hidden from the main forum page, but still accessible elsewhere for a few days? That way, the event forum isn't visible and leading users to believe an event is active, while those involved with contests have time to wrap things up.

Full support. I ran a little raffle for the masquerade and it got fairly stressful to count up entries and draw the winners, much less contact them after the fact with the 24-hour limit looming. That, and I wanted the people who entered to know that prizes had been distributed, so they knew that the raffle was legit.

I like the idea of a subforum specifically for contests. It might also help to keep the holiday forum open a little longer than 24 hours (3 days? A week may be overkill), but clearly state that the event is over--maybe in bright letters on the forum homepage itself. For example:

Vesnail Forums (Event ends May 26. Forums close May 2X.)

I'd also realllly love the ability to view archived posts AFTER the event is over, just in the event that something happens irl and I can't access the posts to see who entered a contest or something. All the threads could be locked at once, and maybe they could be accessed in a separate "event archives" page.

Another option is to make a news post on the day the event itself is over, just as a reminder to people. I always thought it was a bit weird that events just kind of stop with no acknowledgement in a news post. Something like: "That's a wrap! Flowers all over Subeta are blossoming, but Vesnali only lasts for so long. We hope you had fun exchanging flowers. Remember that the Vesnali forums will remain open until 11:59 Subeta time on May 2X!"

Yeah I don't host contests but I always thought that was a very short turnaround.

Full support on this. With holidays both onsite and often irl around the same time it is a lot going on at once. Having at least a few more days to gather ourselves and transfer the information from event threads to other locations after the event is over would be very helpful.

personally i don't support locking the threads. the reason i made this post is because i needed responses from folks to hand out prizes in my contest (a pick your own prize sort of thing), so locking the threads wouldn't.. really help at all. i knew i wouldn't get all the responses before the forums closed, but what i didn't know is that it was a completely waste of everyone's time since i apparently wouldn't be able to reference recent posts to see what items people selected. i like the idea of event archives. i never really understood why these posts are hidden.

i don't really see why it was changed from 3-4 days in the first place tho. a heads up is nice, but it doesn't solve the issue of why i made this thread. most contests go to the last day of the holiday. it seems silly to end a contest 3-4 days early just because the turnaround time on the forums is too short, especially for the holidays that are only a week long.

100% agree. 24 hours is not long enough to wrap up contests, which is why I haven't hosted any these past few events, despite always needing event currency. Like you also touched on, this past weekend in the US was a holiday weekend so a lot of people (myself included) were not online due to being out of town/spending time with family/etc. It would be nice to have at least 3 days minimum after an event ends to wrap up contests/etc.

Agreed, 24 hours is just not long enough. 3 - 4 days was perfect; while i understand we had ample warning about when the forums would be closing, that doesn't address the problem of waiting for responses, needing information from threads and posts, or otherwise!

I didn't have the free time on the 26th/27th to get all the info i needed from my contest thread; i was burnt out and exhausted from IRL chores and errands and commitments, and came home just to sleep and relax a little. I realized i was too late to get the stuff from my vesnali contest all at once about 30 minutes after the forums closed. the thing is, even if just our posts or created thread info stayed in tact I could've gotten it, but they even get wiped from your post history! It's currently not the best system how wholly temporary everything in holiday forums are, then how they blip completely out of existence in 24hrs. when there was a longer grace period, it was passable that everything just got actually-deleted-from-reality, but now that it's 1/3rd of the time frame it doesn't seem to be working for folks & certainly isn't working great for me ;;