Dan E Gray - Latest Comments

Re: The Gaming Industries Retreat from their Fans

Dan — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:33:50 -0000

Great post! This is actually why I left Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and, more recently, SWTOR. I can *totally* deal with bugs, imbalances, and missing features as long as I am engaged, respected and listened to. If I don't have that, I frankly don't care how good your game is; I'm out.

Re: Forums: The Final Word

Mindbendingpuzzles — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:22:00 -0000

I can't help thinking that people would quickly learn to game the system and just reply to the main post so their opinion gets noticed. Case in point blogs that allow threaded comments. Regardless of the subject of the first comment it will get a tonne of replies just so folk can get their message on the front page.

Re: Forums: The Final Word

Plagous — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:47:35 -0000

Great post! I agree with all of your points and believe that a system like you describe would lead the way to having a clean, easy to read forum for a very large audience. In most large forums you usually have to sift through a lot of junk to find the quality posts that actually add to the topic or conversation.

Re: The Google+ News Feed

Dan Gray — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:04:42 -0000

You can filter your feed by circle, using the menu on the left.

Agree with your sentiment, though I do feel like Google has got a lot invested in making this work. It comes down to how much they are willing to change it up, I suppose.

Re: The Google+ News Feed

Izzie — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:32:28 -0000

There's still a lot I don't like about G+. The lack of event planning, the lack of being able to, say, have a feed with select circles but not others (is that possible?).
I'm not entirely thrilled with their photo publishing, either.

I like it but it's got a long way to go before it trumps FB, if ever.

Re: The Seven Levels of Argument

Dez — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:28:37 -0000

lmao nothing like a sound argument.

Re: Building Communities with Momentum

Dan Gray — Tue, 03 May 2011 06:29:45 -0000

Technology moves quickly. There's a lot of things that forum software can do now which required additional software in the past. You may have some addition prepared, only to discover there is a far more elegant and less risky way to do it being developed.

I also don't think it's really possible to predict the exact needs of your community before it exists. For example: IRC is a staple part of some communities, while for others it's not even worth the time to maintain it. What is possible, and should be done, is to monitor your community's needs as they develops, and meet them before (or as soon as possible after) a request has to be made.

Re: Building Communities with Momentum

Elisabeth Claire — Tue, 03 May 2011 06:10:06 -0000

Sneaky compromise: have site expansions prepared, but wait for users to ask for them before going live with them?

Re: Gaming Social Networks

Nox — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:55:58 -0000

An inbuilt way to share screenshots would be nice

Re: Gaming Social Networks

Dan Gray — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:06:55 -0000

Agreed. The more web-savvy someone is, and therefore the closer to MO's demographic, the more likely they are to recognize it as spam and hide it away.

Re: Gaming Social Networks

Elisabeth Claire — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:24:02 -0000

That last sentence is perhaps the most telling. I automatically hide pretty much any in-game news that comes across my newsfeed. While I'd be all for my FB friends getting a discount (however meager), it would benefit the company almost nothing in terms of enticing me to play with them.

Re: RIFT: 150 Hours Later

Dan Gray — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:57:14 -0000

PvP is definitely something I should try more. I found getting into it a bit of a challenge, as I'm more used to the structured and competitive formats of Guild Wars. As for planar gear, it seemed like Planarite never came in big enough quantities to be a consistent source of gear - I admit there might be things I could have done to speed that up though.

Good to hear they are working on guild banks! I think it would do a lot of good.

Thanks for the response.

Re: RIFT: 150 Hours Later

anon — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:27:09 -0000

1. Almost all my gear, leveling up, is from PvP vendors (through the zones of my level appropriate range at first, then from the vendors in the main city. I also have a ton of planar purples from respective vendors in the appropriate zones, too.

3. That's in the works right now, actually. :) Hartsman himself confirmed.

Re: Positive Feedback Loop

Dan Gray — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:26:56 -0000

I'm in ur skypez reedin ur messages.

Re: Positive Feedback Loop

Tasha — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:24:23 -0000

Dan, are you reading my skype conversations? Cos really, I was just having this exact one with a friend regarding politics and the global community.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Dan Gray — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:17:56 -0000

I think even if there were a systen that could display only these highlighted posts and retain the context, it wouldn't be a good idea. The aim is to encourage people to scroll through the pages of a discussion, scanning the posts and taking note of names. While this doesn't mean every post will be read, it makes it far more likely.

Having a system where only the top rated posts get read really does encourage group-think, as they will also be the only posts to receive further votes.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Tasha — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 06:30:04 -0000

My main issue with large forums is that eventually threads of interest are so long that they become unreadable in a reasonable time scale. Community highlighted posts are a great idea however they don't stop you having to dig through a 30 page thread to find the good ones. If you show a summary page of just the good ones, its unlikely that it will make sense to anyone, especially if there's a great one on page 2 and another on page 16 - conversations evolve. So you'll have to go through the thread anyway to make sense of the conversation and get the context of the highlighted posts.

A central issue of forums is that whilst there is a great deal of conversation observers, there are a large number of people who want to be heard. Even if their opinion has been expressed by someone else succinctly they still want to lend weight to it by chipping in, responding to someone with an opposing viewpoint etc., which then leads to big threads.

I can agree with Chalky's worries about childish comments, but upvoting will highlight these unwanted posts to moderators as well as other users. I'd like to see a system implemented and in use before deciding if its good or not.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Dan Gray — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:23:38 -0000

Oh definitely, I'm aware that there are similar systems out there, unfortunately they are usually either flawed or ineffective. The reputation system in vB is worthless, and while it sounds like IPB is closer they are still a ways off.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Chalky — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:15:51 -0000

IPB has the feature where you can +rep posts (with a short message for the person you're appreciating) and the rating appears in the bottom corner of the post like this. The total number of appreciations a user has had is then displayed in his profile.
I believe reputation can also appear next to posts by users but that seems to be disabled on that board.
I think vB has a similar system, but I'm not sure if it is a mod (we had it on AS for a time)

I must say I do like the "rewards" concept, sort of like the idea of giving people custom titles or membership to special groups but without being so fiddly and more intended.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Dan Gray — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:44:14 -0000

I don't think I've seen a forum with such a system (though wowhead is pretty close). If you know of one off the top of your head I'd love to check it out.

That aside, you can't look at the 'liking' or highlighting system in isolation. It is just one component of the whole system, helping meet the goals I set out.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Chalky — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:26:18 -0000

Oh, I see - but many forums already have reputation systems and the ability to up vote posts to highlight them. In these implementations it doesn't actually do anything, besides highlight posts and allow users to display how successful their posts have been in the past for prestige.

I have clearly missed the point here since I fail to see how this differs - obviously you can't change the order of posts without making the conversation confusing, and you can't hide posts if you don't down vote.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Dan Gray — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:18:20 -0000

I've added a note to clarify the moderation issue, thanks Chalky.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Lily — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:15:36 -0000

@Chalky

I take it you must be a moderator, because I dont know how you got that "moderation would be replaced by the community" from this blog post. I think the overall idea here is not to better forums by replacing moderation (or anything to do with moderation in fact...), rather to enhance the user experience in forums by taking the successful features from social networks.

I think his upvote system (or I guess he refers to it as the "liking" system) is a great idea. Forums to me are like a game of "Beat the Clock," in other words, let me post as early in the thread as I can before my post gets buried by tons of pages and comments and never seen again. His system would allow an excellent post in page 16 of 30 to be highlighted and viewed and upvoted and commented on.

Notice he didn't mention a "downvote" which means you'd still get plenty of posts that don't contribute that will still have to be cleaned out by mods, as well as thread deletion, user bans, thread merging, and other general mod actions that will still be necessary. In other words, the community isn't "moderating" itself, but it is rewarding quality, which is too often overlooked in forums. The top dog is he who barks the loudest at the moment. This system would help alleviate that.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Chalky — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:47:09 -0000

I have to say I disagree with the overarching principal here. A democratic, feedback based moderation system is not a way to ensure quality - you only have to look at the youtube comment streams for popular videos to see how this system fails to promote quality. "Thumbs up if the guy in the pink shirt is a fag" is one classroom of bored school kids away from the most popular comment.

The flawed assumption here is that the community as a whole is capable of moderating itself, and that the majority of people who vote for posts will vote for ones that are of quality. The sad fact of the matter that those who would rather post childish flames and memes massively outnumber those who wish to have a mature conversation. What's more, the mob is easily lead and a democratic moderation system leads to group think - although you suggest that negative feedback should not be possible so that unpopular opinions are not demoted, the promotion of all opposing opinions will suppress the unpopular. Cliques and group think will suffocate even the most valid debates if you moderate by mob rule.

You promote quality through strong editorial leadership backed by a dedicated moderation team. People who can stand back from the fray and judge the quality of the user generated content and ensure that minority views can be expressed and debated in a healthy atmosphere.

And yes, this can lead to potential mismanagement and unwanted influence because you are focusing power on a small number of people, but this can be dealt with by ensuring that those people are good at what they do - which is acting as impartial guardians of the health of the community.

Message boards have not fundamentally changed for a long time, but this is for good reason.

Re: Unsucking Forums

Neo Nugget — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:41:21 -0000

Another fantastic post. Great job, Dan.