Section ideas?

[Taiji_mods]

Maybe a little love for the more obscure consoles. 3DO/M2, PC Engine/ PCFX, Philips CDi, Panasonic Q etc. Also some love for the vintage platforms like Colecovision, Intellivision, Sega SG-1000 maybe. And maybe a section for retro computers - 486, Apple II, C64.

 

[FamilyGuy]

General programming, and off-topic. A political thread in off-topic is useful to move contentious posts and refer people there to mitigate flame wars.

 

[Nemesis]

I'd like to suggest something perhaps a bit more radical. I think there are too many arbitrary splits between systems/companies in the technical forums. I'd suggest taking all these forums:

• Refurb and Repair
• Modding, Hacking & Reverse Engineering
• Sony Programming & Development
• XBOX/Chihiro Programming & Development
• Nintendo Programming & Development
• SEGA Programming & Development
• Misc Programming & Development

And simply replace them with this:

• Console Development & Repair
• Arcade Development & Repair
• General Development & Repair

There's a lot of overlap between "Modding, Hacking & Reverse Engineering" and the current company-specific forums, making it confusing where some things should be posted. Similar issues with "Refurb and Repair" vs the development forums, where if you want help fixing your Game Gear, you want the experts who frequent the Sega section to see your thread, but they might not drop by the Refurb and Repair section often. The current structure also discourages talk about systems outside the big 4 vendors named, whereas more general forums will, I believe, lead to an increase in people discussing other systems. Giving arcade a home is a good idea too I think given how large and active some arcade communities are, and the fact there's probably some considerable overlap with quite a few members here (I myself actually have just as much arcade gear as I have console gear). AssemblerGames didn't target the arcade space very well, but I think this forum could, if the sections aren't stacked too heavily in favour of consoles.

If the three forums I've named get far too crowded and noisy (which honestly would be a good thing) and it really becomes unmanageable, then you could split them, but I'd start tighter and grow from there. AssemblerGames had far too many sections, and as a result over half of them languished. Keeping the list of sections small and active helps the community get closer together. I also think you should consider folding "Beta talk" into "Rare & Obscure Gaming" for similar reasons.

 

[FamilyGuy]

I'd like to suggest something perhaps a bit more radical. I think there are too many arbitrary splits between systems/companies in the technical forums. I'd suggest taking all these forums:

• Refurb and Repair
• Modding, Hacking & Reverse Engineering
• Sony Programming & Development
• XBOX/Chihiro Programming & Development
• Nintendo Programming & Development
• SEGA Programming & Development
• Misc Programming & Development

And simply replace them with this:

• Console Development & Repair
• Arcade Development & Repair
• General Development & Repair

There's a lot of overlap between "Modding, Hacking & Reverse Engineering" and the current company-specific forums, making it confusing where some things should be posted. The current structure also discourages talk about systems outside the big 4 vendors named, whereas more general forums will, I believe, lead to an increase in people discussing other systems. Giving arcade a home is a good idea I think given how large and active some arcade communities are, and the fact there's probably some considerable overlap with quite a few members here (I myself actually have just as much arcade gear as I have console gear). AssemblerGames didn't target the arcade space very well, but I think this forum could, if the sections aren't stacked too heavily in favour of consoles.

If the three forums I've named get far too crowded and noisy (which honestly would be a good thing) and it really becomes unmanageable, then you could split them, but I'd start tighter and grow from there. AssemblerGames had far too many sections, and as a result over half of them languished. Keeping the list of sections small and active helps the community get closer together. I also think you should consider folding "Beta talk" into "Rare & Obscure Gaming" for similar reasons.

I see your point, but I don't really agree. For me the Prog&Dev subsections allow smaller communities to have visibilities among themselves even when the mainstream community produces a lot of content. E.G. it could be hard to find the few Saturn content amongst Xbox 360 posts flooding the place.

I'd even have split the Sega section into Dreamcast and Saturn, but I understand this can become over specialized.

To me, the goal of a forum such as OG/AG is for information to be well sorted in order to be accessible easily in the future. It's not like most forums where the latest information is the most important. I like Reddit, but it's a pain to find old stuff on there.

 

[Nemesis]

I see your point, but I don't really agree. For me the Prog&Dev subsections allow smaller communities to have visibilities among themselves even when the mainstream community produces a lot of content. E.G. it could be hard to find the few Saturn content amongst Xbox 360 posts flooding the place.

I'd even have split the Sega section into Dreamcast and Saturn, but I understand this can become over specialized.

To me, the goal of a forum such as OG/AG is for information to be well sorted in order to be accessible easily in the future. It's not like most forums where the latest information is the most important. I like Reddit, but it's a pain to find old stuff on there.

With a single forum though, you could use the prefix labels to do a quick one-click filter down to specific systems easily within the forum. That kind of gives you a best of both worlds approach, where you can keep everyone in the same space, while still being able to easily filter down to specific systems, without needing to totally silo the content. Also, given that the first page of the X360 forum on AG still shows threads back into 2018, I don't think the congestion would be as bad as you think.

 

[Nemesis]

To be clear about what I mean by section labels, see the "Price Check" forum with the "Price Check" label you can put on posts, and easily filter by. In that case it's pretty redundant as that's what the forum is for and there's only one section label, but if we had a "Console Development & Repair" forum with labels for "Mega Drive/Genesis, SNES, Game Gear, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast", and so on, I think that would be ideal.

 

[FamilyGuy]

Well, you can't really judge popularity based on the last year on AG. My point was just that popular system could drown niche communities in their noise.

That said, the prefix option is a good one in my opinion; as long as it's still easy to find at the time of posting and in the future: I approve.

 

[logi26]

I'd even have split the Sega section into Dreamcast and Saturn, but I understand this can become over specialized.

I would agree with this.
Maybe because the forum is still fairly new it might not be the best idea to have too many sub-sections at the moment. But as the 'Sega Development' section gets more posts, it might be a good idea to do this in the future.

I also really like the prefix's. It makes it easier to search for what you want.
Maybe the prefix's would enable the staff to split the threads into sub-sections in the future, providing everyone uses them. All threads with Saturn prefix could go into a sub-forum and all threads with Dreamcast prefix into another etc.

In-fact, I think a staff member may have been busy adding prefix's to threads that had none?
Because I noticed that there was quite a few threads with no prefix's, but now most threads seem to have them.

 

[1]

Maybe because the forum is still fairly new it might not be the best idea to have too many sub-sections at the moment. But as the 'Sega Development' section gets more posts, it might be a good idea to do this in the future.

This was pretty much the plan all along, keeping it super simple for now. But as stuff grows, if a dedicated section is needed we'd planned to make one with the content moving over to that.

Like for now, we've got misc for the lesser known contents but say we got 200 posts on the M2 which I can see Awbacon quite easily doing we'd make a dedicated area for it

We find AG had too many sections at times, but seeing as we're new we didn't want to scatter the content too much so setup the prefixes for now.

 

[bisterddave]

Plenty of great suggestions posted already.

edit: nevermind, I'm dumb and just noticed the Collection/Set-Up section.

 

[PixelCrunch]

Plenty of great suggestions posted already. One of my favorites from AG was Post Your Collection/Set-up, would love to see that here.

We have it, "member collections" under Obscure Gamers Community.

 

[bisterddave]

We have it, "member collections" under Obscure Gamers Community.

Yup, just noticed haha

 

[Nemesis]

Hey @Morphic and @Damien, any thoughts about my suggestion of merging a few of the sections together?

 

[PixelCrunch]

Hey @Morphic and @Damien, any thoughts about my suggestion of merging a few of the sections together?

I like your idea of the price checking, I'm sure it's something we could do. Thanks!

 

[Rixel]

All for the idea of a downloads section but I feel like one of the problems becomes that links break and things go down over time. A lot of the AG one was people asking for things that leaked years ago to be reuploaded or pinging old threads to find something. The current protos thread we have seems to work a lot better, but either a wiki or some kind of library/FTP structure seems like it’d better serve this need/request. That said I know there’s concerns with anyone getting more takedown notices but before we simply repeat the past I think we should review options. Just my 2¢

 

[No Good]

Why no download section?

 

[cta]

No need for a dedicated "free stuff" section imho, but there definitely should at least be a thread for it. Or maybe a couple - one for pay-shipping-and-its-yours, one with free game download notifications, you get the idea. I'd guess those will just happen naturally anyways at some point.

 

[la-li-lu-le-lo]

I'd suggest a computer gaming section. I have a retro gaming PC I built, and I'd like to make a thread about that. An arcade forum would be nice, too.