Development Discussion should be broken up into more topic focused categories

Forum Help Forum Features
#1

I’ve been a user of the DevForum since it’s inception, and while I’m happy to see the community grow, the Development Discussion board seems to have heavily regressed in terms of topic quality. The issue seems intrinsic of how broad the category of the board is. You won’t find much interesting technical discussion because it’s all buried under waves of people talking about the same things over and over.

Over the past year or so I’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the amount of topics that focus on open-ended rhetorical questions, and I just don’t see any real value coming from most of these discussions. Without a clear focus for what they should be about, these new wave users have followed the trendy behavior of other users who post on the board, and it has continuously downgraded as a result.

So to put it as simply as possible, it would be cool if we could see this board broken up into specific topical categories to reduce its dilution of topics. In particular I’d really like to see more niche technical discussions from people who are looking to push the engine forward and innovate. It could also be broken down into topics like 3D modeling, art, music and sounds, game design, best practices, hiring logistics, etc.

72 Likes
#2

I saw your recent replies to some posts and your tweet, you have my full support

3 Likes
#3

Probably our best option at this point. If there was also a category for the redundant and mostly pointless posts, that would keep the others more clean, since clearly DevRelations does not want to go the “enact stricter rules and purge users who shouldn’t be here” route.

4 Likes
#4

I’d like to see this implemented, but I feel that Discussion shouldn’t be entirely segregated into subcategories even though quality filtering is very much needed right now. Using subcategories feels like it would really narrow a topics potential to reach out to wider implications, (a bad thing as this discourages discussion). If anything, a category like discussion should have a primary use where topics concerns an overarching idea, and then subcategories concerning other uses like you’ve mentioned. Wouldn’t want to strip universal discussion entirely.

2 Likes
#5

I completely agree, and I would like to see this implemented into the forums. Sometimes you just want to see certain topics over others and it could feel ‘spammy’ at times when looking.

1 Like
#6

Common usage of #development-discussion usually revolves around:

  1. The art of development – the original idea.
  2. About developers, the meta(earnings, game visits, DevEx, etc.)
  3. Discussions about new(or potential) features, contests and everything else.
    • Feature discussions. Considered spam where you can just make a feature request, duh.
    • Announcement discussions. Considered spam, use the parent post instead.
  4. Open questions, AMA and anything else.
    • Closed questions; has one or more answers which can solve it, not subjective. Considered spam.
    • Terms of Use/Service related questions. Considered spam, should consider reading the Terms of Use/Service.
    • Too short questions; fruitless. Almost considered spam since they are related to closed questions, but does not quite ignite.
    • Polls. Either it’s spam(don’t just create a poll) or acceptable if there is other content explaining details.
  5. Bug report attempts, redirect to #bug-reports or other methods to report bugs.
  6. Help with game design, either choices or something else. #help-and-feedback:game-design-support should be considered instead. This also existed in very old posts of #development-discussion. I wonder why they were threre originally.
  7. Duplicates: A question that has already been asked exists. Why create another?
8 Likes