Users occasionally mistake Creations Feedback for support categories like Game Design Support. “Feedback” is misconstrued as “help” rather than “critique.”
It was originally renamed from “Cool Creations” to emphasize posting for feedback rather than attention, but I believe this confuses the purpose of the category since it is a subcategory of Help and Feedback, which implies that users go there for assistance rather than creative input.
I believe that renaming it to “Creations Critique” would clarify the purpose of the category.
It won’t help. When there was still Community Sage program, we split a ton of hairs over category name phrasing and all that stuff, it never actually helped. Language is very ambiguous. Also, “critique” is less friendly to foreign speakers, it’s not a word basic English speakers might understand.
The best way to solve issues like this is to change how the categories are presented to the user, where users are guided to make posts, etc. The big problem the devforum has currently is that when you make a topic, you get this big list of categories and a new user will have no idea what to pick, so they just pick some category name that appears to make sense to them. This is the core problem that should be addressed.
The front page and category selector should be more user-friendly so that the user doesn’t just need to rely on the names of the categories to decide what is the best way to post. It should be fool-proof to pick the “right” place even for someone that is just newly joining.
I remember there was a feedback session and one of the topics that came up was renaming the Cool Creations category. Cool Creations Feedback was the initial proposal but I suggested dropping the “Cool” part and just having it be “Creations Feedback”.
The new name is significantly clearer than the previous category name (in my opinion) but ultimately as said above, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t change anything because there are too many variables to think about in terms of language and understanding.
Generally forum improvements should be less focused on wording and semantics - setting aside the crowd that can’t comprehend certain types of words (not natively English or the wording is too complicated), it doesn’t do anything regarding developers who disregard wording because they “need” to get their topic somewhere. Wording isn’t enough to change the situation of off topic posts.