Hmmm...as someone who is both a gamer and a WB user i have GC2.com bookmarked and wincustoimize.com bookmarked. When i want GC2 topics, i click there, if i want WC i click my WC bookmark. Why would i navigate from one site through the SD web to find WC when i can just click on the seperate bookmark, treating them as seperate sites as i still and will always do.

I'm not rehashing any arguments, it seems we are back to maturely discussing cross posting.

You also say, "A gamer need only click on the appropriate forums and links in Impulse". Why is that? I use Impulse only to update my SD products. As a gamer and SD customer i would always be at GC2.com or SOASE, not impulse. Others may i don't know. Again if i was in impulse and wanted something from WC i would go to wincustomize.com with my browser.

I would expect and suspect that anyone that is nothing more than the casual user of SD products would navigate between sites in the manner i layed out, as one would think they are seperate products and have seperate sites so they will use what is layed out for them. To someone on the outside looking in, WC and GC2 have nothing in common but the parent company.  I would think that a very casual user would not assume a link between the sites exists and sift through the links and forums to go from GC2 for eg to WC or Ju. Why would you not just open that bookmarked page? Which of course does not require the connected sites and the cross posting.

You use Yahoo7 (which i do as well for my Aussie news, another Australian here ), would i be right in assuming that you expect to find current affairs topics from all round Australia and the world there...How would it be if Yahoo7 started a deal with eBay to advertise auctions on the front page, pushing the days news further down the list of topics. Yes it is a small inconvience to have to sift through the eBay crap you have now been inundated with but since you have little to no interest in seeing those auctions, especially when they have little to do with the intent you went toYahoo7 in the first place for, would you not start to get frutrated and annoyed?

It all boils down to personal taste. those that enjoy chatting on multiple forums within Stardockia may indeed find the cross posting to be the best thing since sliced bread, as is the case with Frogboy. Those whose interests are only focused on one little corner of SD will find their corner very crowded with the topics from the more populated sites flowing in and making the content of interest to that person, very hard to find.

I understand alot of you folks enjoy the sites this way, but since i only go to the GC2 forums i have no need for the rest of forums within SD. I use WB and Object Desktop Ultimate, i just have no interest in chatting about them, only GC2, which these days is a very hard thing to do. Nothing is going to change but i am happy continuing to point out that on this side of the fence, things are not so rosey.

Neilo, hi!  I do see your point of view and you've made some valid points.  For some Galciv/SOASE forum users, much of what you argue may be true, but it is not necessarily the case for all.  If you have your Stardock experience so well organised that you do not need to make use of forums and features other than those you currently use, then that is fine... they're obviously not for you, or others of similar thinking.  However, there may be others who are enjoying the diversity of cross-threaded forums and find the community features and one-stop shopping/downloading of Impulse invaluable, and that is the point of amalgamating the various areas of Stardock into the one place, for the convenience/ease of use of customers.

That's the point, you see, there are always more than one side to every argument, and while you have made some valid points for keeping the Galciv forums/area independent of the others, there are as many, if not more valid reasons for why Galciv/SOASE should come under the same umbrella.   OK, so it's not what you're accustomed to and there are some early inconveniences, but life is full of change and inconvenience and we adapt, and so will we here.  It may take a while, but it'll all work out for the best.

Seems to be a misconception here that's at issue, then. This isn't a "chain of command" thing so much as that the concerns expressed here were brought up internally, and some of us decided to weigh in on our own.

No doubt there are many misconceptions but that's not the underlying issue. If moderators are going to weigh in on a topic "on their own" then they should specify that otherwise the normal assumption is that they are acting in their official capacity. But even then care should be taken because you can't just make a comment like *zoomba removes  his moderator hat * and then tear into folks on the assumption that removes the authority and weight that must be accorded his pronouncements regadless of whether they are professional or just personal.

I had this discussion earlier with Jafo and his assertion was that there was no difference between his status on the forums and mine and that we could argue on an equal footing. He's welcomed to his opinion in this matter but I must disagree since he can ban me but I cannot ban him. That's a significant difference and one that I need to constantly be aware of.

Regardless whether the source is misconception or whatever, whether rightly or wrongly, I fear Jafo, Island Dog and Zoomba in pretty much linearly increasing order and I doubt very much that is their desire and I can certainly say that it is not my desire either but that *is* the current state of affairs.

Speaking of rules, there was a post awhile back that appeared to me to be spam but others thought it might not be. That's really neither here nor there except for the fact that it caused me to look around for the "forum rules" which I was unable to find. Is there anything prominently posted (or even not prominent) defining user behavior and moderation policy? Other than the explicitly defined Forum/Site Issues forums policies that is.

I guess that it's really been the introduction of Impulse that has caused me to notice this mixing. Previously I was oblivious. But it's clear to me now that there has been no change in reality, only one of perception. These 11 (or 13 depending how you count them) sites are so intermixed that they have always really been a single entity. On that basis a single set of rules for forum behavior and perhaps another only very slightly different set of rules for blog behavior is probably sufficient.

I am one of the most devoted and avid players of GC2, and I would never have seen this thread, or the "Smilies" thread, if not pointed to it specifically by someone else, and then following your link there Mumble.  I come to the GC2 forums for only GC2.  I've never really looked at any thread except for those related to GC2, and have not found any of the cross-posting to be at all intrusive.  There are also sub-forums within the GC2 forum that hardly ever (or never) read, like Modding or Bug Reports.  As in Island Dog's screenshot, I click on what GC2 sub-forums I'm interested in and ignore the others, and never use the "recent posts" function.  So personally I have no complaints about cross-posting, and in fact think it likely leads to increased interest and activity across the SD forums.  I theorize that there is a probably a positive synergistic relationship, though I have no specific data to make that assertion.  

I also have no interest in skinning (my desktop is pretty bare-bones functional, but not nearly as spartan as Mumbles!), but I have many different flavors of geeky friends, including skinners.  For me, skinning is personally irrelevant, but my opinion of skinning (or whatever else) to others should also be irrelevant. 

I believe this also to be true, and the the majority of people on the GC2 forums dont have a problem with the cross-posting.  That doesnt mean the vocal minority should be dismissed either though.  I do find it very positive that a good number of Stardockians have taken the time to respond in this thread.  You may or may not like what they've said, but they are certainly engaged.

Sentient species taste better...

One thing that I've noticed in my recent forum "walkabout" is that literally less than half of the forums accessible on any particular website are actually visible through the top level Category list and the only way you will see posts from many GalCiv2 related forums are to view posts listed in the recent posts list or to explicitly "walk the tree" by viewing a specific GC2 forum and then scrolling down to the bottom to see the complete list of subforums cantained within that forum.

For example let's just take the GalCiv II Category as shown in ID's screen shot. There are 8 subforums (ignoring the General subforum that's merely the contents of the parent forum i.e. GalCiv II itself. If you use this as your surfing guide then you can decide to ignore bugs and mods or whatever else you chose, however do you realize that your also ignoring three other forums that exist under GalCiv II but are simply not listed in the top level list? These are Beta Reports, Ideas and Off-Topic (GalCiv II off topic forum 349 as opposed to Home off topic forum 412). Plus your also ignoring another 6 forums under Ideas. That's 9 forums presumably related to GalCiv2 that you probably don't even realize that you're ignoring. That's more forums than you're actually following.

I think really what I'm looking for is a reasonable methodology of finding what it is I'm interested in without unintentionally excluding things of possible interest while not being overwhelmed by things that I definitely *know* I have no interest in.

The point isn't that you may or may not be interested in what's below a listed forum, the point is that you don't know. Plus that means that if I were inclined to follow all of the GC2 related forums that means I would have to scan potentially a couple dozen recent posts lists, one for each forum that I'm interested in. Having to scan 20 recent posts lists because there are 20 legitimate forums that I am interested in is not noticably better than scanning the recent posts for all forums on a site and having to sift through 50% of all thread because I *know* they don't interest me. Neither option is very good.

I do mostly try to be reasoned but I can be as sarcastic and dismissive as anyone else, particularly if I feel provoked. I do believe that I've taken some heat from the mods for something as minor as simple sarcasm even when I mostly try to temper that sarcasm with at least a little bit of cleverness and humor. I also think I mostly avoid being truly abusive but then it's very difficult to be a good judge of your own behavior.

A couple of years ago they had a Super Bowl ad for Monster.com the job search site. Basically the ad showed some guy working in an office with a bunch of chimpanzees. The ads show this one guy trying to work while all around him everyone else was basically "monkeying around". The point of this is that I remember the next day at work everyone was discussing that commerical convinced that they were that guy working with a bunch of monkeys.

The problem is that if *everyone* was convinced they were that one guy working with a bunch of monkeys then who was left to be the monkey. The answer is that at some time or other every one of us is that monkey to someone else, it's just that no one is willing to admit it.

The point of my homily may be a tad obscure, but perhaps a bastardization of a famous Mark Twain quote will help illustrate my point.

"Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known except that he's a jackass, and I know that".

It appears to me that there are a lot of folks that seem to know everything there is to know except that one tiny thing. For my part I'll at least admit that at times I can be a jackass.

So back to the state of the forums. The essence of the issue is really one of what methodology you use to surf the forums.

The first method, which I believe to be the most common, is to scan the recent posts list of your site of choice. In my case that's https://forums.galciv2.com/recent. The advantages to this method are that this gives you a single list to search and it includes all possible forums which may be of interest to you on that particular site. Another advantage is that it allows you to catch threads that you may be interested in that the author for some reason or other posted to the wrong forum. The downside of this method is that if your site of choice includes a lot of forums which you aren't interested in, or even only a single high traffic forum that you aren't interested in, then the top level recent posts list can become flooded with threads that you aren't interested in which makes it more difficult to find and follow the threads that you are interested in.

The second method that has been suggested is that you only scan the limited set of forums that you are interested in. The advantage of this method is that it filters out the threads that you consider to be uninteresting. The downside is that instead of one single list you may have many such lists that you need to monitor plus you could miss a thread of interest simply because it's posted to an unfamiliar or incorrect forum. But the primary downside is simply one of how many different forums are we really talking about. If it's really only 2 or 3 then scanning 2 or 3 forums that are of known interest to you versus scanning only one of which 50% is to you uninteresting traffic seems to be a reasonable trade-off. However if it's 20 forums you need to scan individually then the choice is far less obvious.

Using GalCiv2 as an example the following is a list of all GalCiv2 related forums on the GalCiv2 site.

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/164          GalCiv Dev Journals

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/162          GalCiv II

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/350          GalCiv II > AARs

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/421          GalCiv II > Beta Reports

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/274          GalCiv II > Bug Reports

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/357          GalCiv II > Dark Avatar

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/346          GalCiv II > Game Talk

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/247          GalCiv II > Ideas

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/253          GalCiv II > Ideas > Colonies

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/252          GalCiv II > Ideas > Diplomacy

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/248          GalCiv II > Ideas > Economics

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/250          GalCiv II > Ideas > Research

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/249          GalCiv II > Ideas > Trade

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/251          GalCiv II > Ideas > Warfare

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/345          GalCiv II > Metaverse

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/348          GalCiv II > Modding

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/349          GalCiv II > Off-topic

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/347          GalCiv II > Strategies

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/483          GalCiv II > Twilight of the Arnor

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/161          GalCiv II News

That's precisely 20 forums that you need to monitor. Now it's been suggested that this list could be further winnowed because some of these forums may not be as interesting to you as others, however they may be, and it's not unreasonable for the GalCiv2 enthusiast to want *all* GalCiv2 forums even ones that some others may define as uninteresting. But throwing out Off-topic, the Ideas forum and it's 6 sub-forums, Modding and Beta Reports that still leaves 10 separate forums and their separate recent posts list that you need to scan versus one. So the choice between scanning 20 versus 1 or 10 versus 1 is still to me not a totally obvious choice, plus if you do winnow the forums down you could miss mis-posted threads that you are interested in.

Still this methodology has merit, particularly if something could be done to reduce the required number individual forums that you need to scan and I can think of at least two reasonable ways to do this. However before going on to discuss potential proposed changes there's a third way of forum surfing that's been suggested that I want to address.

The third method is the idea that Zubaz proposed using the RSS feeds of selected forums to somehow create your own custom website. Conceptually this is an attractive idea but the downside is that I'm not a software engineer.

However I have friends that are software engineers and one of them created a "forum scrapper" to do precisely what I was looking for. There were a number of technical problems that made Zubaz's initial proposal unpractical. I think the biggest one was that his method would limit you to only the 5 most recent posts from any one forum, but like I said I'm not a software engineer and my interpretation may be wrong.

However what my friend implemented was to monitor the first two pages of the most recent posts list (the 100 most recent replies on the entire site) and filter out the "undesired threads" i.e. Impulse and Off-Topic. The advantage of this method is that it gives you a single list of the most recent posts from all of the forums that you find of interest however there are some major disadvantages as well.

The first disadvantage is one of having a server of sufficient bandwidth, particularly if this is something that you want to share with your friends. Another downside is that this simply produces a html list that as you click on each link it opens your browser to that specific thread but there's no way to negotiate using your browser to the next link except going back to the html file and click on the next link. Basically it's just not the same. I know this isn't a very well defined reason, perhaps it's just a lack of continuity, however it really is just not the same "forum" experience.

Anyway that's the three methods of negotiating these forums that I know about each with their own plusses and minuses. If anyone has any other method to suggest then I'd be very interested in hearing them.

It's been pointed out that the sharing won't change. That's fine. Actually at this point I now understand that sharing has been this way forever. I've also begun to appreciate the possibility of a wider audience that this can afford. For example this very thread. Although I'm certain that a hijacked blog in the Personal Computing forum is really not the best place to be discussing this, it is one of the places where multiple sites intersect and so does provide a suitable audience for a topic that affects all forum goers everywhere. But this does get back to the issue of knowledge of what forums are shared where.

As I've mentioned elsewhere I'll be providing a map of all of Stardock's forums that are accessible from all of Stardock's sites and believe me it's a confusing mess. I have two motivations for first off spending the time to do this and then for publishing the information. The primary motivation is simply that I want to understand my environment and know that when I post in such and such a forum then where does that thread actually go. Also once the work is done I'm certainly going to share the information with other forum goers that may be interested in "knowing where they are" as well.

The secondary motivation is to perhaps point out what a tangled web these forums are and that perhaps that would give cause for someone to actually take a close look at the countless forums many of which could and probably should be pruned and combined with many other like forums.

Again using the GalCiv2 forums as an example, we really don't need 20 different GalCiv2 forums. Maybe in the old days with 500 new threads a day we did but those days are long gone. If you could only get the threads in some of the less popular forums moved to related forums and winnow down the GalCiv2 forums down to a single handful then the second method proposed becomes very attractive and is probably a no-brainer choice.

Actually the second way to improve the 2nd surfing method is to have the recent post list from any parent forum also include recent posts from subforums as well. Not sure if this is hard or difficult to manage but that would significantly reduce the number of forums that anyone would be required to scan.

Are either of these proposed changes at all a realistic possibility?

Yeah....type like Zubaz or youy'll be assimilated. PDQ. I was once normal. I think. Or was that Zu.

I'm so confsued.