Hey there,
there are way too many forums and subforums which does not reflect the traffic of that page.
Many forums are completely inactive. I think I do not need to put examples here, last post in the forum overview shows that there are plenty of them.
The forum with the most posts (G40 league) is imo way too hidden and by far not prominent enough.
My conclusion:
I vote for:
clean up the forum –> Merge all inactive boards until the merged board as a relevant target audience to allow some traffic to develop. Believe me, ONE active board with a bit less focus is worth 10 times more than 10 board inactive because the target audience is too small.
I would say the amount of forums could be reduced by 80%. If you are open to that idea I could make a concrete suggestion
Move the league up and the play by forum category up. I really recommend to put them on second position just below general and give it a name that is explaining and invites new members to become curious:
Suggested structure for the current play by forum category:
Play other members by forum: Friendly or competitive
- A&A G40 league - Meet, follow and play the best A&A players in the world
- A&A G40 Tournaments
- A&A G40 Friendly games
Things like “find players” don’t need dedicated forums. Dedicated threads are totally fine for that.
As I said I could create more concrete suggestion. I believe this community could flourish better in a sophisticated forum environment.
@forum administrators: What do you think in general? Best regards,
Tobias Georgi
IL is working on that right now.
Hi Tobias,
I believe Imperious Leader is cleaning up the forum. I agree some things should be cleaned up. However, I believe there is plenty of traffic generated if for nothing else, by TripleA. Many of the posts are due to TripleA and the need to correlate the rules from A&A to TripleA so that one can play online in all It’s forms. TripleA for many reasons is not A&A from a leagalistic corporate view.
That said, there are many of us, like myself, who do not play TripleA who do support the game whichever name it must be called for legal reasons, and/or how it’s played. However, The site is axisandallies.org, so the official game takes precedence. Which, whatever way you take it, is a non-profit entity that supports the Axis & Allies community. It’s a big tent and all of us have to live in it.
While I love this game, and it is more than a game in my view, more like a hobby. I would not suggest for one moment that axisandallies.org is exclusively a place to play TripleA and that TripleA related games and topics should recieve preferential treatment due to volume of traffic and any personal preference (including my own).
In conclusion I believe you are correct in that some things related to the site could be better, but I think that they are a work in progress and will be improved shortly. I do not agree however that this site should be organized to optimize online play for a game that is niether offical, nor exclusively represents the Axis & Allies community as whole.
Best Regards,
toblerone77.
I concur with toblerone77. The A&A hobby has many facets, of which playing-by-forum is only one. The concept that “the amount of forums could be reduced by 80%” seems to be another way of saying that roughly 80% of the forum is devoted to the A&A board games, and that this 80% of the could easily be dispensed with because some people aren’t interested in it and prefer to focus their attention on playing-by-forum. It’s perfectly all right to have a preference for playing-by-forum, but one should also remember that there are other people who are just as passionately interested in the board games (and in derivative elements of the board games, like collecting and painting sculpts). I wouldn’t want to see those aspects of the game get dismissed from A&A.org.
Hey there,
thanks a lot for the quick replies.
I would like to clarify that my posts includes things which can be considered separately:
1. I guess play by forum is underrepresented
2. I guess there are way too many forums. This has the objective downside that each forum itself has no traffic and thus the whole thing feels inactive and is less attractive.
One example: http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?action=collapse;c=6;sa=collapse;sesc=0b2b5c69ea74790fdce23ec7dfb675fd#6
There is a whole category divided in 6 sub-forums and for more than 6 weeks there has been not even one post in any of those 6 subforums.
I just know by experience that people are attracted by traffic and demotivated by inactivity.
take 6 forums with each 5 posts per week , merge them to one forum and you will have more than 30 posts in this forum per week because you create cross-traffic from people seeing posts about topics they otherwise would have never seen.
In addition the whole forum overview is easier to scan and less complicated.
The typical arguments for an over-categorization are: “You don’t find what you need quick enough.”
This can be easily solved be using tags in the thread titles. And as long as the traffic is low there is no problem to find anything. However, if traffic is high separation makes sense of course, however the overall forum traffic is very low.
In independently from my passion for the league I convinced it would be clearly preferable to reduce the amount of forums by ~80. This sounds scary but it is the typical behavior that such a chance creates anxiety. I know forum communities which have more than 20-50 times the traffic of that forum and they have even less sub forums –> works perfectly fine.
Independently from my passion for the league I am convinced it would be clearly preferable to reduce the amount of forums by ~80**%**
I sympathize with the argument that the present forum could perhaps be better structured. It’s also true that some parts of the board game forums are more active than others, which is hardly suprising for a forum dedicated to a game that’s been around for decades and which has gone through many different releases. But I get the uncomfortable feeling these argument are really being used as a justification to get rid of parts of the board that simply aren’t interesting to some board members, even though they’re being presented as being independent of an avowed passion for the play-by-forum league.
So I have trouble seeing these arguments as simply being abstract, particularly since they seem to be being made in support of the premise that “there are too many forums”, a premise which naturally implies that the solution is to cut down on the number of forums. I respectfully disagree with both the premise and the implied solution. I find the forums dedicated to the various board games to be both valuable and interesting, both from a current viewpoint and from viewpoint of the historical evolution of the A&A game line.
I’ve never had a problem seeing this site’s board game and historical forums (in which I’m very interested) co-existing with the other forums dedicated to other A&A topics in which I have no interest whatsoever (the miniatures, the play-by-forum league). To me, this diversity is what makes A&A.org such a great site: the fact that it caters to all facets of the A&A hobby. I’d hate to see A&A.org lose its diversity, and if it did so I doubt that I’d continue to be interested in it.
Suggested structure for the current play by forum category:
Play other members by forum: Friendly or competitive
- A&A G40 league - Meet, follow and play the best A&A players in the world
- A&A G40 Tournaments
- A&A G40 Friendly games
What about people not playing G40? Shall we have unique sections for those folks? I can’t believe people just can’t find games to play online as a result of the forum structure.
Based on what it looks like now, what is the before and after for forum sections dealing with tournaments?
Of course, games like D-Day and Guadalcanal are not active, but what are we to start doing here? Just combine all the games and make it impossible to find info on the game somebody just bought?
The mistake that WOTC made is they hated Avalon Hill and with it Axis and Allies. They put no effort to cater to anybody and that site is totally dead for like 10 years ( since 2004).
Further, i don’t really ever see you post in any section other than the online game. Perhaps if you participate you may gain an understanding of the benefit of the current structure.
The only real thing i want is a few child boards for house rules for the top 3-4 games, so it would be easy to find what their is on just the main games.
People should find exactly what they want as efficient as possible. Wait till the Forums migrate to the new software, then well have a clearer understanding of what exactly is needed or not.
Independently from my passion for the league I am convinced it would be clearly preferable to reduce the amount of forums by ~80%
This would destroy the forums! I suspect you want the 20% being your online tournament boards, with one mega board of every game in one section? So look at the popularity of the top boards.
We must remember that just because an idea makes complete sense doesn’t mean that IL is to blame if it doesn’t happen… not all organizational decisions are his call, and even though he is trying his best to clean up the forums, there is only so much he is authorized to do.
I can’t create new or remove forum sections. All i do if move threads that don’t belong to their correct sections, sticky them, etc. Djensen is the only one who makes decisions.
I hope to address these issues when I move everything over to NodeBB.
There are a few different themes for NodeBB but this is the default:
https://community.nodebb.org/
I’m hoping to do more organization via tags. Fewer top level forums and a plethora of tags to find what you need.
Would it be possible to have separate house rules sections for each game, with maybe a general house rules topic for broader suggestions?
Lumping all HRs together doesn’t make any sense.
I vote for that too. And separate sections for Flashmans House rules. JK
I hope to address these issues when I move everything over to NodeBB.
There are a few different themes for NodeBB but this is the default:
https://community.nodebb.org/I’m hoping to do more organization via tags. Fewer top level forums and a plethora of tags to find what you need.
I’m all for updates/improvements and suggestions but Good lord please don’t use that NodeBB! Gah! (Unless it can be streamlined/organized)
Reminds me of this:
There’s so much barf on the screen It makes me nauseous! :(
What if when you click FORUM on A&A.org you go to a page that asks
“Do you want the play boardgames section?”
or
“Do you want the game details, FAQ, and discussion/history section?”
not saying it’s the solution, just an option.
It would help if people would actually read through the titles of the forum sections first. Secondly, those could be cleaned up a bit. I would also encourage people to click on the “Who’s online” title of the boards. There are more guests than members looking up all kinds of topics that many here might call useless but obviously are of interest to many.
What if when you click FORUM on A&A.org you go to a page that asks
“Do you want the play boardgames section?”
or
“Do you want the game details, FAQ, and discussion/history section?”
not saying it’s the solution, just an option.
If the site was to be structured around this basic two-part division (and I’m not saying that it should be structured that way), I’d prefer to have the site split into two separate sections to which people could go directly. This would be quicker and less awkward than having to start each browsing session by having to choose an option, which in my mind would be an annoying extra step that I’d have to take every time I go to the site.
There are more guests than members looking up all kinds of topics that many here might call useless but obviously are of interest to many.
50% of those would be spam computers trying to click membership to join the site with nefarious website. These programs randomly click anything until a certain destination comes up, since the program can’t read. But then they are jacked because they need to read the caption and enter it. Almost 3 years ago we used to have like 13,000 new accounts ( in one month)….all spammers.
@Imperious:
There are more guests than members looking up all kinds of topics that many here might call useless but obviously are of interest to many.
50% of those would be spam computers trying to click membership to join the site with nefarious website. These programs randomly click anything until a certain destination comes up, since the program can’t read. But then they are jacked because they need to read the caption and enter it. Almost 3 years ago we used to have like 13,000 new accounts….all spammers.
Didnt know that IL. � All and all I don’t think the forum is horribly messed up. If people actually take the time to read and search, they may discover that there are a lot of cool things you can learn and do on this forum.
Secondly, addressing tripleA, I only use it offline. The OP made reference to there needing to be “cleanup” at the expense of much of the other content on the board. IMO I think the fans of tripleA would do those who want to play, and those who would probably play, a huge service by maintaining more current updates and tutorials on how to get started. As well as better info to all the aforementioned aspects of tripleA.
This isn’t a slam on tripleA, but I wouldn’t call it the most user friendly system of online play, nor is it intuitive. So that said, if some of the tripleA enthusiasts were to better organize the information available, people might be more inclined to use the system.
As for traffic mentioned by the OP. I think tripleA drives a HUGE portion of the traffic here. One thing that was not to be mentioned, is the fact that the other resources that help tripleA players understand the game is provided through the Axis & Allies forum discussions many times.
Anyways I’m glad David Jensen has given us this great site and continues to improve it.
Edited for punctuation, grammar and spelling…lol…ahh smart phones.
Yep great post as usual.
