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The monumental failure of clubs


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1 hour ago, Kyu said:

https://invisioncommunity.com/news/product-updates/43-paid-club-memberships-and-other-club-improvements-r1065/

 

4.3 seems like it will fix most of the readability issues tbh, at least for participants. Do you think this is enough?

I don't think so, but it sure is worth givong it a try, though I'm sure you see that we'd just prefer going back to having old round table.

 

 

 

It surely looka better compared to what we have now...

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2 hours ago, Kyu said:

https://invisioncommunity.com/news/product-updates/43-paid-club-memberships-and-other-club-improvements-r1065/

 

4.3 seems like it will fix most of the readability issues tbh, at least for participants. Do you think this is enough?

What? clubs need to be removed and the round table needs to be brought back, There was absolutely nothing wrong with how it was, everyone contributed to the threads that were posted back in the days and everyone was happy. I still don't know the reason as to why you guys decided to bother with this clubs system. 

 

To make things short, bring back the round table. Don't try to fix what isn't broken, thank you.

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1 hour ago, Zackyie said:

What? clubs need to be removed and the round table needs to be brought back, There was absolutely nothing wrong with how it was, everyone contributed to the threads that were posted back in the days and everyone was happy. I still don't know the reason as to why you guys decided to bother with this clubs system. 

 

To make things short, bring back the round table. Don't try to fix what isn't broken, thank you.

I am sorry but I am going to have to disagree as the Round Table was difficult to moderate in the past. With the new system if you want to have a private club the rules are much more lax.

 

I personally want to see how upgrading IPB to 4.3 could improve the club scene as I do agree it is a bit tedious to look through different clubs if you want to read what is going on. 

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New Club Type: Read Only

In addition to Open, Closed, Private and Public, we have added a new club type in 4.3: read only. In a read only club, everyone can (without joining) view everything in the club, but cannot participate unless they are invited by a club leader.

I feel like this is one of the bigger complaints. Could fix some things.

 

Secondly, if clicking a club could take you to the 'topics' tab by default rather than that nasty 'home' tab timeline, it'd feel more familiar.

It's just too many folders inside folders, round table was good cause it was 1 thread.

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9 hours ago, Squirtle said:

I am sorry but I am going to have to disagree as the Round Table was difficult to moderate in the past. With the new system if you want to have a private club the rules are much more lax.

 

I personally want to see how upgrading IPB to 4.3 could improve the club scene as I do agree it is a bit tedious to look through different clubs if you want to read what is going on. 

You know, getting rid of the forums entirely would make moderation much easier.

 

I don't understand what the job of a CM is if it's not to moderate. I read some of the 4.3 fixes, and maybe they'll improve clubs a little, but the damage has already been done imo. If people are complaining that their team thread isn't private, well they can always make their own forum. But bending to the vocal minority in this case and compartmentalizing the community has proven to be a pretty awful idea, I'm sure your metrics tell you that. There's plenty of cms, round table can be moderated just fine. 

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2 minutes ago, Gunthug said:

You know, getting rid of the forums entirely would make moderation much easier.

 

I don't understand what the job of a CM is if it's not to moderate. I read some of the 4.3 fixes, and maybe they'll improve clubs a little, but the damage has already been done imo. If people are complaining that their team thread isn't private, well they can always make their own forum. But bending to the vocal minority in this case and compartmentalizing the community has proven to be a pretty awful idea, I'm sure your metrics tell you that. There's plenty of cms, round table can be moderated just fine. 

Unfortunately your perception is not quite accurate as it is not the job of a CM to moderate. If a CM is assigned a sub forum they moderate that sub forum and Globals and above have the ability to moderate all forums. There are many other tasks that CMs participate in that I feel is much more valuable than the time needed to moderate the previous Round Table discussions. I do agree that the current implementation of Clubs is not exactly perfect but as I stated before I will not concede to going back to a regular forum before seeing the improvements IPB is making to this feature. 

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20 minutes ago, Squirtle said:

Unfortunately your perception is not quite accurate as it is not the job of a CM to moderate. If a CM is assigned a sub forum they moderate that sub forum and Globals and above have the ability to moderate all forums. There are many other tasks that CMs participate in that I feel is much more valuable than the time needed to moderate the previous Round Table discussions. I do agree that the current implementation of Clubs is not exactly perfect but as I stated before I will not concede to going back to a regular forum before seeing the improvements IPB is making to this feature. 

Despite my exaggeration it's obvious that's not the ONLY job of a CM. My point was, you have staff whose job it is to moderate the forums. If your goal is to ease the amount of moderating they have to do by suffocating a once lively (perhaps the most lively) area of the forums, why not take it one tiny step further and get rid of the forums entirely?

 

The mere fact that you acknowledge a club-less forum is  "regular forum" is a pretty strong indicator that this extension was unnecessary, IMO. I'm certainly willing to wait out the new changes and see how that goes, but I'm far from optimistic, and I hope you will consider a reversion if the 4.3 improvements do nothing to reverse the wasteland that is currently clubs. An active forums community is essential to public perception of the community and game. Good luck drawing in players who are going to stick around (note the difference here between these players and your storyline-and-done ones) if they don't feel it's worth their while

Edited by Gunthug
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As an ex- Club Moderator, I can say that the non-English teams utilized clubs to a magnitude that was never seen in RT; so that in itself is a major plus to clubs.

 

What I would like to see, and don't know if it's possible, would be to have a feed where the old RT was, that has the threads of all teams that you, individually, can see (with the ability to block out specific teams that you don't care about). This way you wouldn't have to go through the hassle of going to clubs, then finding the team, then finding the thread, blah blah blah; cause that's a drag.

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2 minutes ago, Gilan said:

As an ex- Club Moderator, I can say that the non-English teams utilized clubs to a magnitude that was never seen in RT; so that in itself is a major plus to clubs.

 

What I would like to see, and don't know if it's possible, would be to have a feed where the old RT was, that has the threads of all teams that you, individually, can see (with the ability to block out specific teams that you don't care about). This way you wouldn't have to go through the hassle of going to clubs, then finding the team, then finding the thread, blah blah blah; cause that's a drag.

What you want is exactly what IPB version 4.3 will provide on the main forum page it just isn't out quite yet.

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16 hours ago, Kyu said:

https://invisioncommunity.com/news/product-updates/43-paid-club-memberships-and-other-club-improvements-r1065/

 

4.3 seems like it will fix most of the readability issues tbh, at least for participants. Do you think this is enough?

 

2 hours ago, Squirtle said:

Unfortunately your perception is not quite accurate as it is not the job of a CM to moderate. If a CM is assigned a sub forum they moderate that sub forum and Globals and above have the ability to moderate all forums. There are many other tasks that CMs participate in that I feel is much more valuable than the time needed to moderate the previous Round Table discussions. I do agree that the current implementation of Clubs is not exactly perfect but as I stated before I will not concede to going back to a regular forum before seeing the improvements IPB is making to this feature. 

Okay, let's analyze this; Let's look at what's wrong with Clubs as they are now, and what these updates will do to change things. To do this, I'm going to give you the perspective of how I (and probably more than a few other people) used Round Table, and how this translates to how unusable Clubs are for this. So, previously, with round table, it'd go like this:

 

  • See new posts in the Round Table subforum
  • Click on the subforum, glance over at what team threads have new activity. If I care about any of those teams, I click to see the newest posts.
  • Appreciate whatever drama/bantz/shitposts are in the thread, and maybe participate

Pretty straightforward. Now, let's see the process as of right now:

  • Decide, out of my own volition, to click Clubs for some reason, since there's no clear indicator of new posts. I could follow the forum threads, but understandably, I don't want to get a notification literally any time anyone posts in any of the several team threads I might be interested in viewing. Yes, there's "Recent Activity", but it doesn't go very far; All it takes is like 5 posts in 1 thread in quick succession and I don't know the status of the team threads in any other clubs.
  • I'm in clubs, now what? Well, if I want to look at the team thread of a club I decided to join, thankfully, there's a "My Clubs" area to easily find them. If it's a club I'm not in & don't want to join for any particular reason, I have to go find it.
  • I click whatever Club I want to look at, ending up at the home page, which is basically worthless. I guess I can glance it to determine if there's any new content in the team thread, but I can't really look down the timeline to read the thread, so it's not really useful for much else.
  • I go to the forum topics.
  • I click on the team thread and look at the posts.
  • If I want to look at any other team thread, instead of going back up to the RT subforum and clicking another thread, I have to go back to the Club section and go through steps 2-5 again, which is way more of a hassle, especially since I have to effectively check every single relevant club section to even know if there's new content worth checking for.
  • This is especially bad since this negative feedback loop has resulted in the team threads I care about being basically dead, so it's not even worth clicking on the club section anymore to see if anything's new, or post new content myself.

So, what's the problem here, exactly? The problem is 2 major problems: One, there's an entire 2 extra steps, of clicking on the club, and then clicking on their subforum to get to the team thread. The second major problem is that the team threads are no longer aggregated in 1 page, but separated into their own clubs, meaning that these 2 extra steps become a shit ton of extra steps if you're trying to look at more than 1 team thread, and it's especially problematic because unlike before, it's not obvious what team threads have new content worth viewing.

 

Okay, so now that we've established this, let's see what the new features do to fix this:

 

"Club Content throughout the community": From what I can tell, this allows you to easily aggregate the subforums of individual clubs, putting them together and letting you visit them. This effectively cuts out 1 of the 2 extra steps, because you don't need to look at the garbage home page! And it even seems to tell you when new posts are here, like in the old round table, so it's kind of like how it was before? It's definitely more convenient than now. But it still has the obnoxious caveat that you have to be in the club to see the subforums here, which is especially obnoxious if teams decide to switch to "Read Only" so that non-team members can still view the content, but make it so only team members can actually join the club, as "Read Only" clubs, as far as I can tell, won't show up here.

 

Really, this update does make Clubs way more usable, even though there's still an extra unnecessary step involved. With that being said, I'm still not actually convinced it'll completely solve the issue; Read Only clubs are an attractive setting option for people who want their club content to be looked at, but don't want randos posting in their team threads. Unfortunately, this also means that if people start using it, pretty much everything that makes Clubs more usable in the update is basically irrelevant for any clubs you aren't invited to. Yeah yeah yeah, "then maybe they shouldn't make their clubs Read Only and live in Public mode forever" jajaja I get it, but it's still a problem. I'd also still rather not join the club of random teams I'm not actually in just so I can actually look at their team threads in an even slightly convenient way, but I doubt a solution to this is ever going to exist.

 

TL;DR: 4.3 makes any Clubs you are in infinitely more usable/readable. Read Only is a great feature for team clubs hypothetically, but since it precludes the part of the update that makes clubs actually usable for looking at the team threads, I don't think it's actually helpful. Being forced to join clubs of teams you aren't in just to be able to look at their team thread without going through a summoning ritual is still ass. There's still an entire extra step even with the improvements that wasn't there before even in a perfect world, and that sucks, but idk that's life I guess. Clubs you haven't joined are still basically unusable for regular team thread shitposting purposes, so you're gonna have to join every even remotely interesting looking club.

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