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Perhaps a sport specific forum? I mean, this is a tech site (and why I joined many years ago) but we now have a love & relationship forum, a garage (car) forum, fitness...seems like sports wouldn't be too far fetched to include.

All the fantasy sport threads, MMA, wrestling, etc stuff could go there, and leave ATOT to be a place for truly off topic, random stuff.

I find that ATOT get flooded sometimes with tonssss of threads. I'll make a thread Monday night, get a few responses, then when I check it again Tuesday morning, it's all the way back on page 3.
 
I have a couple -

I think a rating system would be helpful on technical threads.

Moderator QA section - I appreciate the time and effort folks give up to be mods here, but I think members would like a section where we can know a bit more about them.
 
I would like OP being able to set what kind of discussions a thread can have besides the topic.. If they want a technical discussion or a opinion based one for example. Or a requirement for the discussion that statements will be backed up by links to a reliable source.
The reason is that a lot of threads ends up in a discussion with mine is bigger than yours after a page or two and a few people craps up the threads with fanatical devotion to one opinion or company. I think a lot of the discussions are going downhill very fast today, and if you want to keep enthusiasts around you need to do something.

And of course the moderators need to be enforcing these rules.
 
Not related directly to the forums itself, I really wish the reviewers would take some time to explore better visual displays of information.

For example, when new graphics cards come out, I find it difficult to determine how it compares to the multitude of other cards that has already been reviewed. I need to scroll through dozens of plots, each taking up my screen, in order to compare. Bar charts are okay, but for the amount of data that each review puts on a page, it is a disservice to the review. It makes it hard for me to compare and goes against the whole purpose of the review. In the spirit of improvement, might I suggest a heatmap?

With the growing number of benchmarks and hardware to compare it is important to manage it better and I don't think single dimensional bar charts are the way to go.
 
Great input so far. Keep it up!

Lots of people browse on the go so making tapatalk work better with the forums would be great.
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Can you offer this in more actionable terms? What do you not like about how Tapatalk works with the forums currently? What would you like to see changed, specifically?
 
I don't know if it is possible with vBulletin, but making the sub forum links on the side be in a fixed position that doesn't scroll (or scroll only enough to show all of them) would be amazing, IMO. Replying at the bottom of a page or browsing a sub forum and having to scroll all the way up (hey, it's a long way for 100 posts per page!) could be done away with.
 
smackababy said:
I don't know if it is possible with vBulletin, but making the sub forum links on the side be in a fixed position that doesn't scroll (or scroll only enough to show all of them) would be amazing, IMO. Replying at the bottom of a page or browsing a sub forum and having to scroll all the way up (hey, it's a long way for 100 posts per page!) could be done away with.
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You could just use the Forum Jump selection box at the bottom of the page.

KT
 
Themes, please.

I don't like using plugins to simulate the old Dark theme, but I do to avoid eyestrain.


mcurphy said:
I disagree with this. A lifer forum only promotes more nefing to get a high post count. I have been here and active over 10 years, but I am not a lifer. Yet, people like Neckbeard will have access after only a few months.
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I completely agree.
 
Crono said:
- There should be a moratorium on new forums and categories, especially for ones that would weaken Off Topic. Off Topic is meant as catchall for all the non-tech forum topics to begin with, you don't need fifty new forums to limit forum activity.
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z1ggy said:
Perhaps a sport specific forum? I mean, this is a tech site (and why I joined many years ago) but we now have a love & relationship forum, a garage (car) forum, fitness...seems like sports wouldn't be too far fetched to include.
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I wonder if there's a way to do both...

One of the nice things about ATOT is you never know what you'll find there. Except that it won't be pron and it won't be nasty politics. I like that. But now you won't find health & fitness discussion. Or car discussion. Or home & garden discussion...

What I'm wondering is if it's possible to make a "forum" in vBulletin, which you can't post to, but which shows the posts from all sub-forums? For example, look here. That forum has lots of subforums. You can't post to that forum, but you can post to any sub-forum, and the post will appear in the main forum. Edit: But, of course, that's not a vBulletin site.

If that's possible, I'd like Off Topic to be a main forum, that you can't post directly to, and have Health & Fitness, The Garage, Home & Garden, and almost everything else (edit: everything else social, that is) be sub-forums that you can post to. Obviously there should also be a catch-all for anything else - it's just that if the parent is "Off Topic" I don't know what to call the catch-all forum.

As for what not to put in this "Off Topic parent" forum, I would exclude Politics & News - they have different moderation requirements and can be nastier. Maybe Discussion Club as well, but I'm not sure. I would also exclude Love & Relationships. As users who aren't logged in can't see posts in L&R, they shouldn't see the posts listed or blank spaces for them in "Off Topic parent".
 
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bshole said:
Add the ability to rate other people's posts!!! Add an overall poster rating to for each user.
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I think something more like "respect" or "reputation" points would be better than just rating a person.

Every time you post something helpful, meaningful, nice, etc a person can give you a +1. If you troll post, piss somebody off, etc, then you get a -1. However, this could get abused in places like P&N where people would click -1 non stop on some of the people there. So there'd have to be a limit of Rep that you could give per day/week/month.

I know users above said this was a bad idea, and I agree- to an extent. We don't want this to become reddit, where users get a rating in that specific topic, and posts get "points". That should not happen here.

But, on many tech forums like OCN, users get a reputation rating. If they are helpful and give solid advice, people are encouraged to give them positive rep. It's tough here because we have places like ATOT and P&N where trolls run rampant, so I think that reputation ratings should only be visible, and apply to the tech sections of Anandtech. Anything in the social subforums should not use it.
 
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Change the regularly scheduled downtime to a time with less traffic
More emoticons, please.
Don't add anymore subforums!
Get rid of discussion club
Get rid of highly technical
Get rid of other sub forums with barely any traffic
Fix issues with tapatalk search
Stop locking necros
 
dullard said:
Stop with all the useless sub-forums. Virtually no one posts in many forums, meaning virtually no one browses them, meaning the few posts that do go there just languish often unread. Plus it is really hard to determine the proper place to post. If your video card is not working on a motherboard in Windows 7 is this a post for "Video Cards and Graphics", "Motherboards", "Computer Help", "General Hardware", or "Operating Systems"?

I would look back over the last few months and eliminate any sub-forum with fewer than an average of 5 new threads/day. Merge them into forums with actual traffic so users get their questions answered and their thoughts seen.

For example, when I click on Power Supplies, I get on the first page posts that are 1 month old (that doesn't count the 6 stickies). That sub-forum just isn't used. Same goes for "Cases and Cooling" and "Peripherals" which all really belong in "General Hardware".

For example, what is the difference between SFF and HTPC? They are essentially one and the same with just a slight tweak in usage.

For example, the "*nix Software" sub-forum only shows 19 threads TOTAL in the last month.

Deleting the useless sub-forums would really help with making the site more clean, give more users more threads to view without having to click on dozens of pages, and give more visibility to new users who put posts in unused sub-forums then quit the site disappointed. And for the dedicated long-term posters, it would help us from loading a page 6 hours later and seeing nothing new (boring). I cut back my posting about 95% when all these sub-forums popped up since it is too boring to see nothing new and too tedious to click on 20 forums that might interest me.
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Agreed 100%. I miss the days when I could go to OT to read anything related to P&N, L&R (YAGT), The Garage (YACT), Health and Fitness, and the most recently created, unnecessary forum, Home and Garden.
 
dullard said:
Stop with all the useless sub-forums.

*snip*
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I couldn't agree more. There aren't enough users here to justify the amount of forum categories. Some can be combined or deleted altogether, narrowing views and posts, which will only help bring the community more together.
 
Add the ability to rate other people's posts!!! Add an overall poster rating to for each user.
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No. Do that and you'll have "I'll rep you if you rep me" and the forum will be subdivided into cliques.
 
Thought of a couple more:

Split post count categories. Posts for techical categories vs posts in 'just wanting to chat' categaries.

Getting rid of thread that bypasses several forum rules just so that people can drive up their post count with one-word posts.
 
Get rid of Saturday downtime for maintenance.
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Done.

This request has been approved and is being processed. Due to the holidays, we expect the change will take place within a matter of weeks. Our objective will be the complete elimination of the downtime period, rather than a rescheduling. You may see another downtime or two before we are able to enact this change, but it is approved and in process.

Much appreciate everyone's feedback so far - please keep them coming. 🙂
 
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