Listen2Reason's Flamebate Posts

Forum Ideas (Ideas for entire forums)

Okay, so most of the forumbuildr stuff just gets deleted every week. And that’s fine, because we really wouldn’t have any use ever again for 100 mediocre DeviousArtists Angry Replies.

However. Forum ideas are a little different, because one is chosen every week but the others can be resubmitted in a later week. Currently it looks like all the forum ideas are just wiped; last week the top scorers were Urbane Dictionary (which won), N.A.I.V.E. and I think Alcoholics Unanimous…and this week those last two are nowhere to be found. I think this is a bad idea, because those were really good ideas and I think the people who wrote them shouldn’t have to resubmit them every damn week. (Not only that, but could I resubmit them myself and get the credit? Well, maybe some admin would catch me and punish me, in which case, why is said admin leaving themselves open for more work?)

Of course you don’t want to just have the forum ideas sitting around week after week acgreat timesulating votes. Maybe someone will come up with a really good idea that no one’s thought of yet and it *should* be voted up to the top, but it couldn’t because the old submissions already had so many votes. That’s a situation we want to avoid.

We could automatically resubmit the forum ideas each week, but then they count toward the authors’ submission limit and we don’t want to take that choice away from them.

So that’s what I’m ultimately suggesting: Save the forum ideas but have them in a “previously submitted state”. You submit a forum idea, and it doesn’t win…Next week you go to submit a forum idea and it tells you “You have 1 previously submitted forum idea, would you like to resubmit it?”. Then it counts toward the submission limit as usual. If you want to be really strict, you could say that “previously submitted” forum ideas *must* be resubmitted or they will be lost. Thus, the authors *do* have to resubmit them every week, but all it takes is one click. (Or maybe the previously submitted items have to be resubmitted after two weeks, or three. Whatever.)

Simple tips for better Forumbuildr submissions

Escher Posted:

Having a couple of word_types in a submission keeps the item fresh. Having a dozen or two word_types in a submission creates problems. Since the initial impression is based on the text you typed (as opposed to the smaller example which gives the output), having a lot of word_types will make it harder for the voter to understand what the hell you’re trying to say. In addition, having a lot of your message come out random often pushes you past ‘amusingly inappropriate’ and into ‘incoherent gibberish’.

I think people should err on the side of including more word types. If an entry has no word types, it’s only funny once; if it has lots of word types, it’s potentially funny in many different ways. Tonight I did vote up an entry that had only one word type, but only because I thought it was hilarious, and I still feel kinda guilty about it.

Sometimes I’m tempted to take someone’s entry and re-submit it with the words replaced by word types…but that would probably be wrong. Log in to see images! Still, I feel bad because some of these entries would be awesome if they just had more word types…