Ok, I admit it: I hate large threads. I really do. I hate browsing through 100+ pages to find an information I remember to have read somewhere in that thread, I hate looking over 5 new pages just to see if there's something interesting in it since I've read that very same thread 2 days ago.
Of course I understand and respect the philosophy behind this and that this way is the lesser of two evils in such a large and heavily frequented board.
But... I just hate it, can't help it, sorry.

Now, what about if there was an option that would allow to mark certain postings as an "Important Message"? Maybe the original poster could mark such postings in his own threads only, maybe the moderators could declare certain postings as important, maybe even a voting system where after a certain number of votes this posting is marked as important, maybe all of these options.

These Important Messages can have a different background color, a different font color, whatever, I think you get the idea. Additionally on the forum overview there could be a seperate icon/link (just like the bold link when an unread posting is in a thread) to indicate that there is a new Important Message in this thread and to link to that posting.

Just think of the Blizzard blue posters in the official forums, it's about the same functionality, just adapted to the needs (well, my needs at least ) of this forum.


Several examples come to mind where this could be useful.

• Patch notes: just like now, (PTR) patch notes can be updated. Do we need a new thread for each updated patch note? No. Do we want to find the information quickly without searching in 4 new pages? Hell yeah.
• DPS Spreadsheets: there's a new version out? Fine, just mark it as an Important Message to make everyone aware of that who is interested in that thread.
• Tactics for certain bosses: these threads get so cluttered up with useful information, maybe somebody (even the one asking the question about the tactics himself) could make a summary and mark this as important, so that other users, interested in the same question and having similar issues with the boss, have a quick glance at what's important.
• etc.

Now I don't know if there is an addon for vBulleting performing such tasks (a quick search for "vbulletin important messages hack" showed only, well, imporatnt messages in boards themselves, as expected), and I am sure such an addon would have to be written without flaws so that it doesn't take away too much performance or even kill the board.
I cannot write such an addon, but maybe someone reading this can.


So, what you think of this? Completely unnecessary? Good idea? Room for improvement?

Seeing as I'm apparantly the first one to vote "Bad idea", I'll explain my point of view.

The thing I like about this board is the discussion that's going on in here. The raw facts, as interesting as they are, are often nothing without the discussion that lead to discovering them. I do understand that it does take a bit lot of time to browse through these forums when looking for a specific answer, but that's what the search -function is for - you can even search just by post instead of thread.

I think that having specific posts marked out blue/yellow/pink would ultimately promote the value of those posts over others, diminishing the posts that (majority?) feel less significant. Such flagging is very much needed for more open places in the internet, but on heavily moderated safe heavens such as EJ's, I think we'd lose more than gain. Just skipping to conclusions could often result in people not only learning less (not processing through the info themselves), but also not noticing smaller things they might otherwise discuss further.

I agree something needs to be done if possible at all - I am currently working my way through the 95 page Mage Theorycrafting thread. But then again, you get the most out of it all if you read everyone's opinions/thoughts.

How about a +/- buttons near any message, where registered people can reflect their opinion? With 10 "+" this message turn green.

In most Unmoderated forums it works pretty good. But even here, it might make reading a bit easier, and more to the point.

Quite a lot of times, I just breeze on the messages, till I find something interesting, then, I just reread back 1 page if I need to.

Perhaps an optional tag that isn't too intrusive. But really, I'd prefer to have a leisurely read through dozens of pages of discussion and get more out of it than bullet points. I'd hate to see threads cluttered up by +/- tags, subtrees, excessive highlighting, and all the other sorts of things that make it difficult to read through and take in a discussion in its entirety.

Seems to me that these boards aim for every post to be important in its own right. Patch notes and spreadsheets can easily be updated and made available as it is. Discussions needn't be summarized.

I agree with aya fully on this. This forum is meant for people who want to min/max to discuss different aspects of the game.The whole point of having this forum is to thin down all the garbage from wow forums and have intelligent conversations.

Hence every post on the forums should be part of a discussion and shouldn't be discarded because it wasn't voted by some people as useful.

Regarding the +/- buttons, this just reminded me of something I've been wondering for a couple of days...
What does the "Add to user's reputation." button do? Or rather, what's the purpose of said reputation?

As for the topic, I don't really agree with marking specific posts as more important than others. At the same time, I understand the request for having the details listed in a more accessible way.
Wouldn't a possible solution be to, after a certain amount of posts / pages, open a new thread, with the first ones being mostly a summary of the last one? This would be very handy for theorycrafting stuff, at least, having questions answered without having to sift through 3-4 pages of discussion and tests.

Nothing much (yet). But it lets you show appreciation or disapproval for a certain post or poster, since they can see all the reputation given to them- though not who gave it- in their User CP.

Yes, and... what's stopping people from doing this? Seems like a fine user-driven solution to me.

I agree with aya. The forum doesn't need a slashdot upvote/downvote function- it's anathema to truly healthy discussion and unnecessary when the signal-to-noise ratio is high enough. The report post function lets you weed out the truly bad stuff.

Something I have seen work on other message boards that I frequent, is a rating system. The message board in question has a 1-5 rating, though 1-10 could just as easily work. Basically each post has a drop down menu and you can 'rate' that post or poster. Then on the General Forums list there is a drop down menu that allows you to only look at a post that was rated 10, or 6, or whatever number you happen to be looking for. I'm not exactly sure how one would implement something like this, or if it would even work in this case. But I have seen it work relatively well before.

It does feel a bit like the level 1 flaming on the WOW boards though.

Only if you use it that way. Mostly the rep I've gotten has been positive, and most of the rep I've given has been positive, in appreciation of well thought out or reasoned posts.

Really, the only way to get significant negative rep is to hit on Kaubel's daughter.

Yet even that resulted in 20+ rep points for Mr. Nogger.

As far as the thread topic goes, the way I get by (as I'm sure I'm not the only one) is that I know quite a few people who when they post, they usually have something pretty intelligent and/or insightful to say. If it's a real monster of a thread, I'll usually skim very lightly, and give more attention to the posts by people whom I know to be real contributers.

I don't think it's a good idea, alot of the time people go out of their way to make long or lengthy posts, sometimes adding a 1 or 2 line opinion is all you really have to get off your chest. Having somebody decide between which post is better or more important then another post can detract from other posts. What's the point of posting if you know your post isn't gonna be labeled as "important" and for the most part ignored.

I really like the way thottbot have their Comments. Especially with the supression of bad comments. Now this system really have to be forgiving (as Blizz CM say) not showing the until a certain number of readers rated it. I used in my early days to gather IMBD top250 till I noticed that newer films came and went quicker than my underwear.


Con: Some replys gets by unread due to prejudice instead of content. If some post is on the way down (some)people will automatically follow that tendancy without making their own oppinion.

Pro: Don't have to read 72 pages of the same argument over, over and over again.

In the last thread I posted there are enough essays to fill the classroom of any high school english class. People on these forums almost all make well thought out, fascinating, and very important and contributing posts in general. I've been impressed at least with that thread. Denoting some as important, while others aren't, is a matter of opinion often times - and detracts from the otherwise solid flow of ideas here. If this were a popularity contest nothing would ever change.

I don't really see the need for important posts.

I'm pretty sure you can add particular people to your friend list - and everytime they post it rings a bell. The bell awakens a kitten, the kitten flips a switch, the bat signal is raised. At least 50% of that statement is true. Edit: okay maybe the buddy lists do nothing.

I'm going to have to say that I don't like this idea. I realize that for many people the ability to quickly get a reader's digest version of a thread would be handy, but that kind of defeats the purpose of these boards (in my opinion). Given that these are heavily moderated and the signal to noise ratio is very high, I can't imagine that people are spending a lot of time wading through worthless posts.

However, I do understand the desire to skip all the testing and methodology posts and get straight to the conclusions. Unfortunately, this is a poor way to figure things out. If you don't understand the underlying mechanics, the conclusions are, more often than not, less helpful than they otherwise might be.

So I'm not trying to poo-poo the idea, but I just think it would be counterproductive for the community at large.

The problem is that there's two reasons to be reading a thread -- for the discussion, or to find the answer to some question. 15 pages of high-quality discussion about something that turns out to not matter certainly wouldn't be "bad" posts, but it's still worthless for the person who just wants to know what their optimal dps cycle is. Even highlighting "good" posts wouldn't be very useful when you're dealing with 75 page threads. Ideally, the OP would gradually be updated with the relevant information someone just starting to read the thread would need to know -- the Haruhi threads at SA (shouldn't require an account) are a great example of how this could work. If you look at the OPs of the 9 previous threads (linked in the second post), there's a clear evolution where each new thread has everything important from the previous thread added to the summary.

Of course, the problem is that building the summaries is a lot of work.

If it's even possible to create a summary that wouldn't be overly huge in the first place. Taking the Mage Theorycraft thread for example, it'd probably take me pages to condense that thread down. Sure, I can summarize Arcane Blast cycling in a paragraph (and I often do for non-mages, so they have a rough idea of what it is), but that's doing it a massive disservice. There are probably 15+ pages of posts where people have developed the nuances of the process, and reading them in order really helps develop an understanding of the technique, the strengths, and the weaknesses. A summary is almost certainly going to leave out important comments. That discussion is what made people learn their optimal dps.

I mean, in some ways it would work. I could say "10/48/3 is best mage dps past 700-800 spell damage" and that'd be true. But to me it robs the discussion of any feeling of the community. I read posts for quite awhile before I made my first post here, understanding that the standard here is higher and that people enjoy this forum because of that. I'm afraid that if you start publishing summaries, new people will never dig into the mega-threads, and either just rack up infractions or never start posting.

I don't think it's as easy as labeling each post as either "signal" or "noise". That distinction depends heavily on the information you're looking for. If you're looking for an explanation of WHY a particular arcane blast cycle is optimal, the Mage thread has a lot of signal. If all you care about is WHAT your ideal cycle is, it has a lot of noise.

We're essentially faced with the same problem Google is: Organizing all the information in the World!... of Warcraft. The question is, "What's the best way to organize information to make it easy for most people to find what they are looking for and hopefully contribute more useful information?"

From a theoretical perspective, I think the first obstacle lies in the forum structure itself. All posts belong to exactly one thread, but most threads end up with many branches. For example, the Mage thread has some sections on the differences between fire, frost, and arcane, the impact of gear on different specs, what spell cycles to use, PvP versus PvE talents, and so on. And those topics often subdivide. But the thread itself is organized by post date, not topic. It will never be easy to obtain information if post date is the primary sort criteria (after a post has been assigned to a thread anyway).

Of course, designing a system that allows nested, heirarchical conversations is fairly complex. The best example I can think of such a forum structure would be the comments system at ShackNews. And even that kind of a system only lets you assign a response to one parent. Ideally you want something like GMail's labels-- so you could tag a certain post as "Mage", "DPS Cycle", "Frost", "Raid" if it talked about the ideal DPS cycle for frost mages in a raid setting.

But most of us have day jobs and almost everyone here raids, so finding the time to write up such a system seems difficult for anyone to come by. This is probably just a pipe dream, but it's my ideal forum layout for forums with high quality posts.

Things worth having are worth paying for. I'm sure you could provide incentives for the poster to build summaries or disincentives for not doing so.

I really don't think we should move to far from the current system of thread maintenance. The Mega-Threads are intimidating but the discussion in the thread will teach you more about the topic than any digest ever could. Many times you will be left wondering well what about if I tried this after reading the digest and never realize that this was covered in the original because you TL;DR'd the thing.

The people willing to take the time to skim and review the threads are the ones who learn the most and therefore have the best information to make a rebuttal or response and help the discussion to continue. I know hunters who are still using outdated shot cycles because they do not understand the underlying principles behind them. They were told this cycle will get you max DPS. They therefore follow those instructions with no understanding that mechanics have changed, because they never took the time to learn the mechanics. Knowing that xx/xx/xx spec will get you max DPS with x gear is not enough. Change the gear, change a few spell mechanics and suddenly that is no longer true.

Learn why the previous statements were true and you are set top understand why they no longer are after a change. This is why reading the entire Mega-Thread helps you more than a short digest version ever will.

The best suggestion I've heard for dealing with megathreads is to lock them after a certain period of time (I'd say 3 months) and let a new one start, ideally with a first post encapsulating the core points (links to spreadsheets, summaries of different talent builds, or whatever) from the last thread. It shifts a bit of responsibility to the community to maintain them, but that's a good thing. I do agree that 7-month-old threads with people posting on page 113 to say "hey noob if you'd read page 58 you wouldn't be asking that question" aren't helpful.

I agree with you in sentiment-- it's best when someone wants to learn the why and not just the what. On the other hand, "You can lead a man to reason but you can't make him think." I don't think there's anything wrong with helping the people who don't want to learn all the details. It's not my place to judge people based on what they do and don't want to learn.