The wonderful aspect of EJ is that it is like listening to advanced degree lectures. The extra thread might be more considered short term tutoring than handholdly. The question in my mind is not how many of us would refrain from answering posts, but how many might actually enjoy it. There is no downside to trying.

As the game has evolved, a new person has a lot more to catch up on than someone who has been here for years. A place to be able to ask, and read others questions may help to nurture new blood. I understand the desire to prevent it from becoming too basic, and I think that it will be self filtering.

After reviewing Aldriana's points I think I have some points for EJ to consider beyond changes to the rogue forums themselves.

If EJ wants to improve on their current abilites to desiminate information to the masses, I'd recommend the following (please note that I'm not saying that you have to do this, just that I think it would work well...as always ymmv):

Firstly the moderators/webmasters should sit down and develope a forums template to use for every class. Honestly it's already happening in many of the forums, but if every forum featured:

1) A raiding FAQ with complete answers to the common questions. Spec, rotation, stat weighting, racials, doesn't currently have professions but probably should, and so forth. Honestly this locked thread is my "One Stop Shop" for any new rogues I talk to because it does cover it all.

2) A single thread for each spec that exists for that class with a regularly updated spec specific FAQ on the first page as we have now.

3) A SQSA thread with relaxed moderation for hand holding with the first post being a link to the other FAQ threads.

4) A "Current Raid Mechanics" thread as per our thread.

5) a "change log" for all the above FAQs. You'd be surprised how many don't have it and you're stuck wondering how relevant the FAQ actually is.

With this sort of structure in place, the moderators could have some basic guidlines like "Don't give infractions for answering hand holding questions that are not covered in the FAQs". Which would give some consistency to the infractions out there.

Hope that helps.

I won't say its a bad idea in the abstract, but I think you overestimate the ability of the moderation team to implement such a system. Most of the guide/FAQ type content is maintained by the community - in a quick glance across the class forums, I only noticed 2 threads of that type that were started and maintained by members of the moderation staff (the Rogue FAQ and the Shadow Priest Guide). Hence, in the rogue forums, where we have enough engaged and interested people to write and maintain all these useful threads, its certainly a great benefit to the discussion. But what do you do about the forums where that's not the case?

Basically: I'm sure (almost) all the other class forums would love to have good, updated FAQs/Guides/Discussion threads on these important topics - speaking for myself, it makes my life as a moderator quite a bit easier. But if the moderator for that forum doesn't have the time (and/or ability) to make those threads themselves, and no one in the community seems interested in doing it (and/or, if the people who are interested in doing it are bad at it), there's only so much you can do.

From reading Brotherbear's post, I just had a thought. I'm thinking out loud here, but hear me out.

Why not have sub forums to help make the Rogue forum easier to navigate (mainly for people not used to the forums/here for their first time)? There's a few different 'types' of thread here, and having them all together often makes it hard to find what your looking for, and this won't help the people who might be here for their first time looking for help.

We have the information threads (FAQ/SQSA/Blue Post etc.).
We have the spec discussion threads.
We have the Spreadsheet/simulator threads.

As far as I can see, it wouldn't have any negative effect on the forum (except perhaps making some things less obvious to see as soon as you enter the Rogue forum), and would help people find the area they are looking for so as to avoid the hand-holding section bleeding into the rest of the forum. The sub-forums could be appropriately named (Spec Theory, Information/Help, some name appropriate for spreadsheet section), and people coming here for help should easily find the area they are looking for. Things like Blue Post/FAQ would probably stay outside the sub forums for ease of access.

Well this would basically be a try to resurrect the TTT. And we all know how well that was used.

On the other hand I like the idea of having dedicated threads for dedicated usage patterns. The Blue Thread has a reason to exist beside the patch a.b.c thread for the sole reason changes that are made are valid for longer than a single patch cycle and having all the class relevant changes in one thread in a clean way makes it easy to find changes if you dont recall if it was in patch x.1 or x.3

Regarding Synek's suggestion: splits of this sort have been discussed amongst the moderation team in the past (though more typically in the context of splitting druids and other hybrids along spec lines). The major reason we've decided against it is that it just doesn't seem necessary - if we had dozens or hundreds of active threads such that it was hard to find threads pertinent to your subject of interest, that'd be one thing; but realistically, rogues are currently the only class with even a dozen one-month active threads, and given that they're generally pretty descriptively named, I don't know how much you'd really gain by splitting them out further. Having a bunch of subforums with 2 threads in each just doesn't fundamentally strike me as a superior forum experience to what we have - it'd be harder to use for those of us who *are* interested in all the subtopics, and not necessarily that much more intuitive for the people who aren't. If people can't be bothered to read a dozen thread titles and make a meaningful choice between them, are they going to do that much better picking between 3 or 4 subforums or the handful of threads in each of those?

Of course, this ties in to Antiarc's point - EJ as a forum tends towards having a very small number of very long threads. And I agree that its not optimal (though, I will say I think there's a case to be made that having 5 1k-post threads is better than having 1k 5-post threads). The thing is, there's only so much that can be done to change it, as by far the biggest thing limiting the number of threads is historical precedence. Believe it or not, EJ was even *worse* about megathreads a few years ago - in TBC and vanilla there was a single class mechanics forum and there were maybe 2 or 3 rogue threads. At least now we're up to a dozen. The problem is that the convention has been to use megathreads to discuss many different topics, which makes it harder to come up with a new topic that's unique enough to warrant its own thread, and even when people do, they're often reluctant to do so. There's nothing in the rules *stopping* you from starting a new thread whenever you have a new idea to discuss; its just that people don't.

Basically: I agree that information curation is a problem; its just not one that i have a good solution to.

Re: Koaschten. The problem with the TTT was that it was really a Wiki in name only - you couldn't really have dozens of people working on the same article. Vulajin wrote the first version of the rogue article, and no one stepped up to replace him, so it sort of... died. A true Wiki might endure a little better. The other problem with the TTT was the simple fact that it was located in a different area of the forums so people had less occasion to see it and interact with it. Were it located within the class forum - replacing the major guide threads we have at current - that might help somewhat. Were something like Antiarc's suggestion possible, there is some reason to believe that it might work better than the TTT did. Then again, it might not. There's also the problem that there are people here with more than 100 posts (heck, more than 1000 posts) that I wouldn't really want editing the official guide for a class, so there's that, too.

I think the forums are about as good as we can get them, granted I received and infraction b/c of something I posted on page 32 which was addressed on page 20 and a blue post which I missed, we can't all read every single post of a 30+ page thread, and every now and then people are going to miss things.

The combat / sub / ass compendiums have their main pages updated constantly, same with the raid mechanics thread, you can never prevent people from making duplicate posts on the same subjects or asking stupid questions, you simply try to control it.

Personally I think the EJ forums work quite well as the go-to place for answers, usually you can find an answer within a few minutes of browsing.

Compared to TBC and early WOTLK EJ Forums, I find the current setup very enjoyable

I agree with Feist. I know there's been many times when I've read something near the end of a rapidly growing megathread, wanted to point it out to a guild mate, and end up saying "either you have to trust me, or you have to go read the last ~7 pages of Thread X." That's not terribly practical.

This isn't to say that spinoff threads couldn't be locked once a conclusive verdict is reached. In the Gouge example, after it's spun-off, analyzed and realized to be not useful, it could be locked with a conclusion edited into the first post.

An alternative would be to maintain a thread (perhaps locked) that just lists links to these prolonged discussions and really valuable posts that answer questions very well. I used to keep a number of links to past discussions, lately I just do my best to remember key words and use the search function. A rough example would be the following. As a note, I grabbed these links really quickly, I am sure there are better links and I am not suggesting that we must implement any of these topics.

Should I use Gouge in my Combat rotation?

• Answers starts here-ish.

How do poisons work?

• Which are PPM or % based.
• Effect of weapon speed.

How does procs per minute (PPM) enchants and poisons work?

• Why your observed value is different.

How do we estimate the value of energy and CPs?

• How it's done for Assassination.

Hit cap information (I should probably clear this up a little better in the guides)

• What is the difference between the hit caps?
• Is there something wrong with my character sheet?

A new player would still have to know to come to this thread and look around and may be confused about if they should be looking in the FAQ, one of the guides, or here. Plus, if we end up with a ton of topics in here it could get really disorganized.

This by far is the most viable solution. I don't think the real issue here is whether to relax rules, but to make known information easily visible. A table of contents would identify exactly what topics are already covered here and eliminate many redundant questions/discussions. A further breakdown could be used, such as chapters for Raid mechanics, spec help, etc. However, this would be a massive undertaking and rely heavily on the community to update. I saw talk of a wiki, but does this forum facilitate true wiki functionality?

As a direct reply to Paper, perhaps this kind of thing should be in the first post of the same thread?
I used to do the same thing on our guild' forum: maintain links to pertinent discussions too so, at least some of us find it useful!

Back on topic, I was a big fan of the TTT and would love to see it come back.
I think generally the moderation is fine so wouldn't want to see the tone of the forums change too much and since I tend to keep up with new posts finding information isn't too bad for me.
Although a slightly more lax thread is a good idea it's probably just more of a band-aid to the greater issue of it being hard to find the information in the large threads (which Paper's suggestion may alleviate).