Returning Members

[TDA WP]

Wild West is gone. Russ hasn't made a statement on it but it was a work of the previous site owner before he left for other projects. There are plenty of 'rule free' forums on the internet as an alternative.

In fact, this was brought up during the stream with Andrew Eisen and it was definitely established that it was gone and not coming back. That forum is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-forum. Unfortunate, given that as with many other things about the past few years the content has been very badly misrepresented. Mostly it was just people telling stupid jokes and posting nonsense like that time someone posted the entire script of Phantom Menace with character names substituted for those of forum members and a hidden autoplay YouTube of some dopey rendition of the Star Wars theme. Wild West will be missed, it was a silly place [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9wdYy3tCm4].

 

[vallorn]

Wild West is gone. Russ hasn't made a statement on it but it was a work of the previous site owner before he left for other projects. There are plenty of 'rule free' forums on the internet as an alternative.

In fact, this was brought up during the stream with Andrew Eisen and it was definitely established that it was gone and not coming back. That forum is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-forum. Unfortunate, given that as with many other things about the past few years the content has been very badly misrepresented. Mostly it was just people telling stupid jokes and posting nonsense like that time someone posted the entire script of Phantom Menace with character names substituted for those of forum members and a hidden autoplay YouTube of some dopey rendition of the Star Wars theme. Wild West will be missed, it was a silly place [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9wdYy3tCm4].

I remember that thread. That was a good thread.

 

[Marik2]

What would you like to see happen here?

A complete reassessment of the philosophy behind the rules-heavy moderation stance, herin pertaining to the effect of passive aggression caused by said stance and the toxic outcomes from it.

What was old content you would love revived?

The Wild West

Written media or video content, what's more valuable to you?

Give it a mix. Video content can be consumed passively, while written content is consumed actively. Also, you forgot Audio. There should be someone capable of doing a podcast on specific topics.

The WW forums have been fully deleted now.

Too bad, they were the only thing that moved the regular forums away from the toxicity many so often embody here. Ah well, I'm sure the people who decided to poison it by bringing all their R&P nonsense into there can sip fancy drinks and chuckle to how right they were to kill the only good thing in this place for years.

As to deleting the forums and resetting. It would need to be rebuilt from the ground up with a proper look at the rules which encouraged passive aggressive toxicity to brew behind the scenes. It's been pretty conclusively proven at this point that just sticking more rules on top of a broken philosophy of management doesn't fix the problems here.

If you just wanted a forum of forum games, there is literally one on this site.

It doesn't have racial slurs.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

To be clear, I'm not in a position to discuss moderation policies as they are evolving and past bannings would fall under 'Old Grudges' mentioned in the OP. So lets move on from that if its possible. My understanding is a review is taking place regarding the rules but its lower in the long list of things to do for management than getting written/video content rolling again and securing revenue. Patience on that is the most sensible course.

Oh sure, it's just by way of showing a potential problem more for consideration than anything. Dollars to donuts I see a site-nuke and rebuild coming so I have a feeling almost everything will change anyway.

From the Interview I watched, Russ believes the forums and community to be one worth saving, so I don't think a site nuke is coming, especially now that I heard Kross will be working on it again as well. Everything I have heard thus far has been very positive, so I do think they can rebuild it without having to destroy everything first.

 

[EscapistAccount]

From the Interview I watched, Russ believes the forums and community to be one worth saving, so I don't think a site nuke is coming, especially now that I heard Kross will be working on it again as well. Everything I have heard thus far has been very positive, so I do think they can rebuild it without having to destroy everything first.

That sounds like such a complete waste of time and effort, if it were me I'd kill this obsolete forum and take the opportunity to upgrade it to something both more full featured and easier to maintain. How many other times do you get the opportunity for a complete teardown and rebuild?

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

From the Interview I watched, Russ believes the forums and community to be one worth saving, so I don't think a site nuke is coming, especially now that I heard Kross will be working on it again as well. Everything I have heard thus far has been very positive, so I do think they can rebuild it without having to destroy everything first.

That sounds like such a complete waste of time and effort, if it were me I'd kill this obsolete forum and take the opportunity to upgrade it to something both more full featured and easier to maintain. How many other times do you get the opportunity for a complete teardown and rebuild?

There is nothing stopping them from keeping their community and forums AND making the site full featured and easier to maintain. I have seen numerous other sites upgrade without disposing of their existing community or forums all together. Any site can upgrade whenever they want, a buy out is not necessary for that to happen.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Unfortunate, given that as with many other things about the past few years the content has been very badly misrepresented.

If you just wanted a forum of forum games, there is literally one on this site.

It doesn't have racial slurs.

Thankfully, I was never subjected to the haven of debauchery that was the Wild West. I must say, those that champion it really do boggle my mind, that they so passionately pine for a place where they can essentially be the worst kind of people; I?m sure your local prison guards have to beat you all off with a stick for your trying to break IN. I?d offer that instead of continually pouting and begging for a place in polite, considerate and decent internet society wherein you can be the antithesis of those things, why don?t you all exchange email addresses and/or phone numbers and keep that nonsense to and within yourselves? If all you want is to engage in vitriolic, abusive and hateful conversation with likeminded people, email/phone are the ideal forums and you can quit going on and on and ON about a little piece of hell that is gone, erased and thankfully unlikely to ever return.

I, for one, am glad to see that the new owners? primary order of business is to try and make this place livable and welcoming again. That they must campaign on a platform of common respect for and between everyone should be wholly unnecessary, but in light of incessant post like these, I guess they have to send that harbinger forth so the roaches can choose to scatter or cry when they get stepped on.

 

[EscapistAccount]

There is nothing stopping them from keeping their community and forums AND making the site full featured and easier to maintain. I have seen numerous other sites upgrade without disposing of their existing community or forums all together. Any site can upgrade whenever they want, a buy out is not necessary for that to happen.

A buyout isn't necessary, but personally I think the forums have little to no historical value and would simply flatten the site and rebuild on standardised software rather than a custom built solution. It also has the nice side effect of destroying all the embarrassing shit they don't want the community to keep doing.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

There is nothing stopping them from keeping their community and forums AND making the site full featured and easier to maintain. I have seen numerous other sites upgrade without disposing of their existing community or forums all together. Any site can upgrade whenever they want, a buy out is not necessary for that to happen.

A buyout isn't necessary, but personally I think the forums have little to no historical value and would simply flatten the site and rebuild on standardised software rather than a custom built solution. It also has the nice side effect of destroying all the embarrassing shit they don't want the community to keep doing.

They can remove offending threads and posts at will, as has already been done, and can upgrade forums however they wish to make them more functional without the need to remove them. That does not mean they need to throw out all the great discussions on games, events, software, hardware, cosplay, toys, movies, and so much more that actually still exists here. It is still okay and beneficial to discuss female or minority representation in games and the industry. What is not okay is insulting people, attempting to discriminate, exclude or be rude to people and that would continue to need to be addressed regardless of if they nuked the forums or not. They can simply remove the offending posts so no one has to see them rather than just hide them leaving them still viewable as they have before. They would need to do that anyhow regardless of if forums were removed if they wanted to have any sort of community at all whether it is through forums or a comment system so I am not seeing that there really is any benefit to nuking them as there is much to be lost and not much to be gained by doing so.

You may not view the many years of gaming and hobby discussions as valuable, but those who are interested in those things do.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

You may not view the many years of gaming and hobby discussions as valuable, but those who are interested in those things do.

On that point, I would not be betrayed if the site moved to a new forum architecture with leaving the legacy forums open to post and continue on in. The maintenance of 'hey, stop the spambots' is pretty low compared to the ongoing upgrades of a new main hub, upgrading video/social media incorporation, etc. A new forum system can co-exist with the legacy for the old school Escapists plus its more alive than pure archival.

This is me speculating however. A real system admin could speak with actual authority about that but unifying old password/user info into a new system doesn't sound like its a huge hurdle. Keep in mind I am not a proficient Excel user, much less a website coder.

 

[EscapistAccount]

On that point, I would not be betrayed if the site moved to a new forum architecture with leaving the legacy forums open to post and continue on in. The maintenance of 'hey, stop the spambots' is pretty low compared to the ongoing upgrades of a new main hub, upgrading video/social media incorporation, etc. A new forum system can co-exist with the legacy for the old school Escapists plus its more alive than pure archival.

This is me speculating however. A real system admin could speak with actual authority about that but unifying old password/user info into a new system doesn't sound like its a huge hurdle. Keep in mind I am not a proficient Excel user, much less a website coder.

Funnily enough this is actually my job, I am a systems admin and I can confirm it's probably possible. What would prevent me though is that I'd not be sure of how much historical interest the forum actually is. If I was going to take over the design, maintenance and deployment of the site I'd first off port it to a commercial framework rather than run a custom designed site, it's cheaper to upkeep and you don't need to pay development time, or at least not as much. If I was informed it was necessary I could look at porting the database but it's a pretty big job if the databases don't happen to be very similar, you'd need to refactor all your data to fit the new structure of the database, input it and wait for something to break because it will. I've done this once or twice but it's not my favourite activity. After that you have the data in the database but there's no guarantee the new site will actually display the data correctly. The health bar system would probably need custom coding and the spots will almost certainly all be in the wrong markup, which means either sucking it up and putting up with a bunch of posts where italics all became the markup again, or you go through every post and do a replace.

Given that the entire point of this reboot is a clean break and given that they really want to get rid of all the Gamergate stuff if they can and finally given that I personally don't think that ten years of 'is Half Life 2 overrated?' has much reread value I'd be inclined to just let it go. It basically becomes a case of sure, we could preserve the decade of mostly obsolete and forgotten posts and all the banned user accounts, or we could reboot the site and start from scratch.

 

[Nomad]

What would you like to see happen here?

More journalistic content. A return to strict forum moderation - what made the Escapist forum stand out from the crowd was the lack of one-liners and image posts. If I want to see a string of gifs with looped movie scenes taken out of context, I'll go to reddit. I come here for the discussions.

What was old content you would love revived?

Don't revive stuff. Make new stuff instead, relevant for today rather than yesterday.

Written media or video content, what's more valuable to you?

Written media. If I'm not sure about whether or not I'll be interested in an article, I can always just skim it to find out. You can't skim a video - you need to watch it at the video's pace, rather than your own. The end result of this is that I just rarely watch videos.

If I was going to take over the design, maintenance and deployment of the site I'd first off port it to a commercial framework rather than run a custom designed site, it's cheaper to upkeep and you don't need to pay development time, or at least not as much.

This is very sound advice. The Escapist's core business isn't developing website and forum software. Because of this, a custom product will in all likelihood be inferior to the products offered by companies whose core business is developing website and forum software - and if you buy their product, then you'll also have someone to yell at when things aren't working properly. This would have been very valuable during our recent interregnum.

 

[EvilRoy]

Given that the entire point of this reboot is a clean break and given that they really want to get rid of all the Gamergate stuff if they can and finally given that I personally don't think that ten years of 'is Half Life 2 overrated?' has much reread value I'd be inclined to just let it go. It basically becomes a case of sure, we could preserve the decade of mostly obsolete and forgotten posts and all the banned user accounts, or we could reboot the site and start from scratch.

I would second this motion. If they want a new face and a departure from all the old grudges and controversies that have stuck to this site over the years, thats fine, but it makes no sense to attempt to preserve the old forums. The old crap, minus whatever was put behind the premium account wall, is all going to be found on the internet archives anyway. Leaving it here just draws attention to the fact that the biggest discussions ever on this site are about things we can't mention now.

Considering the pure breadth of banned accounts, people who left and never came back, old contributors, old staff - may as well knock out the user database and start over as well. If you want your old name back you can take it, whatever, but keeping a massive database of people who were banned or left a decade ago makes no sense. If you were thirteen in 2008 and got banned on the escapist you could have a bachelors and a masters degree by now. It would have been a pretty quick masters, but you could crank that thing out in 1.5.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Given that the entire point of this reboot is a clean break and given that they really want to get rid of all the Gamergate stuff if they can and finally given that I personally don't think that ten years of 'is Half Life 2 overrated?' has much reread value I'd be inclined to just let it go. It basically becomes a case of sure, we could preserve the decade of mostly obsolete and forgotten posts and all the banned user accounts, or we could reboot the site and start from scratch.

I would second this motion. If they want a new face and a departure from all the old grudges and controversies that have stuck to this site over the years, thats fine, but it makes no sense to attempt to preserve the old forums. The old crap, minus whatever was put behind the premium account wall, is all going to be found on the internet archives anyway. Leaving it here just draws attention to the fact that the biggest discussions ever on this site are about things we can't mention now.

Considering the pure breadth of banned accounts, people who left and never came back, old contributors, old staff - may as well knock out the user database and start over as well. If you want your old name back you can take it, whatever, but keeping a massive database of people who were banned or left a decade ago makes no sense. If you were thirteen in 2008 and got banned on the escapist you could have a bachelors and a masters degree by now. It would have been a pretty quick masters, but you could crank that thing out in 1.5.

There is surprisingly little that is actually on the internet archives, and most of it is only the first page of discussions. I would be amazed if 1/10 of the threads on the site have been archived at all.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

you know what we need to revitalize the role-playing section, I would love if that became active again and damn I miss serial killer, bring that back.

 

[Saelune]

you know what we need to revitalize the role-playing section, I would love if that became active again and damn I miss serial killer, bring that back.

The RP section is weird. Like, there are and have been numerous people who technically were more active than I ever were but they ONLY posted there, so I never met them.

 

[EvilRoy]

Given that the entire point of this reboot is a clean break and given that they really want to get rid of all the Gamergate stuff if they can and finally given that I personally don't think that ten years of 'is Half Life 2 overrated?' has much reread value I'd be inclined to just let it go. It basically becomes a case of sure, we could preserve the decade of mostly obsolete and forgotten posts and all the banned user accounts, or we could reboot the site and start from scratch.

I would second this motion. If they want a new face and a departure from all the old grudges and controversies that have stuck to this site over the years, thats fine, but it makes no sense to attempt to preserve the old forums. The old crap, minus whatever was put behind the premium account wall, is all going to be found on the internet archives anyway. Leaving it here just draws attention to the fact that the biggest discussions ever on this site are about things we can't mention now.

Considering the pure breadth of banned accounts, people who left and never came back, old contributors, old staff - may as well knock out the user database and start over as well. If you want your old name back you can take it, whatever, but keeping a massive database of people who were banned or left a decade ago makes no sense. If you were thirteen in 2008 and got banned on the escapist you could have a bachelors and a masters degree by now. It would have been a pretty quick masters, but you could crank that thing out in 1.5.

There is surprisingly little that is actually on the internet archives, and most of it is only the first page of discussions. I would be amazed if 1/10 of the threads on the site have been archived at all.

Huh. Wonder why that is - I assumed those sites auto-scraped anything and everything. Maybe they just made a server space decision on the assumption that most of the worthwhile stuff would come out early.

 

[Segadroid]

I've literally come out of my slumber to reply to this thread. Funny that.

Definitely more diverse content that makes us stand out like the Escapist used to have, like webcomics, podcasts or heck, exclusive cartoons and video's that aren't immediately thrown onto Youtube so people have an *incentive* to visit the actual website.

The news can come back too, but should no longer be the focus until we can build up a news team. I'm open to discussion over that thought, though.

Addendum: We've got to fix the videoplayer and all the deadlinks for sure as well.

 

[Euryalus]

I miss psychictaco217. He was great. He made hilarious satire posts that were tastefully misogynistic.

 

[MercurySteam]

I'd like to see a revitalisation of the website as much as anyone but what I can't fathom is how The Escapist was allowed to regress into this state. Kudos for Yahtzee for still pulling his weight but I can't believe that a place that hosted the likes of Jim Sterling, Extra Credits, MiracleOfSound, MovieBob (the list goes on and on) allowed themselves to fall into such a state.

I'm not saying we should blow it all up but quite frankly years have come and gone and the only really interesting place left are the forums, however if they could get some good content creators on the payroll there may be a chance of bringing us back.

Or maybe I'm just an old fool with delusions of what could be