Split The General Talk [Pandora] Section


Wolfsclaw

can't be longer than 2 months right?
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The General Talk [Pandora] section has, at the time of writing, 5,910 Topics and 192,326 Replies, which is a massive amount, if you do some little math:

By comparison, the "old" section News Zone has got 126 topics, the Dev Corner 993, and the Beta Testing area 104 topics. Two of three "new" sections - Hardware Hacking and Software Hacking - got even together not even 100 topics. The third new section - "I need help" - seems to be the most successful of the new ones, with an amount of 465 topics.

Throw all Pandora sections other than General Talk together and you get 1790 topics with a total amount of 35515 replies.

That is more than three times less topics than in General Talk and more than five times less replies. The General Talk section is completely overflooded, create a topic, come back after a little vacation after three days and have a hard time finding your topic on page 5 already!

Gentlemen, we need some change here!

I'd suggest for instance two new sections, of which the first one has a subsection (of course these are just shot-in-the-dark ideas, anyone with a clearer mind help me out here):
1) Games / Game Ports - Discuss homebrew games here, give ingame tips, hints, discuss game ports such as eDuke, prboom, descent etc. here and how they perform. Also, emulated games. For example, discuss your Mario64 on Pandora Speedrun, your GBC Pokemon Silver team etc.
You could also announce and discuss your new homebrew game / game port here, if you're too cool for the News Zone.

--- 1.5) Multiplayer Find Quake 3 mates for online shooting goodness, hook up with fellow Battle for Wesnoth addicts, hold tournaments (!) etc. The Wi-Fi gaming function is something that definitely needs to get much greater attention, as its potential is enormous!

2) Emulation - Ask questions, (two links) discuss why game X doesn't run on your favourite emulator, and why you should use Emulator A more than emulator B anyway. New emulator versions could be announced here, as the News Zone is rarely used anyway (because of the delay) and new releases tend to get swallowed by the general talk and beta testing area.



An other idea for a section that came to my mind was "3) Hardware & Building Discussion" where all the "How many boards have shipped?" and "What's my order number?" and "What can I use to clean my pandora?" and "When is Batch 3 rolling?" and "Will the world be at its end when the last Pandora has shipped?" topics would go, but on the other hand it would be kind of sad to create a board like this just because after two years they STILL haven't finished batch one.

Well, this is open for discussion. Let's "nettoie au karcher" (uhm.. clean this mess up) the General Talk section!

And excuse, once again, my engrish :D
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Yep, it's a problem that has been brought up before. It would be nice if someone could create a well thought out poll to determin which sections the community wants. When a decision has been made new sections can be created and the MODs can move valuable threads from General Talk to the new sections.
 
The general section is fine by my standard.
The section I wouldn't like see flooded are :
- news section (moderated so no problem here)
- dev section as there are many realy helpfull info for devs there
- beta tests so we can find easily lastest software

Having hardware mod on the side is cool too (I don't read there)
I don't get the point of the software hacking (IMHO stuckies threads there could be in the news section or beta)

Having Games/Emulations sections would be a way to split news/beta sections even more and won't bring general section threads count down
May be a "gaming together" section does have a value added :
- Setup of multi-players event
- general games advices (like the "I'm stuck in the 3rd level of xxxx games, PLEASE HELP!!!")
But I've yet to see any of these thread anyway

The generals section is acting like a garbage collector (thanks to the mods help) and once a thread there reach the (let's say) 5th pages, it is dead : It already have it's 2 or 3 derailements, most already have plenty of other identical thread in the lower layer ( each pages is a layer).
Going past page 10 is something between necrology and archeology.
So in the end of the day, the numbers of threads / post there don't matter
 
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