Forum Titles Gone

To Lonestrangers point, some people PAID for that because it was part of the tier or pledge promise P made to us.

While I think it is GREAT DS takes the time to do that in the chat, that is part of the problem.

If you are going to do that, then they should also take the time to post that to the people out here who dont go to the chat. Or post some of that in the weekly newletter as well.

I understand your point about community, but it is extremely buried, even in a forum, to disseminate fact from noise.

They are doing a disservice to the 20k+ other backers who dont read the forums every 5 minutes, but are expecting information, that may well indeed be out there.

 

Damn well said Envy.

 

The only thing I would change about how they are doing things is answering questions in chat does little good for most of the community who wont see it, and it's up to someone to capture to repeat it. I'd rather if they answer any questions anywhere it's in the forums. They do lurk and I see them viewing threads, but often what happens is we are discussing something then someone gets a Dev in chat to answer what we are discussing.

If they are interested in answering our burning questions, and they don't have time to read everything on the forums (Even I don't have that much time) then they need to find some way to get people to submit these questions that the Dev's can answer. Most of our threads are just speculation and discussion on possible game features. But sometimes we have questions of how things will work that they can answer, but we don't know what they can or can't answer, or do or don't know at this time.

It's not just them not communicating everything to us, it's that they simply don't have the time to read and respond to everything we post.

Maybe the solution is someone needs to summarize questions about systems we have and submit them I don't know. I'm not too sure what some of you even expect out of them.

 

Good, solid idea. A weekly game FAQ roundup.

I do really like when DS comes into the chat and answers as many questions as he can. And that is a perfect example of your point: Takes way too much time to read everything.

A focused set of weekly round up questions submitted by users, or maybe a way to bubble up (voting?) the top most 5+ burning questions per week, would be really keen.

This would help to actually reduce the noise someone has to climb through in the forums, looking for factual answers, then adding more noise to the speculation.

 

I guess we could setup a weekly thread where we post questions, on wed close the thread and open a new one with voting options, could be a huge list of possible questions. That will also help us sort out what has already been answered because regulars remember some of those posts from the past 6 months.

We can also form a list of "questions we can't answer at this time". Then once they can answer the question we can cross it off and post the answer.

These could also be added as FAQ updates.

 

I suggested this some time ago here, but it didn't seem the community was all that interested. I've posted about it in other threads but there it is.

 

Both those ideas are great.

 

I volunteered to comb through all the threads for questions and their answers, stick them in the FAQ sticky post and everything, but the thread needs moderation assistance. Without moderation, the thread is all noise. It needs to be kept clean.

 

Sounds like someone needs some moderator pants.

I think this is a great idea, and I think these types of ideas go a huge way to resolve any issues someone (*cough*) can bring up about a lack of at least the appearance of communication. =)

 

Nooooo, you don't want me as a moderator, trust me I think the current community moderators are already doing an awesome job!

If anything, I would moderate only those set of Unofficial FAQ threads, but nothing more. If they can lock which threads someone could moderate, that would be fine.

 

Something like this is going to take more than just moderator support. We would also need some Developer buy in on a weekly/bi-weekly q&a. I can help out to an extent. I think something like "5 questions of the week" would be a great idea.

 

Let me ping @DarkStarr and @FireLotus to see what they think about this idea.

 

I tried one question a week, and that turned out to be too much.

Maybe it will be different now.

 

I would think this might be something Firelotus has to submit to the devs, possibly while they have everyone in a room, such as the morning standups. Add on an extra 5-10 minutes once a week, maybe thursdays are a good day for it. As a community manager I'd expect that to be one of her roles. I imagine the majority of her time is spent reading/responding to e-mails though.

This is basically a replacement from the weekly dev chats, that were 30 minutes long. I'd even rather have a FAQ/QA session over PoTA.

 

Yeah, I remember when you started...and ended those. I was really looking forward to those videos.

 

Yeah. I would submit a question, and a week would pass. Or two. Or three. Then I'd get a reply that they didn't have an answer.

And I was tossing softballs.

 

These could be even questions that she asks during the standup and someone says I'll take that, or someone says, We can't answer. Then they can type out a response as they have time and submit in a developer post only thread. viewable by all. That can't take as much time as they sometimes spend in chat. Hopefully right away we'll get the " can't answer" responses, then by the end of the day get the rest of the answers.

 

I think what you're saying is a slightly different idea but would better mitigate the concerns raised by the OP.

The idea I posted was more voluntary for any Dev and makes it easy as it's a single post filled with any question they'd like to answer whenever they have time. There's no noise to sift through, and will make it clear for anyone in the community to see what's answered or not. If something is answered in chat, they could paste the IRC log (snippet) to that thread and it will get moved to the Unofficial FAQ sticky and deleted. And there's one in each major area of the forums so it's categorized. Plus, I'm sure we all use the Dev Tracker, so if a question is answered in a different forum thread, it can be copied over to the appropriate sticky one to consolidate.

I also had planned on taking the questions and answers from the video transcriptions I've done (and yet to do) into those Unofficial FAQ posts too. So whenever there's a new Dev Hangout and questions are asked, it will eventually get added to those Unofficial FAQs as well. Not a lot of people have time or are able to watch the videos, so transcribing those Q&A from the hangouts to the Unofficial FAQs would help tremendously.

But if there's a formal weekly or biweekly Q&A session, even better. Other KS projects I'm on do exactly that.

 

the reddit-like idea brought up, where the most popular questions get voted to the top and then addressed by a dev once a week, is a fantastic idea.

and if we are being honest, that is something that will take very little time away from production.

+6 to this.

 

YES! and +6 from here as well =p

That is even better just from an "external to the community to draw in more interested people" POV.