[HELP] Contests in a Subforum?

[Jim]

39 minutes ago, Erik Leppen said:

I'm not so sure about subforums for the contest. The contest is very much one of the core aspects of the Technic forum. I mean, what's the forum about? Mocs and sets. hat's the contest about? Mocs and building techniques. It fits perfectly. If anything, it's more of what we want than the non-contest stuff. That's why there are contests at all. If contest entry topics swamp the rest, isn't that only good? I mean, finally it's MOC topics swamping the endless discussions about sets we don't like anyway, and finally most of the energy revolves about people actually building stuff :)

If there is a contest going on, I'm sure people will visit the subforum frequently enough. 

I will split this into a separate topic and ask the others.

So, contest in a subforum yay or nay?

[efferman]

yay, because the head with pinned threads is, during a contest, very long and blocks nearly half of the screen.

[Jurss]

Could be OK. At least, worth to try.

[Scoar Sonander]

All yays here, we either try it or regret not doing so!

[Jim]

If there are no valid objections by tomorrow night, I can do some shuffling with forums and subforums.

[higgins91]

I think a sub forum would be good, it would make it easy to find all the contest entries and to better see new topics or answers to topics without searching between contest entries.

[allanp]

I'm thinking nay TBH. It's all good content and activity, and I wonder if it would be missed by some, or many, (reducing engagement with it) if it was tucked away inside another sub topic. As it is, it's all out out in the open and it's so very clearly obvious there's a contest going on, which I think is a good thing.

Whilst I would say Eurobricks is far from dead or dying, I wouldn't risk doing anything to reduce engagement or activity, and this forum always seems to come more alive when there's a contest. Sure, if you're not interested in the contest it may seem like some tiny hassle to scroll through a few more posts to get to content you are more interested in, but that's not a big negative is it really. That's surely far better than to do anything that reduces the life and activity on the forum. Wading through posts is a sign of a healthy and active forum is it not? I may be wrong but that's my gut feeling on it.

Edited April 18, 2022 by allanp

[Gray Gear]

I like the idea bacause you basically can't post MOCs while a contest is going on or the post will be gone very fast.

But I do agree the subforum should be easily accessible , so a single pinned link would be good I think.

Also I think it would be good to remove the "Hall of Fame" from being pinned to free up some space. It has last been updated like 2,5 years ago, so it obviously isn't very interesting or useful without anything new going on. Just my 2c.

Edited April 18, 2022 by Gray Gear

[Erik Leppen]

Just asking, but can the amount of topics on the page be changed?

If so, you can just increase that, so the first page is longer.

 

Edit: but in any case, I simply don't get what moving contest topics to a subforum would solve, and I do suspect new problems to arise, mostly, less contest activity.

But if you want to experiment with the topics, go ahead, but at the very least, keep the announcements and main pinned topics in the main forum so they can't be missed, and only move the seperate entry topics.

Edited April 18, 2022 by Erik Leppen

[howitzer]

9 minutes ago, Gray Gear said:

I like the idea bacause you basically can't post MOCs while a contest is going on or the post will be gone very fast.

But I do agree the subforum should be easily accessible , so a single pinned link would be good I think.

Also I think it would be good to remove the "Hall of Fame" from being pinned to free up some space. It has last been updated like 2,5 years ago, so it obviously isn't very interesting or useful without anything new going on. Just my 2c.

Yeah, these are my thoughts also on every point. If I had a MOC to present, I wouldn't post it now because there's no hope of many people seeing it with all the contest topic swamping the first page. But yeah, it should be on top, and maybe have something to make it obvious that there's a contest going on right now and every visitor really should look into the subforum.

The Hall of fame indeed is pretty useless as long as it's not being updated regularly, so unpinning it (and maybe moving it to the index topic) would free up some space.

3 minutes ago, Erik Leppen said:

Just asking, but can the amount of topics on the page be changed?

If so, you can just increase that, so the first page is longer.

 

Edit: but in any case, I simply don't get what moving contest topics to a subforum would solve, and I do suspect new problems to arise, mostly, less contest activity.

But if you want to experiment with the topics, go ahead, but at the very least, keep the announcements and main pinned topics in the main forum so they can't be missed, and only move the seperate entry topics.

While a popular contest is going on, there's tons of building topics constantly updated, which push every other topic to the second and third pages, so it's a very bad time to present any other MOCs or get attention to other discussions. Contests are great, but they shouldn't force everything else on hold.

I'd also keep the other pinned topics in place, except for the aforementioned Hall of fame topic.

[Good old Lego builder]

I would not like it. I visit the Technic  forum and I like to see updates there. I don’t think I start visit an subforum and check everything out.

I think it would invite less casual viewers, like me, and so less engagement.

[Jim]

I had indeed plans for unpinning the HoF.

[Mr Jos]

Yay, for freeing up space and have less pinned topics that are rarely used more than once. But it should be easy accessible from like a pinned topic-link to the subforum. It will be more organized and still get much views I think, and the other MOC's made during contests will get their attention as well, instead of having to think to post directly or wait till after the contest is finished.

[onzenuub]

At least you can merge the subforum again with the Technic one. :D

[allanp]

I get the point that if you wanted to post a MOC now, then it probably wouldn't be the best time because of all the other contest related MOCs. But if that's the case then maybe you could wait till the contest is over? It would be a shame to relegate so many MOCs to a subforum, where it would get less visibility and engagement, just because it was made for a contest. I don't think that makes a MOC less deserving of visibility or engagement. Poor contest MOCs are already understandably barred from being front paged, bless em!

Sorry @Jim if I'm making things harder , tis but my 2 cents!

[Nazgarot]

I love contest time, and how the forum is bobbling over with positivity and creativity. I would be sorry to see it subjugated to a separate forum, but the majority decides... 

And I agree with allanp; I can post MOCs all year, and they still drown in sulking over official sets that don't live up to the expectation. The best time to post a moc if you want views is straight after a competition. At that point there is a very high activity with participants and voters, but not that many new posts, so why not drop it then?

_ED_

[Gray Gear]

I agree with @Nazgarot that it is nice to see a lot of active users and projects during "contest time". It is good, makes the forum feel really alive. That is something that could be lost if the contest is split off from the normal forum. Maybe we can just go with a seperate subforum for this contest and have another discussion afterwards about how everybody feels about it. We can still decide if this is a good idea or if old way was better after all after the contest is over 

[MangaNOID]

Not a fan of sub forums myself. I can’t add much more than what’s already been said about keeping as it is but that’s my vote...for what it’s worth.

[Paul B Technic]

I am on the fence about this. I do see some benefits to having the contests in a separate subforum. 

[langko]

I vote for no. 
I don’t see the point in booting technic related models somewhere else because the forum is too busy. What’s the point of having a technic forum then. I personally wouldn’t bother looking at them if they were somewhere else. It’s nice to see more Mocs here instead of threads complaining about official sets (I’m guilty as well). +1 for unpinning the hall of fame, it’s useless if not getting updated.

[2GodBDGlory]

32 minutes ago, langko said:

I vote for no. 
I don’t see the point in booting technic related models somewhere else because the forum is too busy. What’s the point of having a technic forum then. I personally wouldn’t bother looking at them if they were somewhere else. It’s nice to see more Mocs here instead of threads complaining about official sets (I’m guilty as well). +1 for unpinning the hall of fame, it’s useless if not getting updated.

I'm not opposed to trying out a subforum for this contest, but as pointed out in this quote, it does seem like somewhat odd logic used to justify it. We start contests (at least partially) in order to increase activity on the forum, but then during the contest we feel like there's too much activity, resulting in less attention for other MOCs. Perhaps it's true that MOCs do get neglected in contest season, but on one hand having more traffic on the forum in general could definitely result in more people viewing non-contest related stuff. And alternately, if the purpose of the contest is to generate activity, hiding it away in a subforum will only tend to diminish how many people actually look at the contest entries, which are just as much MOCs as non-contest ones that get overlooked (though the constant updates do keep them artificially on the front page). The more I type, the more I become convinced that it would be counterproductive to put them somewhere else. More activity on the main forum is a good thing, right?

Maybe I'm just a Eurobricks addict, but I'll always click on the second page if everything on the first page is new to me. (Though I check several times a day, so it never really gets that far for me anymore). It doesn't seem like a hard thing to do to see more new content, but I guess some people just aren't interested? As someone else mentioned, just allowing more posts per page would be really nice, but maybe that's not possible in this forum framework.

[howitzer]

Yes, increasing the number of threads visible on the first page would indeed solve a lot of problems.

[Jim]

2 hours ago, howitzer said:

Yes, increasing the number of threads visible on the first page would indeed solve a lot of problems.

I am checking with other staffers if there are any objections. This is a site wide setting, so it would propagate to other forums as well.

10 hours ago, allanp said:

I get the point that if you wanted to post a MOC now, then it probably wouldn't be the best time because of all the other contest related MOCs. But if that's the case then maybe you could wait till the contest is over? It would be a shame to relegate so many MOCs to a subforum, where it would get less visibility and engagement, just because it was made for a contest. I don't think that makes a MOC less deserving of visibility or engagement. Poor contest MOCs are already understandably barred from being front paged, bless em!

Sorry @Jim if I'm making things harder , tis but my 2 cents!

No problem. That's the reason I asked. If I wanted to make things easy, I would have simply created the subforum 

But I do think increasing the visible number of topics will solve some/most of our issues and obviously I don't want to contests to be "tucked away" so I'd rather have them here as well. Although I do like the idea of having all the topics in a single place.

[Jim]

The number of topics per page has been increased to 50.

[Nazgarot]

That is a great solution!