This one is more born from a pet peeve than a real issue, but is there anyway we could maybe draw more attention to the General Games category? I think it’s fine if it’s not super active but I’ve noticed several threads in General Discussion and even Projects categories that really should be in General Games.
IDK how that’d be done but I at least wanted to bring it up.
do you have some examples?
people probably just don’t know where to put stuff and if the mods think that a topic is “categorized enough” then they won’t feel the need to correct the mistake
It’s not some hugely pervasive issue or anything, I mostly only care because I like the idea of General Games since I’m not always in the mood for a built from the ground up fetish experience but am down for an ancillary one.
But, yes, should have included examples. Here are a couple from General Discussion.
SO Call of Cthulhu - Spot on for what General Games is for.
Bitlife? - Same as above.
someone have this pokemon hack rom - This one is debatable, I’ll admit.
Friday Night Funkin Fat Girl Mod en proceso - Also another one that fits with General Games general point.
Star Wars The Old Republic RolePlay Guild - Ditto.
something that might help would be a “game mods” sub category so if people type in mod in the category when they make a topic it shows up. it might force some projects topics to move over and that might not be desirable though.
Maybe? I’d be for it and it wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. The Fallout New Vegas weight gain mod used to be in general games before being moved to Projects.
We already have tags for things like Twine and RPG Maker, tagging things as mods seems reasonable.
If anyone wants to know about new threads in General Games (or any other category for that matter), just go to the category page and click the notification bell (top-ish right).
In general, once a WG user starts developing a mod for a game, that becomes a project and is moved to the Projects category. It’s where “stuff invented here” goes. There’s already a “mod” tag for people to use.
Whole threads can be moved to other categories, but this tends to get done when its current location is incorrect, rather than “a bit iffy”, or at request of the OP.
To take the first of those as an example: “SO Call of Cthulhu”, it is a request for a rule set that no-one has come up with yet. So you could argue that while it is a “general game”, there is no weight gain aspect yet, and so it doesn’t fit in General Games. If someone were to post some home-brew rules, it makes more sense to move it. If they were a WG user and developing home-brew weight gain content for Call of Cthulhu it becomes a Project.
If something is in the wrong category, then Flagging it, choosing “Something else…” and explaining that it’s in the wrong category will get mod attention.
Since most posts in General Games ARE about mods, you’re better off renaming it to Other Games & Mods.
A user-end problem with this particular forum software that’s bugged me since D1 is how reliant it is on thread OPs using useful keyword tags. Without tags, navigating through a category for relevant stuff is impossible. Instead, you end up searching the entire forum using that function, chewing up additional bandwidth. case in point would be the many threads dedicated to The Sims 4 (and earlier Sims games) are spread around the place.
Even with changes to subcategories, we’re still going to get people making pointless new threads to say something inane or ask questions they shouldn’t feel compelled to ask - until either the system changes or a concerted effort is made to get people using these systems properly.
Sorry it took so long to get to this. Early spring is always rough for us as we have to get so much sorted for tax season and I am still behind on getting some things updated. Also, I will be making many of the same points that @dingotush already made.
You make some good points but General Games is mainly meant for mods or discussion of games that where produced without a fetish vision but contain some in it any way. For example games with character creators that allow you to make fairly large characters or games like Overlord 2 that had a fair amount of fat content in it.
Mods are a bit of an odd edge case though. In general if the mod is under development and the dev is the one making the post #projects is most appropriate, but if some one is simply trying to make others aware of a mod then #general-games might be the better location.
In the end there is a fair bit of general overlap and in the end we just try to make the best call we can.
To give some examples of how our reasoning works I will use your above examples.
Star Wars The Old Republic RolePlay Guild and other RP servers we do not really consider ‘games’ even if they make use of a game. They are more of a general community derived thing and we actually used to have a dedicated topic for them before the forum went down but they tended to lead people to RPing on the server which junked up the feed. Due to that we see these posts more as advertisements and encourage them to really only be casual discussions so we tend to leave them in #general-discussion.
SO Call of Cthulhu , Bitlife?, and someone have this pokemon hack rom are actually questions being asked by other members and not games themselves. Since they are not discussing anything that is known to be in existence or tied to a specific game its more or less seen as a general discussion and thus left in #general-discussion. An argument could be made that maybe Bitlife should be in #projects:ideas but there is not enough there to really constitute a well formed idea for a game or mod, just a general suggestion.
Friday Night Funkin Fat Girl Mod en proceso - You are right about this one and it has been moved to #general-games and tagged with mod.
The best that can be done is really just flag any topic you think is in the wrong category. Selecting Something else and then explaining why you think it is in the wrong category is probably the best way to go about it.