ばか！バカ！　馬鹿ー月！

Community Project: Clean Up Forums and Restructure Forum Boards!
This is one of cloudii's goals for Baka-Tsuki in Summer 2014

• We will decide on a new board structure, so it's easier for members to know where to post questions, etc.

• Cloudii (along with anyone who wants to help) will start moving threads that were posted in the wrong boards to the appropriate boards. We'll also merge multiple threads that have the same topic.

• In this thread, we will not talk about user group privileges. Talk about it somewhere else. ;D

Current Consensus Forum Structure:

• {need to discuss!}

Why do this?

• Reorganizing the forums was on the to-do list on Misogi's "Inaction Has Lasted Long Enough." However, it was never addressed. We're going to address this now. ;D
  
  Why should we remake the board structure for the forums? First of all, I'm kind of tired seeing questions, suggestions, and posts showing up and cluttering the wrong boards. We don't have a clearly-cut "Put Your Questions Here" board, which is largely the reason for most of our mess. Also, I know that many members also wanted to reorganize the way the projects are grouped in the main content area. This is the right place to discuss this. :3
  
  Once we pretty much reach a consensus we're satisfied with, I'll start bothering the right people and hopefully we can get the changes implemented. <3

My Suggestion:

==BAKA-TSUKI==
- Baka-Tsuki Rules & Conventions = Unified Format Guidelines
- Announcements = News
- Administrative Forum (SECRET!)
----> Internal Administrative Policies
- Feedback and Suggestions = Forum/Wiki Feedback
- Help Forum

==LN COMMUNITY==
- Future Project Suggestions
- Lingua Franca Lexicon
- Alternative Language Forum
- External Hosted Light Novels

==TRANSLATION PROJECTS==
- All Projects
----> {List of Featured Projects as sub boards}
----> Everything else gets tossed in the main board AnimeSuki style
- Completed Projects
- Abandoned Projects
- PDFs, MOBI, and EPUBs

==GENERAL==
- Commune
- Animes
- Games & Computing
- Manga & Light Novel
- Music & Culture

==SPECIAL==
- Original Light Novels
- Archives
- Other weird random boards

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I'm approaching this by wondering, what's the best board to put the following threads?

• The most popular project toplist
• Enlistment! Dedicated Project wide Editors wanted
• Looking for an editor (and the billions of variations of these)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You'll also notice that my major suggestions are to do away with the teaser feedback sub-board. I strongly favor just one board to lump everything into. It's what animesuki does, and I think it just makes more sense that way. I also suggest replacing the concept of "Hosted Projects" with a general board to discuss light novels that aren't physically posted on Baka-Tsuki. The boundary between "hosted project" and non-hosted is too thin.

I'm OK with these suggestions.

Maybe Commune/Introduce yourself?

I like the layout as well.

Enlistment! Dedicated Project wide Editors wanted
Looking for an editor (and the billions of variations of these)

I take it that you don't want to put these under Lingua Franca Lexicon?

We could go the extra mile and make a sub forum for editors if we want to screen them or maintain a certain level of standard among editors. I mean this for dedicated editors or the project staff is looking for a specific quality in an editor or proofreaders.

Some modifications on my previous layout.

==BAKA-TSUKI==
- Rules & Conventions (= Unified Format Guidelines, locked with a reduced number of easy-to-understand threads)
- Announcements (= News, has the "most popular project" thread)
- Administrative Zone (Secret, policies set as sticky)
- General Help (= Half of Forum/Wiki Feedback, related to BT's way of working and organized in Q&A, with a FAQ for recurrent questions)
- Technical Feedback (= Half of Forum/Wiki Feedback, technical issues and BakaReader EX)

==LN COMMUNITY==
- LN Universe (= Half of the Manga & LN sub-forum, allowing us to discuss more general subjects and future releases)
- Project Suggestions (Removed the Future part, implying that the projects will be always started)
- Translation Assistance (= Lingua Franca Lexicon, aside that its role is extended to Editor recruitment)
- Alternative Languages (No changes on its structure, but general guidelines can be linked in the Rules & Conventions sub-forum)
- Audio Recordings
- External Translations

==ENGLISH PROJECTS==
- Available Projects (Featured projects as sub boards, the rest is tossed in the main board)
- Completed Projects
- Abandoned Projects
- Digital Releases (Less leecher-friendly, should have a link to the Technical Feedback sub-forum in a sticky thread)

==GENERAL==
- Commune
- Manga & Anime (Merged the two together, moved the LN part in the LN Community section)
- Games & Computing
- Music & Culture

==SPECIAL==
- Creative Works
- Other Boards

Edit: I believe all items listed in this thread are now resolved (likely still a few more scattered in the forum not listed here).
----

I kind of like the current system where full projects (Aux) and teasers (Teasers) are split, because I have to scan through less threads to find the one I want (I usually know if it’s a teaser or full). But I’d probably be able to get used to a combined “all projects,” particularly if we make an effort to be a little more thorough in linking the forum thread from the wiki project page, meaning I can navigate on the wiki to find the forum thread reliably. So whatever, on to the meat of my post.


I went through and made a list of threads that I think could use some forum housekeeping; it’s possible some would disagree with my suggested method of handling a few of the categories. As someone in the editor user group, I could accomplish much of this with the moving ‘posts’ functions, but that’s a round about way of doing it that would also break some links. I think higher level mods should have “move topic” (and “lock topic”), which would be a better way.

I also highly doubt I caught everything in the forums, but this is probably a good chunk of it.

Move to Teasers from FPS
These are threads that have a teaser page on the wiki, but are still in Future Project Suggestions. Move to Teasers from Aux
These are project that got downgraded from full projects for not having one full volume, so I’d say they should be moved to Teasers. I suppose this is less important if the proposed reorganization goes through. In Teaser subforum, but no teaser page (suggested move to FPS)
From my understanding, after the policy changes this year, the Teaser subforum should be reserved for projects in the teaser category on the wiki. But I was one of the people pushing for that change, so I might be selectively remembering a consensus that wasn’t really there. Move to OLN Move to either Aux Brigades or Hosted
Hosted projects are annoying for categorizing... There are some other duplicate (hosted and non-hosted versions) threads I ignored in the below section because I don’t think we have a clear standard. Move to Abandoned Duplicates (across and within subforums)
These are duplicate thread for the same series, mostly across subforums, a few within a single subforum. I would guess the easiest way to handle these would be to just lock the older thread. Or in some cases, one of the threads only has 1 or a few posts (typically a newly created Teaser thread), and for those I’d say it would be best to delete/merge the thread with 1 post and move the other to the appropriate subforum (usually FPS to Teaser), though that might create some broken links on the wiki depending on how it’s done. Change title
This is thread title is in moon runes, which is useless for most forum users. I believe it was done that way because both the romanji and English titles are too long, but I think it’d be better to use however much fits of the one of those two and end it with an ellipsis. (actually I could do this one myself, but I'll see if anyone objects)

...so many stuff to move.

Minor suggestion if the general structure doesn't change too much: moving Auxiliary Brigades above the specific project subforums so that it takes less scrolling through thumbnails to reach the majority of the series threads.

There seems to be a push to convert to the AS style of the sub-boards being at the same level as individual threads within Aux Brigades; and that would make my suggestion not feasible/relevant anymore.

Moved pretty much everything.

Took one glance at the duplicates list and decided I was too lazy to do anything about them. xD

I also didn't change the title 'cause I was lazy.

Thanks cloud. Now that I figured out I was looking at the wrong moderator control panel, I can do things myself too. So I've started working on the duplicates; a little over halfway done right now, and I'll probably come back to it later.

Edit: Finished with the duplicates and chose to rename the one thread.

Edit2: I went through the threads in a more structured way (alphabetizing a list of all threads from all the main forums), so I got most of the duplicates. My motivation did start to run out towards the end, so I never bothered looking up the threads for the following possible duplicate threads, if someone else wants to find, check, and merge if necessary.
Also, I didn't bother looking if this issue has been discussed elsewhere, but the Kara no Kyokai subforum is in Abandoned, even though the project has been restarted.

Bringing this up again. I have clearance to restructure the forum boards. Any comments or suggestions should go in this thread.

I think some of the new board structure might be a little too deep, by which I mean more subforums than necessary. We don't really have all that much activity right now, so the extra segregation of threads probably isn't as important.

So I do think many of them can be removed, but if still keeping the subforums, at least I think the actively used threads should be in the topmost forum; an example is the "I am flagged as a spambot" thread should be in "General Help" rather than General Help's subforum "Bug Reports and Technical Help." I spent a few minutes trying to find it, and that one in particular should be the first thing an unfamiliar user can find.

Cthaeh wrote:I think some of the new board structure might be a little too deep, by which I mean more subforums than necessary. We don't really have all that much activity right now, so the extra segregation of threads probably isn't as important.

So I do think many of them can be removed, but if still keeping the subforums, at least I think the actively used threads should be in the topmost forum; an example is the "I am flagged as a spambot" thread should be in "General Help" rather than General Help's subforum "Bug Reports and Technical Help." I spent a few minutes trying to find it, and that one in particular should be the first thing an unfamiliar user can find.

Will get to this later. But yes, I see what you mean. Can probably toss out most of the extra subforums.