Forum updates, new categories, and dealing with off-topic topics 📢

Announcements
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Hey, I’m back from vacation and it seemed like some forum updates were overdue, so I made some tweaks to hopefully appease the various factions assembling behind the banners of Order and Anarchy.

Thanks @Mhx_Air especially for keeping things tidy while I was out traipsing around Florida with my family.

Anyway, the first thing I did was clean up the categories to try and make them a bit more useful, and to help clarify what threads should go where. They got some new names and descriptions:

How To has become Help Requests to make it obvious that this is the place to ask for help

Reviews has become Game Reviews & Feedback - this is the place to leave reviews, ask for reviews, or ask for or leave feedback on games

Play My Game* has become Game Updates & Announcements - Lots of people like posting about (and reading about) the ongoing development of the various games, so that goes here

Something(?) became Examples & Tutorials. I forgot what it was before, but now this is the place to share logic, bundles, techniques, explanations, etc

Bugs became Bug Reports to make it clear that this is for Flowlab bugs, not game bugs.

Art, Sounds & Music and Feature Requests are mostly the same, just with updated descriptions

The big new category:

Community Lounge

Discuss game development, swap stories, share your game related content, hopes, dreams, etc.

This is where the notorious OTC will live, along with anything else that doesn’t fit cleanly into the categories above.

This category is Muted By Default for everyone. What this means is:

  • On the categories page, it shows in the “Muted” section at the bottom
  • Topics in this category (and the category itself) will not show up for people not logged in (e.g. casual users, folks just looking around)
  • Anyone who is logged in can go visit this category to see the topics, and unmute it if they want the topics to show up in their feeds like Latest

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Click the bell and select “normal” if you want the Community Lounge to just be a normal part of the forum for you.

If you don’t like to see off-topic chatter, you don’t have to do anything and everything should be good to go.

Going forward:

If you make an off-topic thread outside of the the Community Lounge it will be deleted. On the other hand - If you see off topic threads in the Community Lounge, please do not flag them as off-topic, since off-topic is on-topic here :smiley:

Thanks everyone who had feedback, and please let me know if you have feedback on the new plan.

P.S.
I also planned to change the forum home page from the current tab (Latest) to the Categories list: Flowlab Community - Flowlab.io game dev forum

But I haven’t pulled the trigger on that change yet.

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I had just noticed that some of the sections had changed names, since I don’t keep it on latest. This is actually probably the best way to go about this. It’s hidden to lurkers, but brand new members can still interact if they choose to. Users that don’t like off-topic will not see off-topic outside of the off-topic section, and the off-topic section can stay muted if they don’t want to know about it at all. This will likely appeal to everyone.

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I like this approach. Sounds like it’s perfect for everyone. Thanks for taking the time :slight_smile:

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This is very cool. the new names are definitely more clear. but I had a bunch of topics in “general” though that I need to change to something else now that it’s been changed to “community lounge” I’d better get to work! might just change them to “uncategorized”

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“Uncategorized” is no longer an option. If you have some stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere else, let me know. It’s possible that we need an additional category beyond what we already have, so I can add one if it makes sense.

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This is fantastic grazer, thanks for sorting this out

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This is a wonderful solution that I think will satisfy all parties. Great job keeping the peace to both @Mhx_Air and @grazer!

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Thanks for taking the time @grazer, it really needed to be sorted out :slight_smile:

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This is a good compromise, and as well make a lot of things neat & tidy. The forum is a lot more easier to users new and old to get around.

Also I like the list idea, it wont be obvious for recent posts but will help separate the posts from being pushed down from the top. Also it will help become a forum like area than a social media, in which I can still keep track of help request posts that are a few days old.

Now I just need to update my old topics from howto (which is now help request) to Examples & Tutorials lol.

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I like the list idea mostly because I’m used to it from other discourse forums (like the Roblox Dev. Forum and the Aseprite Community Forum)

And obviously, you can still change what you see when you start up the forum page in the settings.

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Hey this is new… (a new message I mean)

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Except I have no more trust levels to earn-

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I may have missed some, but I did a lot of this already.

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Also new reply outlines in private messages, cool!

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Oh I didn’t realize, Thanks @grazer!
I’ll go over all my other stuff later.

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I look that,its like so cool. :ok_hand:

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I think “something(?)” was game design because that’s the category I’m not seeing.

Anyway, this was a much needed forum revamp, so great job! I like it a lot.

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oh wow nice job with this new layout! I just got back from holiday and i was like -this is flowlab forums right? Hehe love the new look grazer.

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You have to be logged in…

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