Some Suggestions For This Forum

[NYCFCFan10]

#1: Less is more. Fewer sub-forums.

We need less sub-forums. Less categories encourages more posting. For example, there's no need for the "other sports" category as its moving really slow. That can be rolled into the off-topic category. This will increase views of those topics and raise the chance of someone posting in them that might not have taken the time to go into the "other sports" category otherwise. "Official threads" or pinned topics will serve the same purpose but streamline everything.

I would think maybe having a NYCFC section with team news and a supporters sub-forums. An American Soccer sub-forum that would handle USMNT and MLS talk. Lastly, a World Football sub-forum that would be everything else. Though, honestly, I think a NYCFC section and just a plain "Soccer" section would be more than enough.

The increase in posting attracts more posters. Less sub-forums will not only create the appearance of more posting, it will actually create more posting. This is good for the forum.

#2: More is more. More emoticons!

Variety is the spice of life. I have emoticons that I would suggest ready to go here:
http://nycfcforums.com/index.php?threads/can-we-add-some-emoticons.321/

 

[413Blue]

I agree, especially now, we do not need so many forums.

 

[NYCFC_Dan]

Don't think I'm disregarding your suggestions, I'm just getting suggestions that go against each other and I can only go 1 way or do nothing at all.
I've streamlined the front page and taken 2 categories out and about 6 forums. Some deleted and other combined into sub-forums.
I was suggested to streamline the front page, which I did so yes, we have subforums now and only 2. Both of them being in the NYCFC Discussion forum. One because I was suggested to make a section separate for songs/chants and the other I made to hopefully encourage people to meet up and start creating a presence in the bars.
I'll get rid of that one as the supporter faction forum has taken over in that aspect of things.
I'm not counting the link forum that takes people to the FB page under Supporters Group and there is an MLS 101 but that one was also suggested.

With the NYCFC section I have to respectfully disagree. Our most active forum is NYCFC Supporters Hub so I don't want to make that one that much harder to find by making it a sub forum. This is an NYCFC site so having only 2 sections for NYCFC discussion would kind of take away from that.
I would agree on contracting the other sections but the last thing I want to do is simplify the NYCFC aspect of our site.
That's why I moved it to the top of the forums.
The supporters faction one is really gaining tracking after just a few days and is just one of those things that will get people talking to each other and meeting up. That's the main purpose of this forum. Getting people within the boroughs and outside areas to socialize and meet outside of just NYCFC SG meetings so come 2015 we aren't strangers.

I'll work on streamlining the other sections. I do like an MLS Section and EPL separate as they are active. Perhaps we can do those 2 and then a third one being General Football which would include discussion about other leagues, international and general football stuff.
That would cut things down considerably.

I just feel as we get more and more active I'll end up having to re-separate everything again as section such as general football would at some point require individual sections. I'm more or less just planning for the future but you are right that RIGHT NOW we do have inactive sections.
I'll work on this tomorrow after work.

Lol I'll look into how to add additional emoticons.

 

[MyBoyVilla]

I agree with NYCFCFan10 on this. Personally, I would like to see:

NYCFC Discussion
-Team News and Rumors (subforum: Fantasy Team)
-NYCFC Supporters Den (subforums: To The Pub We Go; NYCFC Songs & Chants; Supporter Factions)
-NYCFC Supporters Group (subforum: Unofficial NYCFC Supporters Group)

General Footy
-Football Discussion
-Major League Soccer
-English Premier League
-Other Club Competitions/Leagues
-International Football

For The People
-Introductions
-Forum Competitions
-Off-Topic
-The Warzone

Front Office
-Forum News
-Support Desk

To summarize the suggested changes:

1. Put all the soccer stuff together. NYCFC Talk should be next to General Footy/League Talk. No need to stick Welcome Desk and Forum Competitions in between. People come here for soccer talk primarily, it should be up top.

2. Combine the League Talk and General Footy. Once we are condensing that section, combine the Other Leagues forum with Club Competitions forum, not a ton of volume on either of those.

3. Fantasy voting was a cool idea but not worth its own forum, stick it in a sub forum in the Team News and Rumors section.

4. Supporters Factions should also be a sub-forum rather than its own forum, under NYCFC Supporters Den, along with Songs and Pubs. Fits perfectly with the theme of those other two.

5. Combine Welcome Desk with Forum Competitions. Then condense the two competition forums into one forum, no need to separate general competitions from Season Ticket competitions. Also condense Off-Topic and Other Sports.

Final Result: 4 categories, 14 forums.
Instead of: 6 categories, 19 forums (not including advertisement for MCFC Forum)

Could probably use even more condensing than that, but it is a start. No reason to have 4 pages worth of scrolling on a home page. Also, with my suggestion you get all the soccer forums within 1.5 pages of the top. Now, the lowest football forum (Club Competitions) is literally 3 pages down.

Feel free to use or ignore any of the suggestions. Hopefully some other guys chime in with their thoughts so we can get a consensus from the members, allowing the admins to make the change.

 

[einwindir]

I agree with NYCFCFan10 on this. Personally, I would like to see:

NYCFC Discussion
-Team News and Rumors (subforum: Fantasy Team)
-NYCFC Supporters Den (subforums: To The Pub We Go; NYCFC Songs & Chants; Supporter Factions)
-NYCFC Supporters Group (subforum: Unofficial NYCFC Supporters Group)

General Footy
-Football Discussion
-Major League Soccer
-English Premier League
-Other Club Competitions/Leagues
-International Football

For The People
-Introductions
-Forum Competitions
-Off-Topic
-The Warzone

Front Office
-Forum News
-Support Desk

To summarize the suggested changes:

1. Put all the soccer stuff together. NYCFC Talk should be next to General Footy/League Talk. No need to stick Welcome Desk and Forum Competitions in between. People come here for soccer talk primarily, it should be up top.

2. Combine the League Talk and General Footy. Once we are condensing that section, combine the Other Leagues forum with Club Competitions forum, not a ton of volume on either of those.

3. Fantasy voting was a cool idea but not worth its own forum, stick it in a sub forum in the Team News and Rumors section.

4. Supporters Factions should also be a sub-forum rather than its own forum, under NYCFC Supporters Den, along with Songs and Pubs. Fits perfectly with the theme of those other two.

5. Combine Welcome Desk with Forum Competitions. Then condense the two competition forums into one forum, no need to separate general competitions from Season Ticket competitions. Also condense Off-Topic and Other Sports.

Final Result: 4 categories, 14 forums.
Instead of: 6 categories, 19 forums (not including advertisement for MCFC Forum)

Could probably use even more condensing than that, but it is a start. No reason to have 4 pages worth of scrolling on a home page. Also, with my suggestion you get all the soccer forums within 1.5 pages of the top. Now, the lowest football forum (Club Competitions) is literally 3 pages down.

Feel free to use or ignore any of the suggestions. Hopefully some other guys chime in with their thoughts so we can get a consensus from the members, allowing the admins to make the change.

I think this is a pretty good place to start.

 

[MyBoyVilla]

As an aside, I think there are way too many threads to keep track of. Part of that is because when the structure is Section -> Forum -> Thread , you end up with more specific thread topics than if you just have Section -> Thread.

For example, in the English Premier League Section, of the 14 threads, 6 are match-day commentary, 4 are league news, 3 are opinion, and 1 is who will win the league.

If you just have a section called Other Football, likely you end up with fewer threads that are more general. If you are already in EPL Forum, you are going to want to be more specific than Match Day Discussion, so for every game you create a new thread. But if it is just an Other Football Forum, you are more likely to create a thread called Match Day Discussion, and instead of having to follow 6 threads with no more than 25 replies that become obsolete every week, you only have to follow 1 that only becomes obsolete every season, and has around 100 replies.

This change is a bit more radical and I am basing it off another Forum for Tottenham (thefightingcock.co.uk) that only has 2 football sections (Tottenham, Other Football). I do not think they have the range of topics that we do since their league is the focus (i.e. we talk about EPL, they do not talk about MLS).

But if we were to adopt that, we could have, based on the suggestions in my previous post:

NYCFC Section and 3 Forums (i.e. as is)

General Footy with no Forums (add a subforum for each of MLS and USMNT)

For The People, with no Forums (Pin a thread for each of Intros and Competitions)

Front Office

 

[MyBoyVilla]

Once I brought up the idea of pinning tabs, another suggestion hit me. There is really no reason for a Songs and Chants Forum or Sub-forum. Just pin one thread, Song and Chant Ideas. It is absolutely moronic that there 39 threads in that Sub-forum with just 4 of them having double-digit replies. We don't need every genius who thinks he came up with the best song ever to post a whole new thread for each of the 12 songs he made up that day. The most success we had in discussing, creating, and organizing songs was in the Ideas For Songs & Chants Thread. I checked it every day, looked at the ideas, commented and suggested and improved. But now, if you think I am opening all 39 different threads to see suggestions that could have all been on one page, you are mistaken.

Now that I think about it, off all the things that could be changed, this is #1 by far. Holy crap that forum has gone to hell.

 

[einwindir]

Once I brought up the idea of pinning tabs, another suggestion hit me. There is really no reason for a Songs and Chants Forum or Sub-forum. Just pin one thread, Song and Chant Ideas. It is absolutely moronic that there 39 threads in that Sub-forum with just 4 of them having double-digit replies. We don't need every genius who thinks he came up with the best song ever to post a whole new thread for each of the 12 songs he made up that day. The most success we had in discussing, creating, and organizing songs was in the Ideas For Songs & Chants Thread. I checked it every day, looked at the ideas, commented and suggested and improved. But now, if you think I am opening all 39 different threads to see suggestions that could have all been on one page, you are mistaken.

Now that I think about it, off all the things that could be changed, this is #1 by far. Holy crap that forum has gone to hell.

I don't mind them being set apart. Of course it's cleaner having one Songs/Chants thread but you then open the door to a lot of confusion. If everyone abides by internet forum etiquette it would work. When people start commenting without properly tagging a replying you have a clusterfuck and it becomes exceedinglt difficult to manage the thread. Especially with a thread that was that busy. It was very helpful when you made the spreadsheet with all the suggestions, but we shouldn't have to rely on users to do stuff like that.

You are right though a lot of quality submissions will be glossed over because some people may take advantage of the ease of posting and end up oversaturating the frongtpage.

 

[MyBoyVilla]

I don't mind them being set apart. Of course it's cleaner having one Songs/Chants thread but you then open the door to a lot of confusion. If everyone abides by internet forum etiquette it would work. When people start commenting without properly tagging a replying you have a clusterfuck and it becomes exceedinglt difficult to manage the thread. Especially with a thread that was that busy. It was very helpful when you made the spreadsheet with all the suggestions, but we shouldn't have to rely on users to do stuff like that.

You are right though a lot of quality submissions will be glossed over because some people may take advantage of the ease of posting and end up oversaturating the frongtpage.

I think that thread was great. I mean, if you are trying to compile an official list of songs, it is too messy. But to throw out ideas, have them accepted, rejected, changed, and discussed, that was a perfect thread.

When the forum/supporters want to go ahead and create a preliminary list of songs, they can manage to go through the thread for a few minutes and put it together. In fact, that is probably easier than having to keep opening and backing out of threads for each new song, instead of having 10-15 on a page.

 

[Section1Guy]

I think that thread was great. I mean, if you are trying to compile an official list of songs, it is too messy. But to throw out ideas, have them accepted, rejected, changed, and discussed, that was a perfect thread.

When the forum/supporters want to go ahead and create a preliminary list of songs, they can manage to go through the thread for a few minutes and put it together. In fact, that is probably easier than having to keep opening and backing out of threads for each new song, instead of having 10-15 on a page.

Especially when the thread is like a three line chant that doesn't reference the beat, pace, etc... Impossible to know if its any good besides the words.

 

[MyBoyVilla]

Especially when the thread is like a three line chant that doesn't reference the beat, pace, etc... Impossible to know if its any good besides the words.

Exactly. Like:

Yes we really want to hurt you!
Yes we really want to make you cry!
New York really wants to hurt you!
New York really wants to make you cry!

Anyone got more to continue it?

WTF am I supposed to reply to this.

The fact that only 4 of 39 threads have double-digit replies speaks for itself. This is a website for discussion, not everybody posting an idea and moving on.

 

[Section1Guy]

Exactly. Like:

Yes we really want to hurt you!
Yes we really want to make you cry!
New York really wants to hurt you!
New York really wants to make you cry!

Anyone got more to continue it?

WTF am I supposed to reply to this.

The fact that only 4 of 39 threads have double-digit replies speaks for itself. This is a website for discussion, not everybody posting an idea and moving on.

bahahaha.... That's Culture Club!! hahahahaha

 

[MyBoyVilla]

bahahaha.... That's Culture Club!! hahahahaha

See, a video would have been nice. And if someone posted that in the Songs/Chants Idea Thread, I guarantee that someone else would have asked WTF IS THE TUNE, and someone else would have posted the video, and maybe its a great idea and we all like the post and when we go back in a few months, it really stands out, and we adopt it.

Instead, I just looked at it, thought WTF?? and moved on.

 

[NYCFCFan10]

I think we're disagreeing on terminology.

Here's what I think we should have:

NYCFC Discussion
-Team News and Rumors (subforum: Fantasy Team)
-NYCFC Supporters Den (subforums: To The Pub We Go; NYCFC Songs & Chants; Supporter Factions)

General Footy
-Other Football/Soccer Discussion

For The People
-Introductions
-Forum Competitions
-Off-Topic
-The Warzone

Front Office
-Forum News
-Support Desk

I think the cross-pollination of the football/soccer discussions will be great for this place.

 

[MyBoyVilla]

I think we're disagreeing on terminology.

Here's what I think we should have:

NYCFC Discussion
-Team News and Rumors (subforum: Fantasy Team)
-NYCFC Supporters Den (subforums: To The Pub We Go; NYCFC Songs & Chants; Supporter Factions)

General Footy
-Other Football/Soccer Discussion

For The People
-Introductions
-Forum Competitions
-Off-Topic
-The Warzone

Front Office
-Forum News
-Support Desk

I think the cross-pollination of the football/soccer discussions will be great for this place.

Like I said in my later post, I think putting all the football into one forum is also a good idea, albeit a more radical change from how it is now. It would force the members to have more general threads and therefore much better discussion.

 

[NYCFCFan10]

Like I said in my later post, I think putting all the football into one forum is also a good idea, albeit a more radical change from how it is now. It would force the members to have more general threads and therefore much better discussion.

Yeah, well, I don't really see what a full forum (or sub-forum as I refer to it as) dedicated to MLS or EPL achieves that an "official MLS thread" and "official EPL thread" wouldn't accomplish.

Plus, having the international conversation in there means people are more likely to see things and comment on things that they weren't with them being tucked away in separate forums. Its just easier to navigate and see everything.

 

[NYCFC_Dan]

I appreciate the suggestions.
I'm off to work now but I'll try to clean it up when I get home.
Honestly, i don't want to touch the NYCFC section. I don't see anything wrong with it. We can go back to the Songs and Chants sticky topic but other then that I don't see a need to change something which is functioning properly.
I'll make a separate one for Changs and Anthem.
I'll condense Football talk but MLS keeps it's own. We are in the MLS and that needs to be respected and is a fairly active forum.
Off to work can't type much right now.

 

[MyBoyVilla]

I appreciate the suggestions.
I'm off to work now but I'll try to clean it up when I get home.
Honestly, i don't want to touch the NYCFC section. I don't see anything wrong with it. We can go back to the Songs and Chants sticky topic but other then that I don't see a need to change something which is functioning properly.
I'll make a separate one for Changs and Anthem.
I'll condense Football talk but MLS keeps it's own. We are in the MLS and that needs to be respected and is a fairly active forum.
Off to work can't type much right now.

At the end of the day, it is your decision, Dan. We are not criticizing your work, the forums are great as they are now. Just making some suggestion that in our humble opinions would make it better. Keep up the good work.

 

[413Blue]

It's not easy that's for sure. For now, as the forum and the club is growing, it's better to have fewer forums for now until the traffic warrants spreading it about. However, I think it would be best to just stand pat for a couple of months and then make a change based on what develops. That's better than making changes regularly on the fly and confusing people!

 

[MyBoyVilla]

This new MLS Feeds is really going to clutter the New Posts section, which I generally use to see where discussions are happening.