Death to Journals. Long Live Forums.

ok

Well, that was easy. Thanks.

I remember you mentioning the difference between journal and forums, and that you wanted forums to rule this universe. I think it would nice if you could offer to 86 some of our journals before they go to forum. Personally, some of my stuff wouldn't, and shouldn't translate to forum. I also understand your position on continuity, and hatred of deletion, so I can understand if this is not an option.

Also, I play guitar.

ghostrider: I think it would nice if you could offer to 86 some of our journals before they go to forum.

Mark it private, and it won't make the transition. If you've got a meepload, I could do it en masse for you if you like.

Personally, some of my stuff wouldn't, and shouldn't translate to forum.

This would seem to be an argument against removing the Journal concept. If so, tell me more. I'm not really able to find any meaningful distinction between what someone would post in a Journal and what someone would post in the forums, beyond "People clicking on a journal link should be more prepared to read something that turns out to be sad meep".

If there's no real distinction, then let's combine. If there is one, let's figure out what it is and see if we need to keep making it.

I also understand your position on continuity, and hatred of deletion, so I can understand if this is not an option.

Well, this is me changing the rules of the game a bit, so I think it's totally fair if you don't want your meep to make the jump. I don't necessarily agree that your stuff doesn't make sense as a forum, but that's your call.

now that you mention it:

is there a way to make any private journals from long-inactive users into a new thread in this new forums-only system?

i feel like if we're lucky there is a single one, but hey, you never know

I would prefer to see the Journals kept as a separate entity from the Forums, as they are less of a discussion about subject "X" and more a record of particular events in peoples lives and requests for advice on said particular, and usually traumatic, events.

Perhaps a change to make the default setting private, rather then public, would help to reduce the front page clutter (which is what I presume to be a major reason for this change) and may also encourage the use of them as diaries and somewhere for people to write about their lives and personal traumas, in a place where their kids, significant others etc. cannot find them. Any journal entry marked as public could then show up as a forum entry, perhaps in a thread catergorized as "Journals" or titled "Poor,Poor, Pitiful Me", (which is what most of them end up being about).

This may also encourage the use of them as a proofing ground for future forum topics (or dare I say it, articles of the kind once found on Megarad, and no doubt missed by some of the old-school members).

Oh, and I also think that "Ask/Tell is a stupid name, so you are not alone.

_{On 2010-08-16 at 08:57:27, dragonstaff asked to smell your meep}

Hosting private journals doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Don't you people have Notepad?
Also, Ask/Tell sounds really, really stupid and so should probably work out fine.

There are things in my journal that l never would have put into the forum. l suppose that is only because the journal was an option. If that option hadn't existed l probably just wouldn't have shared those things with linkswarm. l suppose this would be considered a good thing by some. l've always thought of my journal as something that belongs to me and the forum belonging to everyone. l suppose that in practice this is just a silly emotional rationalization as they both do pretty much the same thing... l guess the name 'journal' implies that it is, sort of, a 'safe zone' for personal thoughts, memories and feelings.

l completely understand why you would want to get rid of journals from a design standpoint. l can't really think of a valid argument to keep them when viewing their existence from that angle.

i see where you're coming from and agree with you totally. a journal entry functions much like a forum thread without all the nice formatting, parsing and handy tools a forum offers. if people feel like blogging thru linkswarm? lol get a livejournal.

DO IT meepGOT!

metatron: i see where you're coming from and agree with you totally. a journal entry functions much like a forum thread without all the nice formatting, parsing and handy tools a forum offers. if people feel like blogging thru linkswarm? lol get a livejournal. DO IT meepGOT!

i think ask/tell makes sense, i mean, it is what is going on. it just doesn't sound aesthetically pleasing to me.

you could always do some numbah one meep meep like make a checkbox that says 'this is mah journal' and then have a stylized 'my' preceeding the thread title. also, maybe an emo icon of some sort.

God save the Tonetta Tribute Page. My life is incomplete unless it's on top of the Journal block

I vote for Spew/Assrape

I missed the previous ask/tell discussion section... but get it...I'm either asking or telling something...

Show&Tell sounds nice haha... well maybe not... Will all new threads cease to have catagories??

If not why not make a forum called Journaling or somesuch and all Journal type threads can go into that catagory instead of General?

I think the main difference is that often peeps feel the desire to really discuss stuff in the forums and to more comment on peoples Journals rather than discussing opinion... those who want to post meep-eel pics will do so in any format...

Well that and Journals are usually longer and more well thought out sorta... which may throw a wrench in for style... So imagine if the first post of a thread in the forums was like a page long about someone telling a story... how would that look with everyone commenting after??

At the same time, if you do that new (I am coming back to the thread I have already read and it brings me to the point I left off this may all be Totes Awesome Sause...

Am I making points here or laying out my internal garbage processing?? Not sure.

OK, so apparently it took me two weeks to process this meep while I was working on the new site. Sorry for the delay, gents. For your troubles, here's a sneak peek, still quite rough in spots, of what I spent this weekend working on.

dragonstaff: I would prefer to see the Journals kept as a separate entity from the Forums, as they are less of a discussion about subject "X" and more a record of particular events in peoples lives and requests for advice on said particular, and usually traumatic, events.

I can see the distinction you're using here. I like your idea of replicating this via a special category (tag) that basically said "emo meep inside".

Perhaps a change to make the default setting private, rather then public, would help to reduce the front page clutter (which is what I presume to be a major reason for this change) and may also encourage the use of them as diaries and somewhere for people to write about their lives and personal traumas, in a place where their kids, significant others etc. cannot find them.

Good idea. I was working toward this conclusion too. I've been envisioning a checkbox that you get when posting a new forum that says "Keep this private". If you leave it checked, you've just created something only you can see. Doesn't matter how you tag it, but maybe you'll tag it with the "emo meep inside" tag just for your own purposes.

If you don't choose to Keep Private, your entry will run the gamut of the Alpha Queue like any link. This keeps control over what makes the front page.

A side-effect, and one that I hope will be good, is that the Alphas will thusly get link-voting control over all public forums posted. That is, all forums visible on the front page will have an approval history showing Alphas and admins voting it through.

If that turns out to have a 'chilling effect' on good forums (i.e., our standards as a group of voters are too high), we can always change the must-pass-the-Alpha-Queue requirement to determine whether the link hit the front page. If your forum didn't pass muster, there'd be a /forums sub-page with your forum on it, along with all other non-private forums.

In this scenario, for the purposes of what goes into the forums, the Alpha Queue would act not as 'approve/reject', but rather 'front page/forums-only page'. Good forums get promoted to the front page, basically.

Wotak: There are things in my journal that l never would have put into the forum. l suppose that is only because the journal was an option. If that option hadn't existed l probably just wouldn't have shared those things with linkswarm. l suppose this would be considered a good thing by some. l've always thought of my journal as something that belongs to me and the forum belonging to everyone. l suppose that in practice this is just a silly emotional rationalization as they both do pretty much the same thing... l guess the name 'journal' implies that it is, sort of, a 'safe zone' for personal thoughts, memories and feelings. l completely understand why you would want to get rid of journals from a design standpoint. l can't really think of a valid argument to keep them when viewing their existence from that angle.

It's surprising this works the way it does, since it's exactly the same as the forums. I guess it's a question of setting expectations for how people interact with your meep. If we can do it with the word 'journal', I'd like to think we could do it with a 'Journal' tag that let a forum thread advertise itself as journally without being otherwise any different.

Stool: If not why not make a forum called Journaling or somesuch and all Journal type threads can go into that catagory instead of General?

Stool, I think you were drunk when you posted this, but still, it looks like we're all converging on the same idea: make Journals a sub-flavor of Forums. This is easy, sensible, and good.