POSSIBLE CHANGES TO BOBA FETT FORUMS

[Art Andrews]

Over the years we have slowly streamlined the Boba Fett forums found in this site. If I recall correctly, we originally had 7 or 8 forums just for Boba Fett, but we have slowly combined the less active forums, grouping those items together and condensing the content. We are preparing to do this again!

What has prompted this move? Several factors have come into play; primarily the realization that while we have forums for different parts of Boba Fett's costume, we dont' have a forum for Boba Fett as a whole. Threads regarding Boba Fett's complete costume usually end up being posted in the Sarlacc Pitt because members do not know where else to post them. We would like to correct that problem by creating a general Boba Fett forum. However, we do not simply want to add another forum as we have worked very hard to keep TDH from becoming an unwieldy beast with dozens of forums in it. With that in mind, our current plan is to create a General Boba Fett Forum and merge the Jet Pack, Blaster, and Shin tools forum into is, and possibly also merge the Soft Parts forum into it as well. Looking at statistics, we believe Helmet and Armor are still popular enough to stand on their own (we are NOT prepared to merge all of the Boba Fett topics into a single forum at this point).

In addition, we feel that as the Wiki becomes more populated with information, the forums themselves will be less important and will be able to be more condensed.

It is unusual for us to announce something like this before we have completely decided how we want to implement it, but we are doing so for two reasons:
1) So you, our members won't be surprised when the change comes.
2) So you can give your thoughts and input on this change.

As always, we will ultimately make the final decision on what is to be done, but we would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Some may feel that this is a bad move simply because we are not giving Boba Fett the dominating position he once held here at TDH. This is not entirely true. TDH will always be first and foremost about Boba Fett and we expect to have a huge injection of Boba Fett interest thanks to Fett's expected inclusion in the upcoming live action series. However, we are growing and spreading our wings a bit and this means we do have to make room for other interests, such as the Expanded Universe Bounty Hunters and the Star Wars Characters forums, both of which have been a huge success!

 

[KaanE]

It doesn't look bad at all, maybe the best option is use the new system some time and see if it works well.

:cheers

 

[suspect86]

I'm not so sure exactly what condensing will solve.
I wasn't very excited when you put rocket pack and shin tools in the same forum.
One of my favorite things about this forum is the specific separation of each category. It makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for.
If I want to find something related to blaster, I look in the "blasters setion" not the "general Boba Fett section" That could take days of flipping through all of the posts.
If we need more room for EU character then give them another box in the menu.
Don't take away from the biggest draw this site has. Boba Fett. After all, he's the reason I'm here in the first place(no offense to Jango and Zam fans).

my 2 cents

 

[never ending fett]

Something that might help is a direct intigration between the wiki and the forums. I am no expert on the setup and use of wikis. I look stuff up on wikipedia all the time and so far love the wiki here, that's about the extent of my knowledge of them. That said, I don't know how well it would work but from what I can tell now the "discussion" portion of the wiki isn't being utilized, maybe clicking to the discussion tab in the wiki would open a list of threads directly related to the topic; some of those threads would be the pre existing ones, other topics may not have any pre existing threads. Eventually the best and only way to find a thread on a topic would be through the wiki. I think this would/could do 2 things 1, cut down on the amount of times the same questions and topics get discussed and 2 (definatatly a bad thing) possibly eliminate the open discussion of topics believed to be "settled" (like the ESB sidearm which was only recently updated but was previously "settled" at least for most)

This is me thinking out loud; take it at that, brainstorming. It takes lots of bad ideas to get to the good ones, maybe someone with more wiki experience can take this and run with it or take it in a different but related direction.


I understand "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and this might apply here, but as long as this forum has been around there is alot of great knowledge that gets burried under redundant and off topic threads so maybe it isn't broken, but it can be better and I applaude the folks in charge for their vision of continually making this the best resource and community it possibly can be.

I agree with Suspect86 in that there needs to be some sort of separation for the ease of finding stuff, but how it's separated doesn't have to be the form that it is now.

 

[KaanE]

Well, now that I have read the suspect86 post, I agree him. So maybe the best option is to do a new forum on the Boba Fett part like "Completed Costumes" or something like this so the people can put his thread there, and it can be a nice forum with a lot of pics of finished costumes.

 

[stormtrooperguy]

On the wiki note... the integration couldn't be tighter. The wiki is actually a full on part of the forum. This is good and bad sometimes... For example, the "discussion" link at the bottom is really just a shortcut to post replies to the wiki articles. It can't be a link to other discussions, only a discussion unto itself.

With the way that we have the wiki set up now, that wouldn't actually be a good thing. The idea of the wiki section is that it will be a reference library, not a place for conversation. To that end, I've actually disabled the Discussion button for the time being, until I can talk it over with The Dent.

Overall, the idea has always been that we don't want people to move away from discussing things on the board. We just want the wiki to be a nicely indexed collection of all the best information the board has to offer.

So 25 pages of ESB sidearm discussion can become a single amazingly informative paragraph in the wiki

 

[Art Andrews]

Another option would be to use nested forums, like is being used here in the Announcements and Support Forum. When you click on the announcements and support forum, you find that not only is there content within that forum, but there is actually another entire forum, the introductions forum, inside! With Boba Fett, from the main board you would see a single forum, "Boba Fett" but once you clicked inside you would see not only general Boba posts, but also all the specific Boba forums at the top.

The only downside of this is that from the main board page you wouldn't be able to see each of the subforums and if they had new posts. You would actually have to click into the main Boba forum to see that. Not sure if people would like that or not, but if you did that it wouldn't matter how many subforums you had.