Re: Newsgroup vs web forum

On 2007-12-01 08:56:18, Timo Pietilä <timo.pietila@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm not just dreaming about post drop rate.

Google gives these values of postings:

Apparently Forum started at April 2007.

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2006 751 788 1040 818 666 842 863 591 660 639 686 818
2007 650 435 433 1136 491 539 858 779 520 298 444 13

Granted there are few cases that show greater post rate than last year,
but 298 posts at October? That has _NEVER_ happened before.

The numerical trend from 2000 is more convincing. The direct comparision is
April-Nov 2007 (8 months); Oct 2007 is the only month with a grossly lower post
rate than 2006.

Without a decent numerical fit, the best statistical test I can use is the
signed-rank test. This is inconclusive. (2 months higher, 6 months lower: 8
50-50 splits, 2 vs 6 or more extreme is ~14.4%, need 5% to be at all
significant.)

Between 2004 august and September there is sharp drop in postings
(separation of Tome and rest of the angband?).

Yes.

Maybe this newsgroup really is dying on old age.

I suspect that an integrated portal (e.g., forum/RGRA such as oook, or Wiki/RGRA
such as Roguebasin) is the most credible chance of acquiring new players outside
of the higher education bracket.

I guess there has been
also change in opinion of what roguelikes should be which bugs us old
ones. In old days even smallest change or suggestion of change triggered
huge amount of postings and usually consensus was that game should
change slowly. Every single change should be tested and valued. Nowadays
it seems to be that mentality is "who cares", changes are done here and
there, utterly meaningless changes are discussed, but more drastic
problems are not (like TMJ-problem) Takkaria is not telling here what he
is planning to do, just asking sometimes "should I do this" and then
ignores what is being said and decides to do what he wanted to do in
first place.

Which (if V is to be maintained) is a lot better than the near-total total
freeze that happened from mid-2004 to late 2006.

It is too bad that forums have such a bad interface compared to decent
newsreaders. Maybe I could get used to forum if it would be black text
in white background, fixed width font, thread always visible and some
method of knowing what I have read and what not (without cookies, thank
you). And smaller font please so that I could get more information in
same space. With decent search and flagging possibilities, and
ignore-lists. And keyboard-shortcuts, because rolling up and down and
sideways with mouse is so slow.

Eh...for vertical scrolling, I don't see a need for shortcuts other than
HOME/END/PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN. (At least, on mainstream browsers. I don't have a
PDA websurfer to compare against.) Text size: if it's too large, any modern GUI
browser will let you reduce it to a readable size.

read/not without cookies is technically moderately difficult, and automatically
breaks on LANs behind broadband modems. For this application, it would also
break for all non-static IPs. (You need a cookieless login backup. I have
written one to deal with cookieless web browsers for a shopping cart, and it
works relatively well -- but the remaining quirks are basically unfixable, and
have been since 2001. Fortunately, carts don't have to be preserved across IP,
and most IP changes also come with browser client string changes.)

I'm aware of two forum software packages that know what an ignore list is. One
of these is an alpha. I have long-range plans of using the other one (but not
for Angbandish stuff.)

As I see it, the Oook forum could use at least two more user-selectable
stylesheets that are not integrated with the rest of the site design:
* black text on light background: second normal stylesheet
* High-accessibility mode (extremely high contrast to the point of looking
garish to normal vision, default font size 16pt-ish if not larger, other
adaptations to make life easy on screen-readers. Think neon-intensity text on
black).

The normal CSS stylesheets can use several size variations. (Oook looks like
it's on 10pt/12px, which suits me as a default but is a bit small for many
people. 12pt and 8pt are defensible alternatives.)

I really don't know what is so great at forums that people use them
instead of usenet.

The default application for accessing the Internet has changed. It's now a web
browser, and forums are directly accessible by web browser. USENET needs an
adapter for this.
.

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