Mmm.... Serious Business™. Seriously. Maybe a little less ego-flaring on both sides is called for?



As a wait-binge-wait style viewer, I've always sort of liked the idea of having a thread per episode rather than a thread per series.

But that only works with certain shows that get that much per-episode discussion. I know I haven't been alone in being basically shut out of several series discussion threads because I didn't have time to catch up to the very latest episode, or because I was waiting for a slower group's releases. Anyone who prioritizes quality over speed has been there at least a couple times.

The problem is figuring out which series deserve that status. We could stick Geass2 there this season as a pretty easy gimme, but if the conversation falls below a certain weekly threshold, then splitting it up into multiple threads is very likely to kill it faster. At least, that's my feeling on it... it's more interesting to post in a thread when you've got a couple dozen posts of history than when you've got 3 posts since the beginning.

I like the idea of merging episode discussion threads at (or preferably a couple weeks after) the end of the series and moving the result to GA. However, it should be noted that when you merge threads, vbulletin doesn't preserve post ordering, but instead orders everything chronologically. Not a big deal, but you'd lose a little context viewing the resulting mess later.

As far as "hottest girl" threads go... as far as I've seen we've yet to have one that hasn't degenerated into a giant raging shithole. We don't need that shit. We really don't. It also presents a problem with the idea of later thread-merging, because we end up with cruft like that that doesn't fit into the series discussion itself.

Anyway, with some tweaks (eg: making its own forum category rather than hijacking gundam, and the post-series merge-n-move) I don't see why not. But I'm not the one moderating either, and I don't know how that might affect either the moderation workload or the traffic in other threads in GA. Moving "series of the season" to its own subforum under general anime, and updating the subforum title every time a new season's series got added to the list would be a reasonable, workable answer to that -- because to get to the subforum traffic would still go through GA, and still see the same level of incidental traffic. It wouldn't clutter up GA (from the parent forum it would be just like stickying a thread), and on the whole I don't really see a big problem with it. But I definitely wouldn't want to clutter GA up with dozens of subforums -- recycling is the key.

At any rate, if we were to dedicate a subforum to that, we could effectively extend it to two or three series comfortably over the course of a season... so betting on one to be the series of the season wouldn't be a big issue.

Only administrators can rename forums or create subforums though, which means that for every season and every series that got added to that subforum, an admin (either me or Bud, since it wouldn't be Ciber or Wilik...) would have to go in and change the subforum title and description. So there's a certain level of intervention on our part that'd be required, but I wouldn't be loath to doing that, as long as I had someone suggesting the direction it needed to take.

Overall, I like the idea, in some form or another. It'd definitely be interested in seeing it, and hearing feedback from the rest of the staff as well. If we can get all the concerns addressed, then it might be worth doing.