Forum:The New Forums

Opening post
Crossposting my own announcement from Tardis:Temporary forums/Admin announcements:

Hello, all!

We're happy to announce that, with the Forum namespace unlocked, we're finally able to move into some permanent New Forums. Thank everyone for how much they've shown up in making Tardis:Temporary forums happen, and helping the Wiki achieve as much as it did in these diminished circumstances. The New Forums are still very much needed — but we've cleared a way a lot of long-running issues and old policy bugbears, successfully catching up with the past few years' backlogs, such that what we are looking forward do does get to be the fresh start of a whole new era.

While SOTO's still working on finalising the Special:Forum archive, we're taking this chance to officially migrate. The Temporary Forums are moving to Forum:Temporary Forums for now, with some cleanup to come brushing it up as a completed archive. In time, we'll have a central landing page for the Forums, linking to all the archives; but this may take a week or more, as there are several important things to prioritise. (In any case, while archiving all data for history's sake is paramount, User:CzechOut, in his contacts with us active admins, did wish to express his personal view that a lot of the Special:Forum era material was old enough that, even without new evidence, it was long-overdue for review by the community. Admins don't write policy, and neither does the past: you, the community do. Those other things just help to codify and operationalise it. The spirit of T:POINT applies — don't waste everybody's time, don't restart an old thread unless you have an actually fresh look on its topic — but once new Forum threads become possible for all to open, don't be frightened of a prior ten-message discussion ten years ago. "Fresh" doesn't have to mean "specific new evidence", it can just mean "this is reflective of a decade-old community and view of what the Wiki is all about, we have a strong inkling the current majority does not support that rule, or that it is in spiritual conflict with more recent jurisprudence".)

Don't worry, though: our ongoing discussions are going to move directly into our still-being-built Panopticon. While the Tardis Forum works on restoring its interior dimensions, please bear with us and do not open any new threads for the next few days. (But, of course, feel free to work on OPs in sandbox — and don't worry: the list of proposed threads will be retained at the archived version of Tardis:Temporary forums itself. As we make it through those, given the extraordinary circumstances, we'll do the unthinkable i.e. editing the archived page, so as to note that X or Y thread has been posted in the new forum.

We'll make another announcement when things are fully open for business. For now, you're welcome to come over to Forum:The New Forums to give your thoughts as we restructure, and tell us about any bugs you're noticing. (Just give it a few minutes if it's something new. We might be working on it.)

Well, this is Forum:The New Forums, the first official thread of these restored DPL Forums, transmigrated Tardis:Temporary forums threads notwithstanding.

So… what do you want to see about the New Forums? What did you feel worked about T:TF, and what did you think didn't? Are you seeing, and will you see, any issues with the New Forums on a technical or design level as we roll them out fully over the next few days? Here is the place to bring up your own takes.

To give you some outlines on what the admin team has been discussing, we are:
 * strongly inclined to keep a default time limit on all Forum threads, which could even be semi-automated in due course. This limit may be raised from three weeks (21 days) to a full 30 days, and will, of course, still be flexible in case of discussions which clearly warrant more time.
 * strongly disinclined to keep a Proposals/limited-slots model. We discussed this at length, but in the end, we felt it wouldn't be right to "gatekeep" thread creation now that the one-of-a-kind emergency situation is behind us. Moreover, the time-limit discussed above should suffice to keep an excess of inactive threads from clogging up the system.
 * inclined to restore separate Boards, much as previous Forums before T:TF employed, but shake up the specifics somewhat; some of the old areas such as the Reference Desk have essentially been rendered moot by Discussions, and some of the names may need updating.

We are not beyond reviewing the first two positions in light of a spectacularly good argument, but they are pretty locked-in as these things go, so unless you have a very strong argument to bring to bear in this regard, please don't spend too much time arguing for their completely opposites. Better to focus on the details and the operationalisation. As for the third, of course, it invites suggestions in itself!

Right — ball's in your camp! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:58, 11 May 2023 (UTC)