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. Thanks to everyone for how much you'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 to does really 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)

Discussion

 * ……Well — here's the first shame-faced update report: yes, yes, all the links at Forum:Temporary forums/Archive are currently (to use a technical term) completely screwed up. It is my fault and will be fixed momentarily. Apologies for the inconvenience. As you were! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:16, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, this is a welcome surprise I must admit. As one of the few active editors who has been online long enough to have contributed to the Forum subspace... Well, it's surreal and weird to be here. It's like visiting your childhood home while it's on sale and being given a tour of the empty crevice inside.

So as per the discussion of how we should group the forums... I'll be candid. I always found the old setup, which we're using right now, extremely confusing.

Here's the minimum we need: a forum space only for debates about validating some stories or categories of stories... A forum just for changing the rules and discussing decades old policy and precedent which might not fit the community anymore... A forum for technical stuff like updating the site's landing page or logo. I'm not sure which of these would naturally be called "The Panopticon," again because I've always found the system confusing. OS25🤙☎️ 23:35, 11 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Oh, also: can we have quick links to the forums? It got so convenient linking and typing out T:TF... Is it too silly to ask for F:PANTO or something like that? OS25🤙☎️ 23:42, 11 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree with OS25 above about the organization of the forums. While I only used them a few times back when they were active, I did find them very confusing, and I think that the three boards proposed above are a really solid idea, that could help make them less obtuse & more welcoming to all editors, old and new alike. However, I'm really glad to see we now have proper forums again! Liria10 ☎  23:46, 11 May 2023 (UTC)


 * The thing that always rubbed my rhubarb the wrong way was all of the terrible descriptions at Forum:Index. Look at how the Panopticon is described: "If you have questions as to why articles are named a certain way, or why our various policies are worded as they are, or really about anything having to do with the maintenance of this wiki, go to the Panopticon." Does this not suggest that the Panopticon exists to clarify existing policy, not change it? That a new user should come here to ask how the site works, not to propose a change? Every time I forgot the forum names this tripped me up. OS25🤙☎️ 23:51, 11 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I am against strict time limits on discussions, at least ones as short as this. Ideally my archaeology project will solve some of this issue, but it's important to realize that things in the past happened for a reason, even if times have changed, and if the users present for those decisions don't chime in due to infrequent activity we might repeat past mistakes. (I note that obviously my project will contain with it biases, so it's obviously not a perfect replacement for true institutional knowledge.) Indeed, we had quite a few threads in the Thread:Number days that languished for months, if not years without responses before getting a flurry of activity that catapulted them to, if not affecting policy, nearly doing so. (Consider Thread:137011 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II which had no activity for four and a half years, for instance. Obviously excessive, but even once people started discussing it again discussion continued for over a year with no definitive resolution.) Moreover, some issues might need quite a bit of time to reach consensus, and while the deadline can be extended, there shouldn't be a need to ask an admin to do that instead of just letting it find equilibrium and closing it after consensus has definitively failed to be reached or has succeeded.


 * Might I suggest instead that if a thread goes dead for 1-2 months it's bumped once, then killed if it goes dead for that time again? Not ideal in terms of the precedent I'm citing, but, you know. Trying to make it reasonable. I understand yall're strongly in favor of time limits, but I figured I'd still shoot my shot at trying to stop it.


 * I am also strongly against the proposal/limited slots model, some proposals will be popular but will languish for quite some time without anyone being willing to write up the actual post, and some might be, theoretically, incredibly important but unpopular. Either due to controversy, or just because they're technical pieces of wiki administration that very few people care about. (Note that proposals of this type being placed first in line along with removing a strict time limit on discussions also allows for them to have the extended discussion that they deserve, be it due to the back and forth nature of the discussion that will result from disagreement, or to hammer out the nuances of a new policy.)


 * Support Panopticon / Help / Drax Cave / Time Lord Academy / UNified Intelligence Taskforce / Tales from the Tardis / Happiness Patrol / Matrix Archives / The Wikia Archives. I'd also like to see a second archiving project like Czech did in Forum:Panopticon archives, where he provided brief commentary on threads, if an admin feels up to it at some point, but this is a musing rather than a serious insistence. Najawin ☎  00:02, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

To me, having some set time limit is not just there to make the site efficient. It's there to build a sense of trust between normal users and the admin team. In the "middle forum" era, it was very common to have a forum closed after just days, even ones with long considerate OPs. And that lead to... Well, a hostile atmosphere!

I would go as far as to say this: when this site has a healthy forum system, consensus and precedent are the same. I can't tell you that this was true in the Thread days, because it wasn't.

Even worse, as Najawin as hinted at, would be when users would reach a consensus... But it would never get closed because the admin team either weren't invested or disagreed. Take, for instance, Thread:212365: opened 22 March 2017. Closed 23 September 2018.

Or, Thread:212365. Opened 6 March 2017. Closed... 4 June 2020. It is not acceptable for us to tell our forum users: "Hey, start an inclusion debate! An admin will close the topic in 18 to 39 months! :)"

So indicating that forums have always been naturally closed when a consensus naturally happens is an incorrect statement. And it seems to me that, under Najawin's recommended system... The only way to get a forum closure in an instance of the admin team ignoring the post would be for everyone to choose to say nothing for four months. That's not a good system.

Even in the temporary forums, it was common to extend debates if there was a lack of resolution or any ongoing argument that wasn't just the same talking points in a loop forever. In spite of how people have complained of three weeks being long enough, most of our forums so far have been dormant in the week before they close. So it's my take that 30 days is not only more than we'll need, it's more than we use. If there's really a good reason to extend the forum past 30 days... We can just extend the forum at day 30. Admins have rarely turned out requests to extend forums, even at the least justified request.

I also suspect that limiting forum submissions, if it is a feature in the coming weeks, will only be a technical solution while the forums are perfected. But it's fairly obvious that even if we temporarily do a limited forum run we'll be out of OPs by the end of the summer. I can't speak to all the forum names Najawin has listed because I don't remember what each one is and I don't feel like researching it. OS25🤙☎️ 00:24, 12 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Okay, other implementation notes, we need to change stuff to reflect our new spoiler policies. The panopticon in particular puts a massive emphasis on being spoiler free, it's on the description of the page on Forum:Index, the description of the page itself, and the panopticon header that every forum post gets. A more nuanced statement about how spoilers must be clearly delineated at the start of the thread is probably better. Discontinuity and Timey Wimey aren't even Forums, they're in the Theory namespace, yet they still show up on the index page, as does The Howling. This could be made more clear, only The Howling mentions this distinction.


 * Panopticon description obviously needs to be changed, yes. Both on the index section, and to a lesser extent the page itself. I'm not sure that OS25's comments about Logo/CSS/Design vs Changing Outdated Rules vs General Policy Board are quite apt though. Unless we're constantly updating Logo/CSS/Design, which, hey, we might do, but we haven't decided on that yet, we don't need a dedicated board, it's an exception, not a rule, it would be under the "General Policy" section. As would "changing outdated policy", as that's just a subset of all of our general policy discussions.


 * I'd also recommend that whatever our final design for the front page is (dear lord we need to get some movement on that) should have a link to the forums so people don't have to go looking for it. Make it as accessible as possible for those who want to find it.


 * As for OS25's most recent comments, let me push back on the idea that I ever suggested that threads would have consensus and not be closed. While this happened, this is not the example I referenced. I referenced an example where an incredibly important discussion about how to disambiguate languages went without comment for >4 years sans consensus, Shambala bumped it, and then discussion happened for another year without consensus before the forums shut down. With time limits, what would happen here? "No consensus, closing thread." Similarly, I insist that I never suggested that historically consensus -> immediate closure. You simply won't find this in my comment. It's not there.


 * I'd also like to push back on the idea that we only need 30 days. Sure, maybe we're only using so much time and our threads languish for a week before closing. But why is this? It's because people are violating our forum policy.
 * Replies like "Agreed," "No," "Yes," kudos, or even longer sentences that amount to little more than a statement of being for or against something are usually deeply unhelpful. Unless an admin asks for a simple show of hands on a purely arbitrary matter, it's important to tell us why you feel the way you do. If you don't, your opinion will likely be discounted in the final closure of the thread.
 * A lot of the recent threads have been people showing up, voting, and not actually discussing the issue and hashing out the strengths and weaknesses of the positions at play. I say this even concerning threads I agree with the conclusions of. Sure, if all we're doing is some voting with some arguments on the side maybe we only need a month. But if we're actually going to have real discussion, which is what we should aspire to, we shouldn't assume that a month will be sufficient. Many of the threads in the older eras took longer than a month. It should concern us that everything is happening so quickly now as a symptom that our process has gone awry. (Indeed, I will say that I've actually wanted to respond to some of the threads that were closed just after they were closed.) Najawin ☎  00:50, 12 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Hey, some of my best friends post "agreed" and nothing else in forums!


 * In all seriousness, that outdated and tacky rule made a lot more sense in the days where forum OPs were a sentence or two. I'm working on an OP right now that's going to be longer than our page on Rose Tyler.


 * It's safe to say that these days, a lot of the implications and considerations are already considered by the time these forums actually open for debate. A large series of people saying they agree with a very detailed OP is, in fact, consensus. OS25🤙☎️ 01:02, 12 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Also: maybe this is just me. But forums being open for 40 months because we can't wave an admin our way is a worse situation than someone showing up late to a debate by a few days. OS25🤙☎️ 01:08, 12 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm no stranger to long opening posts! But I think there's always room for discussion and well thought out comments. "Agree" or "Disagree" adds very little to the discussion and encourages people to think of these discussions as simple votes. They're not. Forum threads are carried by stronger arguments, not simply by who agrees - 100 people can agree with the OP, ignoring an objection, but if the objection is strong enough to render it technically infeasible, it can doom the proposal. We should encourage discussion and nuance, thoughtful reflection on issues. Forcing everything to happen in a month means things are more likely to get emotional, more likely to get lost in the shuffle, and more likely to just reframe the entire way we're discussing topics in an unhealthy way, imo.


 * And look, nobody wants to go back to the era you're talking about. I remember it! It was still happening in 2020! But I don't think these are the only two choices. We don't have to wait 40 months after consensus is reached, but neither do we have to force close a discussion when there isn't consensus, even if discussion has stalled, or have a time limit as short as a month. Najawin ☎  01:13, 12 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I just feel very strongly against the idea that those who to come to their forum to give their voice of approval on an idea are somehow failing the system. They are not, they are the reason the system is worth saving.


 * I think honestly I might be more kind to this idea if you just meant non-validity debates, or serious rule changes etc. But realistically, again, if we tell people "Hey, forums last two months by default," guess what's going to happen? The debate is going to last two and a half weeks, then it'll just sit there for another 39 days. OS25🤙☎️ 01:44, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I've repeatedly suggested getting broader community feedback for some of our larger changes! I want feedback! But hashing out the actual details of the issue in depth is a different sort of thing than just providing feedback. Someone showing up, saying they like the thing, then never returning isn't really discussing the issue, and part of why just doing this should worry us is that if someone else comes in later with a strong objection, well, we have no clue if the first person might have changed their mind. They haven't returned to the thread, and we don't know how their reasoning was presented, so we can't evaluate the strength of the rebuttal comparatively. These comments should be something we use to inform our forum discussion, not something that is considered part of it. But this gets into more nuanced details of how to have forum discussions.

Think of it not as the people doing something wrong, but the culture that results from this having adverse consequences. Tragedy of the commons. We should be really concerned that everything is happening in 2 weeks rather than 3. That wasn't normal prior to the closing of the old forums. While some of that is surely the fact that everyone wants to get to work on stuff that has piled up, we should be deeply concerned about making easily overlooked mistakes in our rush to get things done. Najawin ☎  02:09, 12 May 2023 (UTC)


 * (Oh, and let me note for the record OS25, the very long opening post you're talking about, if it's the one I'm thinking of - I think that's going to need substantially longer than a month to discuss! That's precisely the type of discussion where there's a lot of stuff to hammer out in the thread that could take ages, even among people who broadly agree. I don't see why an admin should have to come around every month to refresh it, with us worrying that it might or might not get renewed, potentially even rushing through bad versions of the end policy that do more harm than good, when we can instead take our time to actually work out the best path forward. Perhaps the great is the enemy of the good, but so too is the slapdash.) Najawin ☎  04:27, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I agree with creating separate subspaces for "inclusion (validity or coverage) debates", "policy changes", technical changes, and additionally querries. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎  05:10, 12 May 2023 (UTC)