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Friday, September 26, 2008

Posting on consecutive days? Shock! Horror!

One of the things about journal writing as opposed to 'zine writing is that you don't need to try to write full length articles. You can just do snippets of whatever kind.

My internet forum posting has dropped to an level lower even than slow times here at RD/KA!. I'm not lurking all that much either. So I'm surprised to find myself feeling quite pleased recently to have registered for the ConsimWorld forums.

I've been reading ConsimWorld for a couple of years, and have a been a regular reader of the Combat Commander forum in that time. But I've never posted there because I thought you had to pay to register, and I see no reason to pay to post on a boardgames forum. It turns out that I was wrong, as I discovered recently on this thread at Fortress: Ameritrash. So my lurking there has paid off. The story goes that ConsimWorld hides its free registratrion to increase the numbers of paid registrations.

Some of what is said in that thread is true. You're not going to read thousands and thousands of posts to catch up on all of an old thread. But then, you're not really going to do that on a bulletin board either, are you? It's an obvious point that the bulletin board format is generally easier for finding things, so that it works better for rules questions and so on. But for general chat about a very tightly focussed topic- eg. a single family of boardgames- the open-ended single thread format offered by ConsimWorld actually seems ideal to me. It is certainly better than what you get at the BGG, where each expansion and/or supplement to any game gets its own individual forum, which just fragments the discussion, which must therefore to some extent undermine the community-building elements of internet fora.

If only I'd had something like this at my disposal back when we first played Up Front! ;)

2 comments:

Andrew Paul said...

"You're not going to read thousands and thousands of posts to catch up on all of an old thread."

*raises hand* I did, once. Read through a 1500-page thread. :)

"A bit political on yer ass!" said...

OK Andy, before I start in with the routine questions about your sanity, exactly what was the thread about? ;)

Cheers,
John