I guess that it's really been the introduction of Impulse that has caused me to notice this mixing. Previously I was oblivious. But it's clear to me now that there has been no change in reality, only one of perception. These 11 (or 13 depending how you count them) sites are so intermixed that they have always really been a single entity. On that basis a single set of rules for forum behavior and perhaps another only very slightly different set of rules for blog behavior is probably sufficient.

I am one of the most devoted and avid players of GC2, and I would never have seen this thread, or the "Smilies" thread, if not pointed to it specifically by someone else, and then following your link there Mumble.  I come to the GC2 forums for only GC2.  I've never really looked at any thread except for those related to GC2, and have not found any of the cross-posting to be at all intrusive.  There are also sub-forums within the GC2 forum that hardly ever (or never) read, like Modding or Bug Reports.  As in Island Dog's screenshot, I click on what GC2 sub-forums I'm interested in and ignore the others, and never use the "recent posts" function.  So personally I have no complaints about cross-posting, and in fact think it likely leads to increased interest and activity across the SD forums.  I theorize that there is a probably a positive synergistic relationship, though I have no specific data to make that assertion.  

I also have no interest in skinning (my desktop is pretty bare-bones functional, but not nearly as spartan as Mumbles!), but I have many different flavors of geeky friends, including skinners.  For me, skinning is personally irrelevant, but my opinion of skinning (or whatever else) to others should also be irrelevant. 

I believe this also to be true, and the the majority of people on the GC2 forums dont have a problem with the cross-posting.  That doesnt mean the vocal minority should be dismissed either though.  I do find it very positive that a good number of Stardockians have taken the time to respond in this thread.  You may or may not like what they've said, but they are certainly engaged.

Sentient species taste better...

One thing that I've noticed in my recent forum "walkabout" is that literally less than half of the forums accessible on any particular website are actually visible through the top level Category list and the only way you will see posts from many GalCiv2 related forums are to view posts listed in the recent posts list or to explicitly "walk the tree" by viewing a specific GC2 forum and then scrolling down to the bottom to see the complete list of subforums cantained within that forum.

For example let's just take the GalCiv II Category as shown in ID's screen shot. There are 8 subforums (ignoring the General subforum that's merely the contents of the parent forum i.e. GalCiv II itself. If you use this as your surfing guide then you can decide to ignore bugs and mods or whatever else you chose, however do you realize that your also ignoring three other forums that exist under GalCiv II but are simply not listed in the top level list? These are Beta Reports, Ideas and Off-Topic (GalCiv II off topic forum 349 as opposed to Home off topic forum 412). Plus your also ignoring another 6 forums under Ideas. That's 9 forums presumably related to GalCiv2 that you probably don't even realize that you're ignoring. That's more forums than you're actually following.

I think really what I'm looking for is a reasonable methodology of finding what it is I'm interested in without unintentionally excluding things of possible interest while not being overwhelmed by things that I definitely *know* I have no interest in.

The Off-Topic forum is of virtually no interest to me (I'm here for GC2), and both the Ideas and Beta-Reports are listed in the drop-down menu if you click the little arrow to the far right of the GalCiv II forum header. 

It does seem silly that some of those arent listed below with the rest of the sub-forum headers.  Personally though, I dont find it onerous to use the drop down menu.

Sentient species taste better...

The point isn't that you may or may not be interested in what's below a listed forum, the point is that you don't know. Plus that means that if I were inclined to follow all of the GC2 related forums that means I would have to scan potentially a couple dozen recent posts lists, one for each forum that I'm interested in. Having to scan 20 recent posts lists because there are 20 legitimate forums that I am interested in is not noticably better than scanning the recent posts for all forums on a site and having to sift through 50% of all thread because I *know* they don't interest me. Neither option is very good.

Hi Mumbles, and thank you for answering my question.

To be perfectly honest, Mumbles, you have nothing to worry about with the mods here or any of Stardock's forums.  Firstly; your comments are always polite, reasoned and intelligent, and thus contain nothing for the mods to become heavy handed about. Secondly; the mods are generally pretty helpful and friendly towards all users, being they themselves are users like the rest of us... just with a little more responsibility to resolve issues when they arise.  The heavyhandedness, however, is something that's reserved for when a user flagrantly flouts the rules and/or becomes arrogant, rude, obnoxious, disrespectful, etc... and in that regard you certainly have nothing to worry about.

As for the moderators interjecting into this thread, well I interpreted that as being "this is the way things are" to inform us of what to expect from Stardock sites now and into the future; and, to some extent, to bring a settling influence to the thread so that the discussion could continue peacefully.  Furthermore, the mods here are quite approachable and you can/should feel free to contact them if/when you have concerns... I promise, they don't bite.

As for your thoughts on having to sift through various post/threads of disinterest to get to what is of interest to you, I'm sure it's an issue that is being looked at (as a result of this thread), and that something to make Galciv2 more user friendly will be done if it can be.  Stardock has a good 'user friendly' policy and will do what it can to provide customer satisfaction, so things will improve as time goes on and the developers can get to them.

Anyhow, Mumbles, all the best to you and I hope it all comes together for you soon.

I do mostly try to be reasoned but I can be as sarcastic and dismissive as anyone else, particularly if I feel provoked. I do believe that I've taken some heat from the mods for something as minor as simple sarcasm even when I mostly try to temper that sarcasm with at least a little bit of cleverness and humor. I also think I mostly avoid being truly abusive but then it's very difficult to be a good judge of your own behavior.

A couple of years ago they had a Super Bowl ad for Monster.com the job search site. Basically the ad showed some guy working in an office with a bunch of chimpanzees. The ads show this one guy trying to work while all around him everyone else was basically "monkeying around". The point of this is that I remember the next day at work everyone was discussing that commerical convinced that they were that guy working with a bunch of monkeys.

The problem is that if *everyone* was convinced they were that one guy working with a bunch of monkeys then who was left to be the monkey. The answer is that at some time or other every one of us is that monkey to someone else, it's just that no one is willing to admit it.

The point of my homily may be a tad obscure, but perhaps a bastardization of a famous Mark Twain quote will help illustrate my point.

"Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known except that he's a jackass, and I know that".

It appears to me that there are a lot of folks that seem to know everything there is to know except that one tiny thing. For my part I'll at least admit that at times I can be a jackass.

Yes...it's a little bit like the adage about Architects, Engineers and clients [my 'real' world]...

An Architect is a person who knows a little bit about a great deal...and goes on to learn less and less about more and more until he knows practically nothing about everything....

And..

An Engioneer is a person who knows a great deal about very little and goes on to learn more and more about less and less until he knows practically everything about nothing....

And..

A Client is always right....

So back to the state of the forums. The essence of the issue is really one of what methodology you use to surf the forums.

The first method, which I believe to be the most common, is to scan the recent posts list of your site of choice. In my case that's https://forums.galciv2.com/recent. The advantages to this method are that this gives you a single list to search and it includes all possible forums which may be of interest to you on that particular site. Another advantage is that it allows you to catch threads that you may be interested in that the author for some reason or other posted to the wrong forum. The downside of this method is that if your site of choice includes a lot of forums which you aren't interested in, or even only a single high traffic forum that you aren't interested in, then the top level recent posts list can become flooded with threads that you aren't interested in which makes it more difficult to find and follow the threads that you are interested in.

The second method that has been suggested is that you only scan the limited set of forums that you are interested in. The advantage of this method is that it filters out the threads that you consider to be uninteresting. The downside is that instead of one single list you may have many such lists that you need to monitor plus you could miss a thread of interest simply because it's posted to an unfamiliar or incorrect forum. But the primary downside is simply one of how many different forums are we really talking about. If it's really only 2 or 3 then scanning 2 or 3 forums that are of known interest to you versus scanning only one of which 50% is to you uninteresting traffic seems to be a reasonable trade-off. However if it's 20 forums you need to scan individually then the choice is far less obvious.

Using GalCiv2 as an example the following is a list of all GalCiv2 related forums on the GalCiv2 site.

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/164          GalCiv Dev Journals

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/162          GalCiv II

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/350          GalCiv II > AARs

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/421          GalCiv II > Beta Reports

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/274          GalCiv II > Bug Reports

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/357          GalCiv II > Dark Avatar

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/346          GalCiv II > Game Talk

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/247          GalCiv II > Ideas

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/253          GalCiv II > Ideas > Colonies

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/252          GalCiv II > Ideas > Diplomacy

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/248          GalCiv II > Ideas > Economics

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/250          GalCiv II > Ideas > Research

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/249          GalCiv II > Ideas > Trade

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/251          GalCiv II > Ideas > Warfare

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/345          GalCiv II > Metaverse

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/348          GalCiv II > Modding

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/349          GalCiv II > Off-topic

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/347          GalCiv II > Strategies

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/483          GalCiv II > Twilight of the Arnor

https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/161          GalCiv II News

That's precisely 20 forums that you need to monitor. Now it's been suggested that this list could be further winnowed because some of these forums may not be as interesting to you as others, however they may be, and it's not unreasonable for the GalCiv2 enthusiast to want *all* GalCiv2 forums even ones that some others may define as uninteresting. But throwing out Off-topic, the Ideas forum and it's 6 sub-forums, Modding and Beta Reports that still leaves 10 separate forums and their separate recent posts list that you need to scan versus one. So the choice between scanning 20 versus 1 or 10 versus 1 is still to me not a totally obvious choice, plus if you do winnow the forums down you could miss mis-posted threads that you are interested in.

Still this methodology has merit, particularly if something could be done to reduce the required number individual forums that you need to scan and I can think of at least two reasonable ways to do this. However before going on to discuss potential proposed changes there's a third way of forum surfing that's been suggested that I want to address.

The third method is the idea that Zubaz proposed using the RSS feeds of selected forums to somehow create your own custom website. Conceptually this is an attractive idea but the downside is that I'm not a software engineer.

However I have friends that are software engineers and one of them created a "forum scrapper" to do precisely what I was looking for. There were a number of technical problems that made Zubaz's initial proposal unpractical. I think the biggest one was that his method would limit you to only the 5 most recent posts from any one forum, but like I said I'm not a software engineer and my interpretation may be wrong.

However what my friend implemented was to monitor the first two pages of the most recent posts list (the 100 most recent replies on the entire site) and filter out the "undesired threads" i.e. Impulse and Off-Topic. The advantage of this method is that it gives you a single list of the most recent posts from all of the forums that you find of interest however there are some major disadvantages as well.

The first disadvantage is one of having a server of sufficient bandwidth, particularly if this is something that you want to share with your friends. Another downside is that this simply produces a html list that as you click on each link it opens your browser to that specific thread but there's no way to negotiate using your browser to the next link except going back to the html file and click on the next link. Basically it's just not the same. I know this isn't a very well defined reason, perhaps it's just a lack of continuity, however it really is just not the same "forum" experience.

Anyway that's the three methods of negotiating these forums that I know about each with their own plusses and minuses. If anyone has any other method to suggest then I'd be very interested in hearing them.

It's been pointed out that the sharing won't change. That's fine. Actually at this point I now understand that sharing has been this way forever. I've also begun to appreciate the possibility of a wider audience that this can afford. For example this very thread. Although I'm certain that a hijacked blog in the Personal Computing forum is really not the best place to be discussing this, it is one of the places where multiple sites intersect and so does provide a suitable audience for a topic that affects all forum goers everywhere. But this does get back to the issue of knowledge of what forums are shared where.

As I've mentioned elsewhere I'll be providing a map of all of Stardock's forums that are accessible from all of Stardock's sites and believe me it's a confusing mess. I have two motivations for first off spending the time to do this and then for publishing the information. The primary motivation is simply that I want to understand my environment and know that when I post in such and such a forum then where does that thread actually go. Also once the work is done I'm certainly going to share the information with other forum goers that may be interested in "knowing where they are" as well.

The secondary motivation is to perhaps point out what a tangled web these forums are and that perhaps that would give cause for someone to actually take a close look at the countless forums many of which could and probably should be pruned and combined with many other like forums.

Again using the GalCiv2 forums as an example, we really don't need 20 different GalCiv2 forums. Maybe in the old days with 500 new threads a day we did but those days are long gone. If you could only get the threads in some of the less popular forums moved to related forums and winnow down the GalCiv2 forums down to a single handful then the second method proposed becomes very attractive and is probably a no-brainer choice.

Actually the second way to improve the 2nd surfing method is to have the recent post list from any parent forum also include recent posts from subforums as well. Not sure if this is hard or difficult to manage but that would significantly reduce the number of forums that anyone would be required to scan.

Are either of these proposed changes at all a realistic possibility?

I think most are capable of sarcasm and dismissiveness, given the mood and circumstance.  However, I was referring more to abuse, arrogance and name calling, etc, and I've not seen that in any of your posts... well none that I have read, at least.

As I said before, I don't think you have anything to worry about.  Sure, mods will say something when they see a thread going downhill as a result unpleasantries being exchanged, not to single you or anyone else out but more as a settling influence so the thread can continue without being locked... like peacekeepers, if you will.

Anyhow, Mumbles, and take care of yourself.

Yeah....type like Zubaz or youy'll be assimilated. PDQ. I was once normal. I think. Or was that Zu.

I'm so confsued.