Individual Discussion Boards for each show

I like that idea. It could be used to add trivia and tidbits about shows too.

I support this idea too :)

I also back that idea. It would allow us to communicate with each other more effectively regarding categorizations, documentations, and other stuff that we end up talking about when we edit shows.

It is a must have. +1

I may be the only dissenting opinion, but that's OK. Discussion boards sound great right up until you have one. They can quickly devolve into squabbles, so there would need to be moderation and more to the point boards are huge resource hogs.

How would they be resource hogs? We've been told that resources aren't an issue at TVMaze.

The coding could be, but in theory you could just slot in something like Disqus

The main problem with discussion boards, IMO, is that they're all or nothing, and there's a lot of "all" out there. Is a discussion board necessary for Trackdown? Human Target? Planet of the Apes? Kolchak: The Night Stalker? Night Stalker? Timeless? Thousands of other shows across the world? You end up creating wastelands of nothing that sit there and look like.. well, you've got nothing. Maybe if they were available by request, but then someone would have to process the requests. And how many requests would be necessary? If only one person is going to use a discussion board, it's not really a "discussion".:)

Regardless of the resources necessary, is a discussion board necessary when only 5% of your user base is going to use them

I think most people that want to discuss a show, go on social media, find fans of that show, and chat with them. TVMaze isn't going to be able to compete with Facebook or Twitter. Heck, IMDB couldn't. I don't think people use database sites for discussion: they use... database sites for data, and discussion sites and media for discussion.

Keep in mind there are hoards of people who do not use Facebook or Twitter or who don't like using them to discuss television shows at least for whatever reason.

You might be right that an individual board for each show here wouldn't get used much. But I think it's a good idea because it could potentially attract people to join this site, and even contribute.

We've been thinking about this recently. An individual forum per show could be cool, but it could also be a huge overkill with 99% of the available forums never being used. I think we'd like to start with improving the comment functionality, allowing comments on the show-level and see where it goes from there.

Considering the comments section per episode isn't really used all that much, I really don't see the benefit of having a whole forum for each show as well. As it stands I imagine staff-wise, it has the potential of been a bigger resource then necessary, especially if you have spam posters.

david wrote:
We've been thinking about this recently. An individual forum per show could be cool, but it could also be a huge overkill with 99% of the available forums never being used. I think we'd like to start with improving the comment functionality, allowing comments on the show-level and see where it goes from there.

IMO the comments on the episode level is cool, but sometimes people want to talk about the show in general, or its cast, or they want to talk about something that happened over multiple episodes, so it doesn't always fit. Plus people want to know when a comment was posted on the show in general, so it would be best to be able to subscribe to the entire show's comments. I suggest a main board per show where you can view and respond to all posts on a particular series including comments on individual episodes.

It would also be useful to have all data related questions for a particular show in one place so that we wouldn't have to look very far to find out about it.

The resource hog would come when you want to do stuff like display all threads for all shows that you're following - rather than have to check every single show's discussion board;

1. Can't fully cache and serve to multiple users as each would be different

2. Extra storage and read/writes on new indexes (which is fine if they're using a good provider)

3. Additional storage for Full Text Index (FTI) if you want to search posts for text properly

Basically resources used depends on what kind of features you want to have.

dpratt wrote:

IMO the comments on the episode level is cool, but sometimes people want to talk about the show in general, or its cast, or they want to talk about something that happened over multiple episodes, so it doesn't always fit. Plus people want to know when a comment was posted on the show in general, so it would be best to be able to subscribe to the entire show's comments. I suggest a main board per show where you can view and respond to all posts on a particular series including comments on individual episodes.

I agree and back this idea ;)

Maybe we can look at this a little differently and have a TVmaze forum, like proboards, separate from TVmaze.com. Keep the forums here for website stuff and the proboards for tv show stuff. Just an idea.

WilliamDAGwood wrote:
Maybe we can look at this a little differently and have a TVmaze forum, like proboards, separate from TVmaze.com. Keep the forums here for website stuff and the proboards for tv show stuff. Just an idea.

I think keeping the TVmaze forums here just for website/database stuff is a great idea and feel it would be beneficial to to TVmaze overall. As far as using another system for what I term Fan Boards/Forums, I really can't speak to that as I'm not that type of user. I AM on both fb and twtr but I as a 'looky-loo", but might those types of sites have ways to attract folks to TVmaze?

dpratt wrote:
Keep in mind there are hoards of people who do not use Facebook or Twitter or who don't like using them to discuss television shows at least for whatever reason.
You might be right that an individual board for each show here wouldn't get used much. But I think it's a good idea because it could potentially attract people to join this site, and even contribute.

It "could potentially" do a lot of things. But it failed to do so for IMDB. I believe it failed to do so for tv.com. It never worked that way at TVRage.

The fact that people don't use Facebook or Twitter to discuss shows sounds like a bad reason to try to have less "friendly" user boards to discuss shows. And the problem isn't that they dislike Facebook or Twitter to discuss shows: it's to have them come to TVMaze to do so that is the issue. Why would they like TVMaze more than Facebook/Twitter?

If it costs nothing, and takes up no memory or staff resources, sure, why not? But if it does, then you have to look at what it could potentially do, over what it inevitably hasn't done, and what price would need to be paid.

One other thing is that TVMaze has a general chat forum. It says people can discuss TV there. How many posts there are about TV discussion?

Another question I'd ask is: how many of these potential people want to just read stuff, and how many people want to write?

It's like the difference between a town's people asking for a newspaper, and how many volunteer to write for it?

From bitter experience :) , I know that writing all the posts in the world doesn't do any good if no one wants to write in response.

I guess it depends on preference. I don't discuss TV here. I have better avenues for that (Reddit) with a more focused community.

I do believe that the the current site allows for a bit of community discussions via the article system. For example, this article for Taboo. The article was written and there was a brief conversation and critique. The structure is there. We just have to implement it differently.

Let's say there is a new episode of Gotham tonight. If someone were so inclined, they could write up a brief article with some links and a description and we now have a place to talk about tonight's episode.

Again, just a thought, but maybe it's a way to see if there is any real demand for it.

The thing about it is that something like that isn't going to get a lot of use right away, but over the years as TVMaze becomes more popular and seen more as an authority, more people are going to join and contribute. And having a platform that brings in people who like to talk about television is a good way to attract more users.

Lots of sites have general chat forums, but dedicated chat forums do more to bring in users.