So, did we get anywhere with this?
WilliamDAGwood wrote:
So, did we get anywhere with this?
Things take time and they don't really reveal what they're working on so unfortunately I don't think you'll get much of an answer.
gazza911 wrote:
Things take time and they don't really reveal what they're working on so unfortunately I don't think you'll get much of an answer.
If we told you what's been worked on, we'd have to kill you. Just the way things are, sorry :-D
TomSouthwell wrote:
If we told you what's been worked on, we'd have to kill you. Just the way things are, sorry :-D
*pulls shirt onto my head*
Are you threatening me?
Hi, I'm fairly new to TVM, but I had gotten the hang of most of the controls and decided to dip into the forums. And what do I find? The IMDB boards are to be no more? Holy crap! I had to Google it, because I hadn't heard about it yet. It absolutely floors me.
I have 17 years at the IMDB, The little anniversary marker they give you reminds me of 12-step chip. I find that amusing. But I've been there since before there were boards, since we didn't think to take note that they were owned by Amazon because most of us didn't know who in the hell Amazon was. I have seen the boards go from a place for film-lovers to geek out together to a bad-egg Twitter feed.
So if you even consider adding a show-level comments section, please have a moderation plan in place. Whether it's user-driven or you have a team approving comments, without proper moderation it will go the way of IMDB. Guidelines need to be set from the start, and they must be enforced with as little prejudice as possible. Off-topic, adult language, sexual subjects, political ties to the material - that's just a brief sample of subjects that need to be defined.
Too many forums have failed by adopting the approach of "People are adults, just agree not to attack or harass each other and it'll be fine." Sadly that rarely works out. Your ToS is going to need some seriously beefing up if you go this route, or eventually chaos will ensue.
The problem isn't the TOS: People who are willing to "play nice" will do so whether there is a TOS or not. The vast majority of those who aren't, aren't going to be stopped by a TOS. A TOS usually serves more as a legal defense: "Here's where we say what you can't do what you know you shouldn't be doing." And there's no way to create a TOS that's broad enough to cover every potential infraction. And if there was, it'd be so long that almost no one would read it. :(
Some reporting/moderation system would need to be in place. But at the end of the day, all you can really say is "Play nice, stay on topic, dont' advertise, and keep it workplace-safe."
Be that as it may, if we do go the route of boards, we are going to have to set parameters. It will devolve without moderation. It will devolve without some sort of CoC or every challenge the moderators make to a post will be responded with "You never said I couldn't do such and so." Will it cover everything, no of course not. That doesn't mean the only other option is to do nothing and hope it will be OK.
Honestly, the bigger issue is going to be resource demand. Boards require databases in order to function at any sort of useful level. As posts, sections, and users increase, so will that demand on dedicated servers to handle the database just for the boards, never mind other site functionality. Folks have been wondering why TVDB is having issues, and one hypothesis is the increased demand from PLEX and Kodi systems querying their site. If we want Maze to be that level of useful, we need to decide where the put the resources we have, and I'm not sure a system of discussion boards is the best use of those resources.
Gadfly wrote:
The problem isn't the TOS: People who are willing to "play nice" will do so whether there is a TOS or not. The vast majority of those who aren't, aren't going to be stopped by a TOS. A TOS usually serves more as a legal defense: "Here's where we say what you can't do what you know you shouldn't be doing." And there's no way to create a TOS that's broad enough to cover every potential infraction. And if there was, it'd be so long that almost no one would read it. :(
Some reporting/moderation system would need to be in place. But at the end of the day, all you can really say is "Play nice, stay on topic, dont' advertise, and keep it workplace-safe."
Actually I was making a joke about the fact that TVMaze's current ToS is only 3 sentences long, so just adding 1-2 small paragraphs about comment rules would more than double its size. I wasn't trying to suggest that a ToS is somehow an adequate deterrent to trolling, bashing or other bad behavior. That would be rather silly and naive - especially in this context, since the IMDB's ToS is HUGE.
But obviously if you have to explain a joke, you didn't tell it properly to begin with. :)
WilliamDAGwood wrote:
So, did we get anywhere with this?
We plan on implementing and are actively developing various tools/features to improve discussing topics with other users throughout TVmaze.
The topic of the thread is part of it and has been discussed internally since the conception of the site.
cheers,
Jan
Jan wrote:
We plan on implementing and are actively developing various tools/features to improve discussing topics with other users throughout TVmaze.
The topic of the thread is part of it and has been discussed internally since the conception of the site.
cheers,
Jan
Thanks, Jan. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with.
LadyShelley wrote:
It will devolve without some sort of CoC or every challenge the moderators make to a post will be responded with "You never said I couldn't do such and so." Will it cover everything, no of course not. That doesn't mean the only other option is to do nothing and hope it will be OK.
Sadly, in my experience most offenders will say that anyway. People that are jerks (for lack of a better word) on forums don't suddenly become nice people when you moderate them for being jerks.
I don't think I said to do nothing. As I noted, some system of moderation would have to be set up. But any TOS will have loopholes. You then face the choice of keeping the TOS short and having some kind of general "appropriate behavior as determined by staff" statement. Or you keep making the TOS longer as you keep closing up loopholes.
I actually came onto these forums to suggest just the same thing - from time to time I would hop onto the IMDB boards to discuss a show and/or read what people are posting but I did that the other day and yes, like others have discovered, they are now gone; but yes, a lot of the posts on there where dribble unfortunately.
I'm not really into the discussing "each episode" thing, I'm more interested at discussing a show in general and it would be nice to have somewhere to do that.
As for the social media stuff - totally different than forums, which is why someone may have suggested above that people don't like discussing shows on there.
Why don't people like social media for discussing shows!? Because the format doesn't really support that kind of thing...... sure you can go comment on the shows or perhaps post in specific groups about them, but really, the format is not built for it like forums are; social media is more for perhaps leaving a comment on a post and being done with it; not for having "discussions" - far far to hard to keep track of and way to messy; groups improve upon that, but really they still don't offer the usability that forums offer nor the community feel they do.
With that said, along with IMDB's forums having become a lot of dribble to comb through, they were also terribly laid out and weren't really "much to look at" - terrible execution and I'm sure the TVM team could come up with something far superior.
I am am also supporting to have discussion boards for shows and I have a feeling that at least something similar will happen in the future :)