*The Forum Sucks

[scorycory]

Did someone say massive sig?

[White Cornerback]

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]What I Dislike[/div]
Unfortunately, the list of things I like stops there. Why so soon? Many of the remaining sections of the forum are poorly optimized towards the forum structure, and would do much better on either a separate site structure or, in a perfect world, a custom website. Let’s dive in.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Signatures[/div]
Since this is not a specific forum section, I’ll stick it up here on its own.

Gripes: I really just dislike how big and flashy they can be. It can feel very annoying to see a single-sentence response to a forum thread, taking one line of text, then the user’s signature takes up the space of 25 lines worth of images.

Alternative: Honestly, either remove them or put a size limit on it. One thing that I have really enjoyed in other forums was the requirement of large signatures to be placed within spoiler brackets, to prevent them from overshadowing the thread itself. As popular as signatures are, I’m not sure this would ever take off, but I thought I would include it. I do, at least, abide by my own principle, with what may be the shortest signature on the forum.

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Yeah so apart from disabling them entirely. The forum actually has a function in that currently resizes images in signatures to a certain %. What fucks this up is people putting tons of images in their signature and it doesnt resize the canvas, just the images individually. Really if your sig is longer than another post than it should just get altered/remove if you're taking the piss.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Create a Player[/div]
Gripes: Starting at the top, we have the Create a Player section. Although the pinned threads are fantastic, in the sense that they give the player long, detailed descriptions of what they need to do, they could be moved to nearly any other platform and still serve the same purpose. So I’ll consider it neutral. However, the worst part of this section is by far the player creation threads themselves. New Player threads are a lengthy form and likely the first intimidating portion of the league to newcomers. Players need to make sure they gather correct information about how the league works, make decisions about their player, and apply it all correctly onto the form, then manually receive feedback if necessary.

Alternative: I’m sure everyone reading this has seen a Google Form before. Did you know that they can separate their topics into different pages? Did you also know that they can lead to different pages of the form based on how you answer previous questions? Using these two features, one can construct a form that guides the user through creating their player, denying invalid options at each stage, and allowing different inputs to stat customization based on the archetype picked. All this data would then be spit out into a spreadsheet, likely to be much easier for importers to review, approve, and process.

Custom: On a custom website, this form can be completely arbitrary, and provide an even more granular level. The new player form for MLR can be found at https://redditball.com/players/new. Although I slapped this page together in less than an hour, and have barely touched it since, you’ll notice that it provides new players much more guidance in filling out the data, and it can also validate player data against its internal database upon submission. This validation can include checking for player names that are already taken, invalid player type combinations, and more. Once this page is submitted, the user is sent to another landing page, reminding them to join the Discord if they haven’t already, and it is sent off to the administration team. Since you can’t view this page if you are not an admin, here’s a screenshot of it below:



You’ll notice that this page provides administrators the ability to quickly view all the relevant information, and process it as needed. If rejected, the form will return to the player, with the rejection reason provided, and allow the user to edit and resubmit the form at a later date. If a player is accepted to the league, their data is automatically used to populate a new entry within the player database, with all the relevant information. No additional copy-over is necessary. I believe a form like this one would streamline new entry into the league much more than any other feature added.

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As you'll find with a fair bit of critique, the biggest issue with all of this is the people to do it. We have the HO who are making the league run and it's already taking up enough times, GM's do their teams, bankers bank, graders grade etc. With eco gone who was one of the most technologically literate people in the league, I think we lost a decent bit of manpower in this regard. Infinite/frick being both simmers counts them out of this.

So really you're left with 37thchamber who's on his way out of the league and I think BWIII who has already commented in this thread about being busy with IRL. I don't know of anybody else in the league who has the know how to implement these QOL improvements. Either that or people can't be bothered. These would no doubt be huge improvements but we don't have anybody to manage/implement these that isn't already halfway to retirement because of being burned out doing the heavy lifting in a certain aspect of the league.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Player Retirement[/div]
Gripes: This section doesn’t belong under Getting Started. It also does not promote much conversation, aside from nostalgia trips, which don’t really need to be on a public forum in threads that not many people will browse. There’s not a ton to say here so let’s quickly move on.

Alternative: Retirements could instead be a simple Google Form submission, which trips a flag on the player’s backend spreadsheet data. If needed, administrators could also change this option on their own.

Custom: A custom website would handle this very similarly, where players could submit a retirement notice, which would no longer require human review. Retirement processes could be automatic, and simply send a notification to the administrators letting them know it has occurred. Same as above, administrators could submit one of these processes on their own as well.

Code:

The reason it's under getting started is solely because when this league began from users from the SHL, that's how it was laid out on the SHL jcink site and it was just never changed. It's not promoting much conversation now or directly because there hasn't been many big name or sudden retirees (relevant people, not bums) recently but I can assure you on long careers that it definetly stimulates discussion in the thread itself along with on the discord if it's linked.

It's also cool to see somebody sum up their career, say goodbyes or write their fuckin magnum opus in it. In terms of the suggestion, really you'd rather just look forward to a system similar to the EFL, VHL and the SBA has (and likely soon enough the SHL). This everything manual system is what bollockses up alot of new people when they join and burnsout people like graders/updaters because its so fucking boring doing a job when it could be easier if we had people willing and having time to develop a system.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]NSFL & DSFL Rulebooks[/div]
Gripes: This section of the forum is incredibly empty, as you would probably expect. Conversation is disallowed, and instead each thread simply lists all the information one would expect to be in the rulebooks. Although it is fairly easy to read, I believe a forum is too complex of a structure to use. The player signatures and avatars distract from the text, and the forum does not provide alternative reading methods such as a dark mode.

Alternative: As simple as it is, I believe this information would be better presented in either a read-only Google Doc or a PDF. Word processors have been in design for decades, to provide an easy-to-read, easy-to-write setup. Additionally, users in Google Docs can apply their own color themes through popular extensions, like Darkdocs. Editors can also share editing power amongst themselves, removing the need for editing permissions on the forum. Finally, Google Docs also provides much more fine control over the presentation of the text, with support for in-line photos, navigation bars, and more.

Custom: Although possible to design a custom website to present this information, it is likely not worth the effort. Instead, I’ll use this section to talk about LaTeX. LaTeX is a plaintext markdown language for designing professional documents. Take a look at the MLR rulebook for an example of what it can produce: https://fakebaseball.gitlab.io/rulebook/rulebook.pdf. The PDF generates a table of contents automatically, with clickable links to its pages, that are also updated automatically whenever the PDF sections move across page boundaries. Most reasonable PDF readers (like the one I use, built in to Firefox) can also provide a navigation bar to get anywhere within the document in a fraction of a second.

Code:

FWIW we actually had both the NSFL & DSFL rulebooks in PDF format but for whatever reasons, HO at the time was literally not able to comprehend how to download and then edit a PDF and re-upload it back to jcink with the new edits on it so they went back to default jcink post.

Code:

I really enjoyed the article but I think one thing you missed in particular was the sheer amount of clutter/out of dates stuff that has been outlined before but it never gets taken care of. For example

- http://nsfl.jcink.net/index.php?showforum=12 Player created pages there from as long ago as 16th november. These players are not coming back and at the very least could be moved to a holding area so they dont clutter up here.

- http://nsfl.jcink.net/index.php?showforum=14 Temporary dsfl rulebook and a dsfl rulebook thats been there for months with no progress. One is PDF/other is forum post id imagine is being transcribed from the PDF but was never finished.

- http://nsfl.jcink.net/index.php?showforum=69 People leaving the moved link when moving pages, there is no reason to this other than to create clutter and mixing up more player pages @ anybody, never ever leave the trace link, ever.

- http://nsfl.jcink.net/index.php?showforum=328 Threads like old seasons/past bot lineups should be deleted.

- http://nsfl.jcink.net/index.php?showforum=161&prune_day=100&sort_by=Z-A&sort_key=last_post&st=40 Incredibly old threads that haven't been deleted/moved. There is no way that there's a S14 player still in the DSFL as we're midway through S20.

+ player roster pages aroun the site that are not locked.

[infinitempg]

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Infinite/frick being both simmers counts them out of this.

Actually I just stream - @manicmav36 is the simmer right now. But yes count me out of that I got my own shit to deal with lol

[Lemon]

I really liked your response, thanks for it. Very insightful, and shows me a lot of the historical decisions that I was never around for.

As you'll find with a fair bit of critique, the biggest issue with all of this is the people to do it. We have the HO who are making the league run and it's already taking up enough times, GM's do their teams, bankers bank, graders grade etc. With eco gone who was one of the most technologically literate people in the league, I think we lost a decent bit of manpower in this regard. Infinite/frick being both simmers counts them out of this.

So really you're left with 37thchamber who's on his way out of the league and I think BWIII who has already commented in this thread about being busy with IRL. I don't know of anybody else in the league who has the know how to implement these QOL improvements. Either that or people can't be bothered. These would no doubt be huge improvements but we don't have anybody to manage/implement these that isn't already halfway to retirement because of being burned out doing the heavy lifting in a certain aspect of the league.

And then there's me :fingergunz:

[37thchamber]

And then there's me :fingergunz:

psst...

click here for free lemons