Hurray for the Org

[Orvis Tertia]

OK, I know this is a bit off topic, but I've been over at the totalwar.com forums a bit today and yesterday reading the threads about the upcoming patch (there is no news there that isn't here already, in case you're wondering). I just have to say, I really appreciate the forums here at the Org, because the .com forums would make me ill if I checked them on a regular basis. They seem, over at the .com, to have an ongoing problem with flaming, incessant (and mean-spirited) griping and moderators closing threads. I don't think I'll be visiting there much.

Cheers to the Org community. I'm glad to be here instead of there!

[Owen]

Well, any official board will have its fair share of flames. Even if the game is superb, you'll still have people swearing about it being crap and insisting that all the other games they play work fine with DirectX 4.0, so it must be the game's fault. Third-party user communities will never suffer in anywhere near the same way. Having said that if a games software company wants to make a real success of their own user community, they need to find admins and mods who are impartial and efficient enough to minimise the affects of the trolls and flamers such that the presence of company staff and, hopefully, better technical support makes theirs the forum of choice.

How to do it well? See the Paradox forums. As far as I know, there are only four significant third-party forums that relate to Paradox games out there and none of them discuss the games that much. They arose from Paradox wishing to control the off-topic forum and cut down on, in chronological order, more adult material, political arguments (in the run-up to the Iraq War) and teenage spamming (twice). With the exception of the inability to ever have a forum server that's quite big enough, their commitment to the forums, including finding space for user mods, is excellent, and has resulted in huge improvements in each game.

I haven't been on the totalwar.com forums enough to comment on them, but I do find it strange that they're still using ezboard for the online community, rather than, say, vBulletin. Then again, with the link here on the homepage of the com's website, I suspect they prefer it that way. CA staff can come here whenever they want, and are treated with respect, but they have none of the hassle of running the forum software or of keeping the forum clear of trouble.