Reorganizing GRB content

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TheoSqua
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Reorganizing GRB content

Post by TheoSqua »

I've been contemplating changes we could make to GRB since I became a mod, and think it's time to start discussing with the community to see what everyone thinks.

Potential Updates:

Convert Baseball Talk into sub forums
Game Day Threads: Self explanatory, all GDTs would go here. This would be more lightly moderated and allow the normal back/forth in a GDT.

Baseball Events: Posting about news, events, trades, signings, etc. The forum where we rehash threads from 2 years ago after a bad start. This would be fairly moderated, pretty similar to what we have now.

Baseball Discussion: An article-based area where posters can write up thoughts/ analysis/ideas. This would be heavily moderated and all posts would be required to stay on topic. All negative arguments/insults/ etc. would be removed.

Minor Leagues: Basically the same thing we have right now.

GRB Hall of Fame
We would create a set of sub-forums to replace the Archives with various "GRB Hall of Fame" forums. The format is TBD, but it would be an community driven event every offseason. Off the top of my head we could do something like Hallf of Fame Baseball Threads, Hall of Fame Off Topic Threads, Hall of Fame Posts, and Hall of Fame Posters. Where a small number of each are nominated and voted in every year.

Consolidate and remove stale forums.
Fantasy Sports and Other Sports would be merged into a General Sports forum.
Archives would be converted into a sub-folder for removed forums and posts would be moved to the GRB Hall of Fame section above.
Interviews would be archived and locked.
Social - General and Rants and Raves would be archived and recreated to break the monotony of every subject having a 200 page thread.
Social - Politics would be archived and recreated as a privileged forum. See more below.

Privileged Forums
Hall of Fame Banter - a forum just for grb hall of fame inductees to talk to each other about how great they are. This could either be private, or read-only to non-HoF posters.

GRB Premium - a forum that requires a certain number of posts/log-in time to see. This would be heavily moderated and if something like this happened we'd want to make sure the content was fairly limited as we wouldn't want to have posts from the public section migrate here instead, and we wouldn't want it to be a bash new posters section.

Politics Discussion - This could be read-only to the public or private, not sure yet. Writing to politics would require a minimum post count, say 100 or something, and a special group access that can hopefully be automated by posts/time. Posters who cannot play nice from a politics standpoint can have their access removed without being banned from baseball. This would give the Mods a way to remove some of the bad blood that has caused posters to leave in the past without them losing their access to discussing baseball.

The privileged forums is just an idea. If the mods/community can't think of a way to make them unique/interesting without impacting the posts that go into the public forums the idea won't get past this post.


These are all of my own personal ideas. I haven't run them by most of the mods, and none of this can be done without a mod consensus and approval from Kyle - so this is all very far from being set in stone.

I just want to start having some conversations about what we could do to freshen up the forum so that we can start making some potential changes in the offseason.

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ghostrunner
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by ghostrunner »

I think Politics being a privileged forum probably makes sense. I'm not a big fan of any baseball forum being that way. Mostly because I never liked visiting the Reds forum that has that structure.

I noticed NSBB has actually hidden it's game day threads from the public, which I'm curious about. Why they did it, and how it's going.

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TheoSqua
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by TheoSqua »

ghostrunner wrote:I think Politics being a privileged forum probably makes sense. I'm not a big fan of any baseball forum being that way. Mostly because I never liked visiting the Reds forum that has that structure.

I noticed NSBB has actually hidden it's game day threads from the public, which I'm curious about. Why they did it, and how it's going.
In my vision, no baseball content would be hidden. And the privileged forums is probably the lowest priority of the ideas.

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heyzeus
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by heyzeus »

I think I don't necessarily like the idea of the privileged forums, because it segregates some amount of the conversation at GRB, and acts as a deterrence to new posters. I think we need more new posters, not less.

But I like the other ideas. We have a few forums that nobody at all uses, and a few forums that are minimally used. The gigantic threads from many years ago probably do discourage posting, so it's not a bad idea to lock old threads and start anew (even though I do enjoy going back and re-reading old threads when they're bumped).

AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

In general, I'd be on board with whatever changes you all make. I honestly tried quitting/posting less at various points because the vitriol can get quite heavy, but - for as ridiculous as it sounds - I generally feel attached to some people here and enjoy reading their posts as well as this place overall. And, largely, this is a great source of information about the Cardinals.

I do also think this forum needs more inclusion and more new posters than less. But, whatever you all want to do, I'm on board.

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go birds
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by go birds »

consolidate the minors and baseball forum imo

that's the only input i have

oh and i guess you could burn the politics forum to the ground--i keed, i keed

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

I think it's fine. But whatevs. I'm not going anywhere.

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stlouie_lipp
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by stlouie_lipp »

I like the idea of more threads instead of the "mega" threads. It seems like people try to find a big thread to post something in rather than start a new thread. I think that stifles conversation.

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wart57
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by wart57 »

I am not in favor of heavier moderation.

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BottenFieldofDreams
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Re: Reorganizing GRB content

Post by BottenFieldofDreams »

I think a subforum for GDTs makes sense, but I'd be afraid more baseball sub forums would make ideas and conversations less populated and less bouncy.

Submitted with a grateful 'but whatever.'

How long is going to take to get word on my WNBA subthread proposal?

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