ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

How would you feel about creating another board about non-ToME related stuff? Post websites that you're interested in. Talk personally with other members of the board. Have even more for the moderators to do.

How would you guys feel about this? Just to be neat? I'm trying to convince DG that having a non-ToME related discussion section would be pretty cool, so help me out here!

That'd be a great idea!
Why hasn't this been thought of earlier?

I think this is a bad idea. Better would be to create a separate forum somewhere and then point people to it when you want to carry a thread into an offtopic direction.

Once you start bringing in other topics, issues of appropriateness, offensiveness, moderation, and more become bigger problems.

True, Neil, but think about it...

We've had very, *very* little trouble with those kinds of issues on this board. The users here are so great, I think that we could risk doing this without taking on too much more on ourselves.

Personally, I think that the users who post on the ToME forums have proved themselves time and time again to be dependable, polite and curtious. There have been very few instances (that I know of at least) where a mod has had to correct a user for inappropriateness.

I think the only reason we've had very, very little trouble is precisely because the discsussion here is limited to ToME, Module development, ToMENet, and Tolkien.

Don't hijack it, please. This stupid forum software is obnoxious enough that I don't want to deal with offensive content as well.

Well, I know that on proboards at least, you have access to a list of censored words. I don't know if it works the same way here though...

This would take care of any offensive language that may arise.

Why not give it a try and let the denizens of the ToME forum decide whether or not to keep this priviledge?

Generally it sounds like a good idea, BUT ...

I won't list all the possible things that could go wrong with such a venture ... you'd open up the forums to the whole universe of human interaction ... and this can easily get out of hand.

My vote : if you find mods who have enough time to keep an eye on things but don't try to meddle too much in what's going on, give it a try ... on an experimental basis first, and if it is successful, keep it ...
Just like the mode for ToME ... "Try it in a module first ..."

A single board usually isn't that hard to keep in order.
I'd say give it a try, you can always shut it down if problems arise

Via PM'ing, I've had any number of great & ongoing conversations with other members of this forum. There's lots of fantastic people here, and it's been a real treat to get to know some of them better on a personal basis.

OTOH, I've also had some very unpleasant surprises, from people from whom I expected it least, up to and including requests for pirated software. (And that person had better know what I am talking about, and feel ashamed )

These varied experiences leave me with mixed feelings about an off-topic forum. At most, I would be extremely cautious about adding such a thing. I agree with Mitharheru that it sounds like a great idea, but if it were to be done at all, experimental (whatever that turns out to mean) would be best at first. I'd also point out that the Tolkien forum --another potential avenue for off-ToME discussion-- has seen very little use, despite all our mutual interest and devotion.

Yes, but the Tolkien forum was devoted to strictly Tolkien discussion. I'm talking about a forum where you can talk about anything.

And yes, Neil, I am beginning to realize that it would take a much bigger commitment from the mods (and possibly nominating some new ones...).

I think that we should try it out on an experimental basis at least.

I know that I have found myself discussing non-ToME related things on the discussion board, but I can't help it, I am a scientist, I ask questions and want answers, a board such as this would allow people like me to get their answers with out annoying everyone who doesn't care.

these forums are about tome-related stuff, and are for tome-related discussions by tome players. if you want to discuss something other than tome, go to a forum other than the tome forums. the web has hundreds or thousands of forums already that serve the purpose you suggest. the most i could possibly endorse along these lines would be to link to a couple of them, there's certainly no need to generate another one here.

There's always usenet.

If I get my way, and get an NNTP interface to this site going, then they'll even have the same interface.