CHANGE IS COMING

Hey everyone.

So, here's the deal. In the last couple years the activity on this site has decreased and now our member base is smaller. This doesn't mean that we're dying or dead or a thing of the past or that line rider is now a meaningless activity, but it does mean that we need the forum to change to reflect our smaller, more tight-knit community. As it stands, we have about 30 forum sections and only a handful of posts per day, and tons of awards and ranks and things that are basically never given to anyone new anymore. So the staff have been conversing about what we would like to do.

Part of what we want to do is to significantly level the playing field of our member base. This means we want to give everyone a significant voice, get rid of a lot of the red tape (meaning secret sections and projects and exclusive whatevers) and really come together as a community and work on stuff together. So, that is why instead of just making a bunch of changes, we think it's a good idea to get the input of you guys. That's what this thread is for. So, I'm gonna bring up a bunch of stuff that we are thinking about doing and see what you think, but we won't actually start doing anything until we see what you have to say.

Part 1: Ranks
We're planning to eliminate two ranks: Elites and LCC. And we're thinking about changes to Retired Staff, LRL, and/or the Member PIP bar.

The Elite rank, which has always been part you're-on-the-right-track-to-become-staff and part hey-greys-look-at-this-guy-he's-a-good-member, has become mostly meaningless with such a small member base. So we think it's time to get rid of it.

The LCC has made some great stuff over the years, but it's slowly ground to a halt. We're also finding it hard to distinguish between what makes someone "good enough" for the LCC anymore. So we think it's time we moved towards a more community-centered approach. So here's what we are thinking about doing. We want to archive the LCC section, but make it public (minus the nominations thread) so you all can look through it. Then we'll create a new sub-section, possibly called the "WCC" or Weridethelines Community Collaboration, where we can have site-wide collaboration projects. We have a number of projects in the works and/or recently completed, and we can move those threads there. We also want to kickstart the section by making threads for all the unfinished LCC projects and opening them up to the community. Some of the projects might have a director who holds the parts to a standard of what exactly is needed, other projects might just be a total free-for all. But we think having a section for these and using the LCC projects to kickstart it is a good idea. (Side note, this means I'm hoping to finish Evolution of Line Rider Scened with a site-wide effort so you'll all get to check out the project now) We could also use the LCC YouTube for these projects, including the recent collabs spearheaded by Kramwood and the CSP projects that are soon to be finished (as well as the old ones), to get us a jump start. This is obviously a pretty big change so we are curious to know what you all think!

It has come to our attention that many of the newer people on our forum don't know much about our Line Rider Legends - who they were or what they did - so we are thinking about having a new subforum with a thread for each LRL that anyone can post in to talk about the user, as well as a public nomination and discussion thread for deciding on any new LRLs.

Retired Staff. We aren't sure what exactly we want to do here, and we'd like to ask all of you what you think. On the one hand, there's not a strong reason to get rid of the retired staff PIP/color/rank, and we do want it to be known that they were staff, but on the other hand we're trying to level the member base and maybe retired staff gives too many ranks to the staff (three out of the four left on the site). We're thinking about making a stickied thread to honor the retired staff - maybe that would eliminate the need for the color/PIP/rank, but maybe it would be a nice supplement as well if we want to keep the rank. Please tell us your thoughts!

Part 2: Forum Sections
So, hope you didn't get nervous when I talked about adding two subforums above, because we are thinking about archiving and a great many more.

MOTW and LAOTW are dead and we plan to archive them. RIP. (however, see below about featured movies)

Featured movies - we've talked about this and we've decided maybe it's best to make a public section for discussion of featured movies. You could nominate and have polls and discuss movies for featuring in the section, and the staff would do the actual featuring. We think this might be a good substitute for what used to be MOTW/MEOW/whatever

We don't need so many sections for tracks. So we're thinking we'll merge green room and bare tracks, and merge non-conformist zone with previews clips and tidbits (as well as update with what versions can be posted in the tracks section, it currently says "only through 6.7" and that's horribly outdated) What would you think of making previews a subforum of the tracks section? and the big question - what should the name of the section be? Tracks? Line Rider Tracks? Full Tracks?

Poll of the Day has run its course and we plan to archive that too. We can still have random polls in off topic sections.

We're planning to merge clans and contests into engaged riding - not that you can't have clans or contests anymore but that sections is plenty of space to do it.

We also think merging recording center and tutorials into help center will be a good idea.

The Hello/Goodbye forum can maybe be converted into a "Coming/Going" sticky somewhere, and the feedback section can probably just be merged into WRTL Center

Finally, the off topic sections - we're thinking about merging some of them into a generic "off topic" section, maybe keeping "your creations" and "dude this is awesome" as subforums of the off topic section.

Part 3: Profile Pic Area
tell us thoughts/opinions on all of these:
- thinking about removing member PIPs.
- thinking about removing join date from profile pic area.
- thinking about removing trophies and MOTW PIPs from profile pic area but keeping them on actual profile page.
- thinking about adding a custom text box under profile pic, where you can basically type anything you want. Kinda like a custom usertitle for those who remember that.

TL;DR:
you probably want to actually read the whole thing

I tl;dr'd until I read the bottom line. :/

I agree

As long as my rank stays we won't have a problem.

/s

I do agree with getting rid of elite and LCC seem fine. I really don't see an issue with anything mentioned. Merging a few of the "super secret" sections with a public one wouldn't be awful either. Obviously staff would stay secret.

Part one-
keep the retired staff notice some where so that any new staff can ask the oldies questions.
agreed on the rest

Part two-
New Tracks? New Lines?
other wise agreed on it all

Part three-
join date and pips and trophy on the profile page, and i like the idea of the user text bar

Getthim wrote:keep the retired staff notice some where so that any new staff can ask the oldies questions.

more thinking about members knowing about retired staff than new staff, heh. New staff are typically trained in by the current staff.

Rafael wrote:

rabid squirrel wrote:

Rafael wrote:

rabid squirrel wrote:

Rafael wrote:I wouldn't merge bare tracks and green room because sometimes I want to watch some scenery tracks and the green room makes it easy to nagivate through them

we could make a thread that has a list of all the green room threads? would that solve your issue?

yeah it would, but.. I don't see why a section being posted in infrequently is bad if it still fulfills another purpose

it's just bad because we want to have the size of the site reflect the activity
lots of dead sections and it feels like a desert
which leads to be a perception that nobody is here
which leads to less activity

you can make like a "Linee rider tracks" section and devide that into the subsections Green Room and Bare Tracks?
because trackmaking and scenery making are two completely different things and I think they should be divided
I'm kind of conventional regarding that I guess
it just makes sense to seperate bare tracks from scened tracks

full convo:

Spoiler:

How about we use the tag system I suggested? One of the benefits if it is you can put one of the tags in the search bar, ie 'scened', and that's what you get. Every track with the scened tag shows up.

I'll be throwing more of my thoughts in later, at work right now.

[senpai] kevans wrote:How about we use the tag system I suggested? One of the benefits if it is you can put one of the tags in the search bar, ie 'scened', and that's what you get. Every track with the scened tag shows up.

I'll be throwing more of my thoughts in later, at work right now.

I like that idea a lot (but I won't be editing topics tagging things myself) but rafael is more concerned about the history of it all and finding old scenery tracks I think.

This all sounds good.

cool talks y'all.

for the retired staff, I think the sticky thread is fine but what if we just kept the pip bars and removed everything else? that way they are known for being ret staff and it makes it slightly more official/noticeable but also still removes that rank and ya. Plus it would eliminate the need for a sticky thread. Unless you want that kind of thing for descriptions of that user.. or we could just put the date they became staff and retired on the pip.  

that's all I got.

A custom user title is kinda like a sig, but we already have sigs.

A generic "off topic" would be a bit broad, but I do agree that a few sections could be merged or pruned

MEOW and LAotW are dead, but I propose a subsection of featured tracks for featured line art.

If there aren't any ranks anymore, we could have everyone be able to choose which color they want their username to be. Mine would be yellow :3

boobah

FreakingKoalaMan wrote:cool talks y'all.

for the retired staff, I think the sticky thread is fine but what if we just kept the pip bars and removed everything else? that way they are known for being ret staff and it makes it slightly more official/noticeable but also still removes that rank and ya. Plus it would eliminate the need for a sticky thread. Unless you want that kind of thing for descriptions of that user.. or we could just put the date they became staff and retired on the pip.  

that's all I got.

I like the idea of letting them keep the pip but not the rank.

Okay so after some discussion on the Green Room point.

- We don't want to make a track forum that you can't post in and then put three subforums for green room, bare tracks, and previews & tidbits. That would lessen activity in the section, make it harder to go look at stuff, and make it more, not less, confusing and cluttered.
- We don't want to make Green Room a subforum because then it looks like Green tracks are less important
- We don't want to merge Non-conformist Zone into previews if we're not merging anything else because it doesn't really make sense to suddenly group actual tracks in with previews
- We can't just keep things as they are with 1 track every week or so and four sections because that's just stupid.

So, we've decided that there's not really a solution to this issue but the best course of action is to just merge the green room into bare tracks, because we think it's more important to consolidate than to allow you to easily look back at scened tracks posted here in the past. Making a youtube playlist is probably better anyway, and you can always search the forum for a track you know.

I still want this place to use it's own host, even if we still use phpBB it'd be a lot nicer due to modifications etc. I just hate forumotion with a passion and always will.

rabid squirrel wrote:
So, we've decided that there's not really a solution to this issue but the best course of action is to just merge the green room into bare tracks, because we think it's more important to consolidate than to allow you to easily look back at scened tracks posted here in the past. Making a youtube playlist is probably better anyway, and you can always search the forum for a track you know.

If this is true I assume we'll be naming the new merged category something other than bare tracks? If not I think it's a good idea. Like "Tracks" or a name that reflects the full length of a complete track (started and stalled, or whatever the user considers finished) released to the public by a user.   

^ I think "Line Rider Tracks" is the best name we can come up with but if anyone has a better suggestion please share

also I did some background secret organization/cleanup stuff today so it's sort of begun. More to come tomorrow!

How about something like "Line Movies"?
"Line Movers" (I like this one)
"Movies"
"Track Films"
"Line Stuff"
"The Theater"
"Line Rider Track Videos With A Side of Norbi"
"Baked Goods"
"Cookies"
"The Collection"
"Film Collection"
"Phat Stackz"
"Lines Y'all"
"B.A.R.K. - Best Awesome Righteous Ktracks (the K is silent)"

after some staff discussion we're thinking more along the lines of "Line Rider Videos" (as opposed to tracks)

and I've thought maybe I'll type up a list of stuff that should probably go in previews and tidbits instead of that section:
- tracks shorter than ~30 seconds
- off sled tracks
- quirk hax
- other modified physics
- tracks making extensive use of lines other than the "core 3" (blue/red/green)
- lulzy/non-serious tracks (unless creating an illusion that it is a big srs track is part of the lulz)
- movies that involve extensive in-track editing (aka editing movies)
EDIT: - junk/unfinished compilations

thoughts?

EDIT:
MOTW/LAOTW archived
Announcements archived
Merged off topic section down, updated stickies

So where will the occasional announcement type thread be posted at now?

oh whoops I forgot to include that in the OP. we'll just use the WRTL Center to "announce" things from now on. We never really use the announcements section anymore.

also, archived PotD

We should change the "important stuff" to "Technical stuff" and put it in the middle. I say this because I think that tracks should be shown as the more emphasized part of the forum. Under the new technical section we can move version development and help center there, create a more comprehensible build list and flash player list, along with anything that falls under "technical".

WRTL center and Off topic should be merged as "General discussion", with the following subsections (not in this order): General discussion, a much nicer name than 'off topic' where we can put everything off topic in there; WRTL Center, where all LR related topics can go, but doesn't fall under movies or technical; Contests and battles, self explanitory; and finally Coming/leaving. Archives will go there too, but those aren't important.

To help illustrate how general discussion sub forum can be organized, I'm linking another forum i visit, which really has their shit together http://www.smackjeeves.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=26&sid=24e359108f6fa3419e0a2c9c277b6e57 also I'm the creator of the most posted topic of the entire community, thank you very much

this post is all @ kevans ^

1. we're doing away with the grouping categories entirely. Smaller forum. Looks like this:
- featured movies
- line rider tracks/videos (subforum: previews & tidbits)
- Engaged Riding (subforums: version dev, WCC)
- WRTL Center (subforum: line rider legends)
- Help Center
- Off Topic (subforums: your creations, dude this is awesome)
- Archives
now that I'm looking at that maybe we could even make help center a subforum of WRTL Center. hmm. will ponder. and discuss.

2. rules, play & download, and announcements are what is in the "important stuff" forum. I suppose I didn't mention this in the OP, but rules thread is being moved to the WRTL Center, play and download threads are being moved to Engaged Riding (this is why I haven't updated them yet btw) so there will be no important stuff/technical stuff anymore at all.

3. "General Discussion" is a dumb name. Most of what happens in off topic isn't discussion. And I'm definitely not putting any line rider related section in a sub forum of a non line rider section. Definitely never doing that.

4. WRTL Center stuff has to be related to WRTL or Line Rider - I think that's an important distinction, and is why it should be more prominent than sections that don't.

5. That site is waaaay more active than us and has waaaay more structure than we're going for here. We are making a shift AWAY from that kind of site.

6. When IRTL first started, part of what made it so welcoming was a big fat "Introduce Yourself" section right at the top of the forum. I don't want to bury that at the bottom of the site. But we don't have enough activity to make it a whole subsection so that's why we're thinking about making a single sticky thread.

I JUST HAD A BRILLIANT IDEA

I'm going to archive the sections, and THEN move all the threads from those sections to the new section, LEAVING THE "MOVED" NOTICES! So you can look back through the section archives but we can also have our nice merged section.

Wish I'd thought of doing this with the off topic sections. But I'll do all the rest this way.

EDIT: just did this to tips & tuts. you can look through them in the archives but they're all actually in the help center

EDIT: and now recording center, clans, and contests & battles

EDIT:
archived & merged feedback
archived hello/goodbye
updating, creating, unsticking, and moving around stickies as I go
changing section names/descriptions as I go

EDIT: archived & marged bare tracks & green room which took forever
rearranged the forum sections organization

CHANGE CAME

EDIT: a few things:

• I like that the community sections are reduced to three concise sections
  
• I don't like that the tracks are in one section with a subsection; i preferred a section for serious tracks and a section for "whatevs".
  
• It seems odd to have such a minimal forum page (which is good) but to also have such a cluttered bar at the top of the forum; consider removing "Calendar" (it only lists birthdays, really), Search (or remove the search bar and keep the search link, they do the same thing), and the portal in general (if possible).
  
• What happened to the sections at the top? I liked them because it gave newcomers an easy way to start up fast, and it was convenient. I suppose it might be easier to just link to Kevan's version website, even, but removing it entirely is a bit odd. :/
  
• There's no birthdays thread. IDK if that's intentional, but it's just something I noticed, and it's not a big deal at all.
  
• Adding on to my fourth point, i feel like a "line rider versions" section would be a nice place to put the "version development" subsection.
  
• The announcement section is gone as well; it might be handy, but maybe the "WRTL Center" section will suffice.
  
• The off-topic subsection trimming has been necessary for a hella while, and y'all done good with that.
  
• It's gonna be weird with the bare tracks and scened tracks being in the same section, but i'll get used to it.
  
• Really looking forward to the "WCC" section
  

efrazable wrote:I don't like that the tracks are in one section with a subsection; i preferred a section for serious tracks and a section for "whatevs".

Any reason you feel that way? It might just be growing pains aka you'll get used to it. The whatevs don't really need to be right on the front page but they're still easy to get to.

efrazable wrote:It seems odd to have such a minimal forum page (which is good) but to also have such a cluttered bar at the top of the forum; consider removing "Calendar" (it only lists birthdays, really), Search (or remove the search bar and keep the search link, they do the same thing), and the portal in general (if possible).

*shakes fist at forumotion* I will see if I can change this but I recall it being impossible. *checks* yep, I can delete wrtl livestream or new posts but those are the ones we actually use. If I had my way I would delete calendar, FAQ, and search.

EDIT: WAIT I HAVE A BRILLIANT IDEA TO BEAT THE SYSTEM
will implement soon. prepare to be amazed.

efrazable wrote:What happened to the sections at the top? I liked them because it gave newcomers an easy way to start up fast, and it was convenient. I suppose it might be easier to just link to Kevan's version website, even, but removing it entirely is a bit odd. :/

They are now stickies. The rules is in WRTL Center and the play/download line rider (which I'm going to rework into a "getting started guide" thing that tells you about .sols and standalones and everything) will be in Engaged riding. I'm going to explain all of this in a new "announcement" soon.

efrazable wrote:There's no birthdays thread. IDK if that's intentional, but it's just something I noticed, and it's not a big deal at all.

There was some confusion here, I unstickied it, wolf made a new one, I deleted it and restickied the old one. It's back and that's all you need to know.

efrazable wrote:Adding on to my fourth point, i feel like a "line rider versions" section would be a nice place to put the "version development" subsection.

Yeah working on this

efrazable wrote:The announcement section is gone as well; it might be handy, but maybe the "WRTL Center" section will suffice.

We hardly ever used it anymore so yeah wrtl center.

efrazable wrote:The off-topic subsection trimming has been necessary for a hella while, and y'all done good with that.

thank you! Glad someone appreciates it haha

efrazable wrote:It's gonna be weird with the bare tracks and scened tracks being in the same section, but i'll get used to it.

They are also in the archives, check it out. a section full of redirects.