1. Less serious discussion and more fun. But only if it's fun for me and is done on my terms. "Me" being everyone on this forum, and everyone on this forum being in complete disagreement.


"No" was fun. Resisting was fun. One word/sentence/paragraph games were fun. Catching obscure references to animals that may or may not be blind was fun. Things that don't exist were fun. Programming/design contests are fun. Picture wars are fun. Hot babe threads were fun. Drunk posts are fun. Photoshopping is fun. HockeyMMORTS's coded with variables in HTML are fun.


And everyone has a different take on every one of those and ultimately, the people who are in charge make decisions and rest of us just deal with it. Which is how it should work and how it always has worked. And people get annoyed and leave, and new people come in, and so on and so on.

So to the staff I say:
This isn't a democracy. Stop asking us what we want because we're doing what we want already. Just make a decision based on what *you* want because that's how the system works.

Hmm, often people look back on the past as if they were better days and they get so caught up in worrying and trying to return that place to its former glory and atmosphere... but it never quite works. Perhaps it is just you yourself that has changed and grown out of the lounge? Sure things have also changed within the lounge, but if it hadn't, you would have the same threads all the time but that is nigh impossible with the diversity and size of this community here.

The only option you have is to either move on or stay. But if you stay realize that it is still possible to create fond memories and perhaps it is even happening right now. There is no way of knowing the atmosphere you will remember and perhaps miss until further on down the track.

The Lounge used to have a smaller croud, but I guess as it grew and new people arrived who perhaps weren't a similar breed/weren't as intelligent as the current members (for whatever reason... being too young and childish) but that is unavoidable on the internet.

I've been here for a little while but have never been really active in the lounge. I've started a few topics, my most successful one was about a girl and it got some people really interested and it seemed like they actually cared (besides some of the joke posts, which even then made me laugh). You can't confine what people write on here... it's just the same as no matter how many times we put the rules on the top of every forum people still won't read them. But some real gems come from every day problems - everyone experiences heartache... just the same as everyone experiences computer problems. The Lounge reflects exactly what the name portrays it as - just a place to relax and talk about whatever is important to you in your life. We do it with friends on a real lounge all the time (usually with beer in hand, so why stop intoxicated posting? =P).

I feel this applies in many things in life... I have longed to be part of many former school classes and sports teams and even I wished I had of come to GameDev earlier simply because I can still feel that bond between some of our long time members. But perhaps it is just all in my mind? I have to make do what is avaliable... Perhaps it is human nature to look up upon ones superiors in such a way that they appear better than they are - and so we replicate... thus improving well beyond them.

PS: I think you have brought alot to this community capn_midnight.

I like it. I like the ideas - those are some of the fun threads.

In fact, I think that if more of us made interesting topics, the too-serious negative politics would get balanced out pretty quickly - simply because there would be something better to be reading and posting about.

Maybe I'll even make a cool thread for once.


And, to the nay-sayers, learn to take the good parts out of this. In fact, come up with your own good ideas or improve on some of the ones here. And ignore the bits you don't like. Hear me? Ignore. Just like you say we should do about the political threads. Yeah.

Quote:Original post by capn_midnight
Fewer Polish viruses (i.e. Link Spamming)
We've had a spat of people posting links to funny youTube videos or articles on the dailyWTF, or whatnot. While I enjoy these videos and articles just as much as the next person, if I wanted to see them I would be crawling youTube and dailyWTF myself. Replicating those posts here is unoriginal and unproductive.

I don't like this one as 90% of youTube and the dailyWTF are crap, and there's good ones that you normally don't find through the sites built in toplist and such(as usually gamedev related ones rarely make it to the top), I can see not reposting ones that have already been posted, but good ones that are fresh I welcome. I don't like to crawl those sites and gamedev.net usually is a good spam filter for them.

I think we really need a debate forum for GDnet, to make the lounge friendlier and less hostile overall.

It gets hard to ignore political threads, especially since by their back-and-forth nature, they are most often at the top of the threads list, and because they are inevitably much longer than other threads, normally.

It's like trying not to watch a car crash, you know it's going to only end in something unpleasant, but you aren't going to look away. You're going to look at a political thread because you know someone's going to say something stupid and you're going to want to smack them down(How many people relished Stupid Army Guy's demise, I wonder?). This isn't everyone, obviously, but quite a few as I see it, even as they try to argue the opposite.

People like arguing, and that doesn't reflect well on the membership when the lounge is seemingly overrun with threads asking for something explode into an argument, where in all likelyhood, no one is going to end up changing their minds, but more people are going to end up pissed* off.

That's why I think we should direct political/religious discussions to a seperate forum, preferrably with it's own mod that'll keep things, well, moderate(make it Lessbread. That will appease him, for a time).

*No, in the american sense

Other than the no drunk posts rule, I agree.