Dear fellow Play-by-Forum players and GMs,
As many of our games have moved primary communication to Discord, I have been pondering something. I still want to ensure that we always post all adjudications to the forum for archival purposes. However, because we're not using the forum as often for public press, I wonder if it would make sense to reduce the number of new threads we create.
I want to make sure that PbF activity is still periodically visible to the general site populace, but we should also be considerate of just how often our new threads take up the "Currently on the Forum" section of the main page. I also don't want to have to exclude all our games from that list (as we've done with some subforums in the past).
We could hypothetically move to a model more akin to how CYOC or Mafia operates (largely one thread per game). However, I also don't think that it serves much organization-wise to lump all threads for a single game into one chronological stream. Digging through old games and records becomes a pain when they're in one mega-thread.
What I'd like to propose is this: from now on, each play-by-forum game that uses Discord should create one new forum thread per game-year rather than per turn. You'd still probably want a separate thread for the game start, game end, and AAR's. Each GM could make a call on whether Winter results would be the end of the last thread or the start of a new one, so long as they remain consistent.
Note: for GMs running games that use the forum messaging system, I'd want them to have the option to keep making a new thread every turn to encourage immediate public press after the adjudication; longer discussions could hypothetically get lost in a thread-per-year setup.
Does this seem reasonable to you all? But it just seems like it would be good stewardship with our PbF games to reduce the noise we create on the front page, especially as our turn-by-turn posts are primarily for record-keeping purposes at this stage.