Portal comments are dead – long live the forums!

[Sehales]

Captains,

 

In the past year we have been using the comment feature below our portal publications, but we are unhappy with its functionality. It leads to bad visibility for great comments and also creates a need for seperate moderation. This is why, effective today, we are switching back to creating forum discussion threads for our news articles.

 

You will be able to access this forum section with a direct link from each portal article.

 

The discussion threads will be created by our beloved @The_EURL_Guy in this section.
Please note that in order to improve visibility and to avoid thread necromancy and confusion, most news discussions will be set to automatically lock after seven days – however for major news or very active topics this restriction will not be used.

 

Have fun commenting!

Action Stations!

[Bad_Players_Are_Toxic]

20 minutes ago, Sehales said:

It leads to bad visibility for great comments and also creates a need for seperate moderation.

And now they're hidden away in the forums, the visibility is virtually none. This isn't about making good comments easier to see. Going through these forums is a chore in itself and i'm not scrolling through pages looking for good comments. This is just WG being too cheap and lazy to moderate the comment section on the news articles.

[edjman]

huh

 

[THESHOWMAKER]

So WG had enough of criticism on the portal where most people that actually want to inform themselves go so they decided to keep it clean and move the comments here where a VERY small percentage of the playerbase actually visits or ever logs in. This smells like censorship

[Aragathor]

A genius move, now any criticism and warnings will be invisible to average readers. WG will have to worry less about people calling them out.

 

PS: Can't wait for the upcoming self-congratulatory piece stating that the change was "welcomed by players".

[Sehales]

4 minutes ago, But_Can_You_Meme said:

And now they're hidden away in the forums, the visibility is virtually none. This isn't about making good comments easier to see. Going through these forums is a chore in itself and i'm not scrolling through pages looking for good comments. This is just WG being too cheap and lazy to moderate the comment section on the news articles.

I understand what you mean, but the comment section simply didn't work very well, showed only old posts instead of the latest ones being first and we were limited to very basic features.

On the forums we can highlight important things, quote users and much more effectively discuss the topic. It is not about being lazy, as the amount of work is the same.

 

If you asked a question in the comments and you didn't manually scroll through the comments when checking back again, you missed an info. On the forums we can quote or @mention you, your notifications can be customized as well (some players prefer to receive an email whenever someone answers their topics, others only want to see it in their notifications when visiting the forums, etc....)

In the best case, some more players join the discussions and stick around on the forums, in worst case, nothing really changes.

 

Just now, Aragathor said:

A genius move, now any criticism and warnings will be invisible to average readers. WG will have to worry less about people calling them out.

It is actually quite the opposite. The average player is unlikely to read it fully and if they do read it in-game or via Game Center, they couldn't even know that there are comments, as the comment section was only working on the portal itself.

By default, it was also only showing the first handful of comments, which was usually the same 5-10 people writing "first", "why do people always write first", "what about carriers?", "unrelated topic XYZ", "I hate you", "actually it is ok"... you get what I mean.

From my experience, the big and critical discussions always happen on the forums (or reddit), but barely ever on the portal. Just have a look at the many threads we are having on the forums.

[rykzet]

nice decision tho

[MrFingers]

I'm also having my doubts about the reasoning behind it... it smells indeed a bit like censorship and a way to make "critical feedback" on certain controversial articles (either by nature or content) less visible to the broad audience... An ideal solution would be to have a widget underneath the article that shows the top posts of the thread on the forums. That way it is indeed clear this is not a (not so subtle) attempt to silence critical voices.

[Aragathor]

6 minutes ago, Sehales said:

It is actually quite the opposite. The average player is unlikely to read it fully and if they do read it in-game or via Game Center, they couldn't even know that there are comments, as the comment section was only working on the portal itself.

So making the comments invisible on the portal raises their visibility to the average reader. Interesting logic you are using there.

 

7 minutes ago, Sehales said:

By default, it was also only showing the first handful of comments, which was usually the same 5-10 people writing "first", "why do people always write first", "what about carriers?", "unrelated topic XYZ", "I hate you", "actually it is ok"... you get what I mean.

Yeah, I call BS on that. But I can't prove you wrong because WG already removed all the comments from previous articles on the portals.

 

9 minutes ago, Sehales said:

From my experience, the big and critical discussions always happen on the forums (or reddit), but barely ever on the portal. Just have a look at the many threads we are having on the forums.

From my experience big discussions only happen on reddit where WG can't censor them through a moderator using a bald faced excuse to close the thread.

[ImperialAdmiral]

Most of the comments under the articles were whinning, trolling and comments from people that appeared to have no clue about the game.

Talking about Polish version of the site so at least in that case it is a good decision.

[Bad_Players_Are_Toxic]

6 minutes ago, Sehales said:

The average player is unlikely to read it fully

Because the average person doesn't have time and/or care.

 

9 minutes ago, Sehales said:

From my experience, the big and critical discussions always happen on the forums (or reddit), but barely ever on the portal. Just have a look at the many threads we are having on the forums.

 So you use the average person as a reason but the average person doesn't come on the forums and participate in those ''big and critical decisions''. Only hardcore players and those with an investment come into the forums. The average person  comes home from work and plays a few games and MAYBE reads a news article.

 

This whole thing smells of Laziness and/or an attempt to control information. Badly made excuses as reasoning comes across as dishonest and quite frankly, leads me to distrust anything you have planned in future. 

[MightyWizard]

I have mixed feelings about this.

I completely agree that the comments in the website were "too limited"
and I agree that the forum has way more tools to allow us to express and communicate (think about multiple quotes, attachments, images etc....)

nevertheless... I really think you should try to show some of these posts in the website.
maybe a little snippet that shows the 2-3 posts  with more reactions... something like that to encurage users to go to the forum.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

no, wait... the Italian Website points to the english forum?!?

https://worldofwarships.eu/it/news/general-news/comment-join-us-on-the-forum/

 

@Sehales please fix this, there should be a section in the forum for each language!

[M0riic0N]

I see a s...storm about to happen on this thread lol

[svadilfari]

too bad, i enjoyed the occasional shitposting there

rip

[PassTheSalt]

I'd like you to reconsider the auto-lock feature

 

-most threads run their course and fade away

-bringing back a post can  be funny

-bringing back a post can be useful to highlight how things were worse/better in a previous patch and create constructive discussion

-we can't hold you to task quite so easily ;)

 

overall moving it it's a good idea though.

[iJoby]

WG, what does your IT guys think about this change?

It is a well-known fact that your portal will become less valuable without a comments section, simple SEO would tell your IT guys this fact. and redirecting readers to a forum which only a tiny fraction of the player-base uses is a bad idea, did anyone consider asking the players about this?

 

On 10/10/2018 at 5:33 PM, Sehales said:

I understand what you mean, but the comment section simply didn't work very well, showed only old posts instead of the latest ones being first, and we were limited to very basic features.

As for this, It is total BS, the first comments you see on the forum when clicking the topic link is the oldest comments, same as the portal, on the portal you had a drop down menu which gave you a choice, Newest - Popular etc. on the forum, you have more or less the same thing, so how is this easier?

[Aragathor]

After thinking about it, I must admit this a genius idea by WG.

In one fell swoop they wiped out the ability to visibly criticize the decisions of the company and removed all traces of criticism from old articles.

The comment section has been removed from all previous articles. All the comments that showcased WG's mistakes are gone, all the blunders, the callouts, gone forever.

In addition WG has not only moved comments into a section barely frequented by users, it also has set up an auto-censorship systems, since topics will close after 7 days.

And let's not fool ourselves, WG will keep topics open only if they fit their narrative, everything else will fall under the "these are the rules" excuses.

[antean]

Thing is, there's the Dedicated Forumites & then there's the News Release Repliers. Both are just a fraction of the player base.

Then there's the in port chat threads where some players ask questions about stuff already posted in the News Releases.

 Again, a small number of the player base.

 Let's face it, most of the players only want to play. WG, itself, only wants to  (imho) sell product.

 Of course, WG will want to limit 'criticism'/ feedback, call that what you will, if it doesn't fit with their 'monetizations'.

I believe, in the EULA, somewhere, WG says they can do what they want to, at any time (or words to that effect).

As long as I can post and get a few ideas of mine across to WG, I'm OK with closing 'portals' (especially if this is just 'duplicating' things)

 

[AdmiralCollingwood]

9 hours ago, Sehales said:

From my experience, the big and critical discussions always happen on the forums (or reddit), but barely ever on the portal. Just have a look at the many threads we are having on the forums.

I dont like to use the forum very much, nor will I use reddit. I wonder which experience you were talking about. Right - its deleted noone knows  ?
Sometimes, the forum seems to be out of order (not working) . You took the chance away to correct wrong translations, or refer ot the english page !!!

It might bring people to ignore your "news" in general in future too . And GC doesn't seem to work on every system properly (Omega out).

[gnist0s]

WG is just plowing the road to make it easier to inforce GC

[Skyllon]

This smells of "gun caliber progression" excuse...

 

1 hour ago, iJoby said:

First time i've seen somebody get called a Nob with a K. 

You never know. Maybe he (k)nows something we don't?

[victorem]

what can I say...

i was banned from commenting on the portal, guess why,

 

at least here I can still say I dont like censorship.

regards

ps.    will that mean im going to be banned from commenting here too? 

       just in case let me say for the last time

           down the censors!

 

 

 

[Anymn]

What an idiotic decision. I liked scrolling through the comments as part of the reading-the-news-experience. Now I have to go to the forum, find the right topic, login again because single sign-on isn't working properly, and hope there are even some people that took the time to respond. Which I highly doubt: only 27 persons did comment here, while there would easily be ±50 comments on the website.

 

Also, forums is not a fully replacement for comments. Comments are a quick, 5-line max expression of thoughts, which were perfectly fine as a response to the news article. Forums however enable people to put walls of text in, which I then have to read completely - wherefore I don't have enough time. This is why I prefer quick comments. 

[hjsteg]

A nice Idea, but you must follow through. Please link directly to the appropriate discussion thread. To just have a link to the generic discussion forum is not good enough.

[Shaka_D]

On 10/10/2018 at 4:00 PM, Sehales said:

It leads to bad visibility for great comments and also creates a need for seperate moderation.

With reference to the above, the translated to real life reasons, I presume, is you mean the following:

 

'It leads to bad publicity (negative comments too visible), and we need to punish people for saying bad things about us'

 

Yes, I have always wondered about some comments and how they should be moderated, but perhaps someone can explain to me how moving the comments to the forums creates better visibility for great comments? The difference here is not everyone uses the forums, but lots of people will read the comments so WG wants to hide the bad publicity in the closet? It won't change my life for the better or worse so it doesn't really matter, but you know, the reasons....

 

Just saying, still love you guys though, just be honest about why. We're all your fiercest critics, but your biggest fans.