Too Many Stickies

[Sakunyuusha]

Sticky: new releases July + August 2009
Sticky: new releases September + October 2009
Sticky: Hentai Anime List - By Category
Sticky: DO NOT UPLOAD: list - updated
Sticky: AGTH TUTORIAL

There are five stickies in Hentai Discussion right now. A screen resolution of 1440 x 900 shows only eight threads when the page is fully scrolled to the top. This means that over half of the visible threads are stickies. Worse, it means that less than one-fifth of the monitor is displaying any new information for return visitors. Larger resolutions may not suffer the problem as badly, but the point still stands: five stickies is a bit excessive.

The point of a sticky is:
(1) you want every member to read it because
(2) it's very important, it addresses an FAQ, or both

But when you flood a forum with stickies, ironically you make it that much more likely that people will NOT read them. People are selfish by nature. They don't want to be lectured. (LOL @ irony of what I'm doing here. Thank you for listening ;____; ) They want to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible. If you tell them, "I'll give you treasure but first you need to read this one thread," they're more likely to listen than if you were to tell them, "I'll give you treasure but first you need to read these six threads."

Advice: de-sticky some of these threads, please.

Why: with fewer stickies, people are more likely to pay attention to the stickies. With too many stickies, it becomes a "sticky block" of text which people's eyes tend to glaze over as they look for the forum's first non-sticky thread.

More Advice:

1. you don't need four months' worth of upcoming releases stickied. A single two-month sticky should be good enough. I could understand temporarily having both stickied once we reached Week 7 or Week 8 of a two-week period, but any sooner is just clutter. If people want to talk, they'll post in that thread. The odds of somebody posting a dupe thread for products which don't even come out for over two months are low.

2. Does anyone seriously read the Hentai Anime List thread anymore? It isn't updated and it isn't complete even by 2007 standards. I'm not saying it was a bad thread. It was a great thread. But "was" is the key word here. I don't think it needs to be a sticky anymore.

3. Does the "Do Not Upload" list really need to be a global thread? I can understand it needing to be posted in the Rules forum and in the Torrent and Direct Download forums. But I don't see why it would need to be posted, let alone stickied, in the Hentai Discussion forum.

4. Wouldn't the AGTH tutorial sticky now be better suited for the Tec Support forum? Why is it a sticky in the first place? I confess to having asked about it not but a few months ago, but I don't think I'm the rule. I think I'm the exception: I almost never see people asking questions about ripping the game text from eroge, and I think that if anyone wanted help with this he would go to Tech Support first and Hentai Discussion second.

And just like that, Hentai Discussion goes from having five stickies to having only one.

Thoughts? Comments? Criticisms? Alternate plans?

[redrooster]

three threads released from being sticky, last posts partly done in 2007 though. I hope it´s o.k. that way...

[elgringo14]

I don't think 5 stickies in one section WAS too much, I've seen worse.

[Sakunyuusha]

That's like saying that it's unimportant if a man is 100 lbs overweight because you've seen the amazing 1000-lb hippopotamus-man. Being overweight is bad for your health whether it's 20 lbs or 200, and having too many stickies is having too many stickies.

Personally, I think 2 is the limit. When you have 3 or more stickies, I think people begin to ignore all of them (as one chunk) and their eyes hunt for the first non-sticky thread.

For forums where you feel it's important to have more than two threads stickied, I think the best solution is to make one thread a sticky and call it the Common Threads thread. And inside that sticky, a mod updates the top post (sort of like how red updates his anime lists), and the top post is a list of all the important threads by category. Like ... (making this up)

Rules:
Akiba-Online's Rulebook
Top 10 Rules
Rules for BitTorrent
Requests

Requests:
Where do they belong?
How do you write a good request?

Famous A-O Discussions, Debates, or Arguments
Japan to ban rape from hentai
Japanese citizenship
chompy first 'netizen' to set foot on moon



You get the idea. ;p :)

[Sakunyuusha]

Back to old habits again. :|

Today's date: September 26, 2009.

Current sticky coverage:
(1) September & October 2009
(2) November & December 2009
(3) January & February 2010

Seriously -- who on earth is already looking that far ahead at 2010 that it'd warrant a sticky? Personally I think even November is off the radar: most people are concerned about the current month's releases, the next month's releases, and the previous month's releases (if they missed them), and that's it. Very very very very very few people sit down and do their hentai homework looking months and months ahead of schedule to see what's in the works. That's fine that they do that, but since they're so few in number, it seems hard to justify a sticky which affects the entire community.

[elgringo14]

Japanese companies can plan their releases as far as 6 months in advance, so there is some reason to have that.

I'm not sure that one extra sticky "affects the entire community", only one individual (and always the same) seems to bother apparently.

Seriously Sakun, don't you think you're asking for unsignificant things, there is not 10 stickies, just damn 3. And even so, there is no such tremendeous activity in the hentai discussion section, that you have to search in page 2 every day, to scroll down in the page, or whatever you are doing. We're not in Hongfire here.

[redrooster]

I am spending many many hours every month to keep these threads up to date every day. There hardly is any information pool like this in the whole web. And all members and guests interested in hentai are having the profit out of this permanently.

And I am moderating this board more than 12 hours every day. I don´t want to spend more of my time just for searching where the threads have been descending down the pages in the hentai discussion thread. So please call me lazy if you may...

[Sakunyuusha]

Lazy, no. Selfish, yes. There are other moderators who invest much of their time and effort on this forum just as you do, but they do not sticky threads as a matter of personal convenience: they sticky them as a matter of community-wide convenience. If I'm of the minority opinion, then that's one thing; but if I am not, and if most of the regulars in Hentai Discussion don't see a need for a thread for hentai five months from now to be stickied, then I would say that it is indeed selfish of you to make it a sticky so that you are not inconvenienced when trying to locate the thread.

Think of it this way: a sticky is like a global bookmark. It's a bookmark forced on every single member. It is thus reserved only for those threads which most stringently require it. Otherwise, the stickier begins to impose his bookmarking practices on the entire community. It would be like if you chose to bookmark Akiba-Online and Google but I chose to bookmark 2channel and NicoNico Douga. Not only are my bookmarks not showing up, but yours are, and I can't make them go away.

What do you do when you're all alone on wanting something bookmarked? You bookmark it --for real-- in your own web browser. Very, very easy access, and it doesn't impose on anybody else's view of the board.

I know that calling some "selfish" is an offense in and of itself, so I am sorry if you are upset with me for saying so. However, I want to be honest with you. I value our friendship here, and I do not want to lie to you. I honestly think you are being selfish on this matter. And maybe you could say that I am being selfish, too. But the problem with that argument is that my selfishness only affects you, while yours affects the whole community. You have valid solutions to my selfishness (e.g. bookmark the threads on your own), but I have no recourse whatsoever.

[Sakunyuusha]

Here is a proposed alternative suggestion: why not create a subforum within Hentai Discussion called "Calendar" or "Release Dates" or something similar? Every single on of your Upcoming Releases threads could be there. They would be very easy for everybody to locate and it would no longer create a need for stickies.

Alternatively, you could create a subforum called "Calendar" or "Release Dates" at the level two branches above the first proposal, i.e. at the same level as "Discussion" and "Requests" and "Torrents," and this subforum could then have its own subforums, one for each media format: hentai, JAV, so on and so forth. This way, the redrooster of JAV (if he exists, and whoever he may be) would also benefit.

[elgringo14]

I propose to change nothing with the stickies. So it's one against one.