What is this forum?

I'm interested to see how this evolves/works.

The majority of my 14,000+ posts on AP.net were on front page News articles. A big part of AP for me was talking about that new single that was just released, a tour announcement, etc, without feeling like I was missing out by just dropping in randomly to the Fall Out Boy thread without reading 10 pages of backstory.

Here's to the future.

 

I may be missing it - but is there a direct link to the corresponding article discussion on the articles themselves? I also feel like I did most of my posting on the news stories.

 

Not yet. Not sure if i will. Separating the two is very important to me right now. The stress of managing the news comments was one of the things that was hardest on me the past few years.

I know quite a few people did, but to me, to want to keep publishing, it's important to me to make this step and make it this much of a delineation at the start. It was active design goal to separate them as much as I did.

 

That makes sense too. For the few news post I did post in - I probably closed far more because of what the comments section had become. Thanks for the clarification.

And I didn't mean for that to come across upset at all, either. It's just funny that fundamentally changing what has become a routine for almost 10 years can leave you a little confused. Congratulations on the new direction. Love the look.

 

No, totally makes sense, no worries! Thanks for reading! I really do think this will lead to something better all around. From the forums to the content itself.

 

Really excited to see this thing evolve, the main page and everything looks great Jason!

 

All of my posts were done on the home page. I never used the forms. It will be interesting.

 

So essentially, if I wanted to be super boring, I could use the Article Discussion forum to see all the news from the main page, but without the beautiful formatting?

 

Apparently not. The posts in the Articles Forum contain excerpts of the news articles, but they don't show the entire article, you can't expand to see the rest of the article, and they don't link to the full article. So in order to know what the article says and write a comment, you have to read the article on the homepage, navigate to the appropriate forum post, and submit your comment.

(Not knocking this format. Just trying to explain/make sure I'm not understanding incorrectly.)

 

Posted these elsewhere but worth sharing here:

 

honestly, i'll probably be here for the most part. its kinda like the old site... and i mostly only commented on the front page news stories.

 

This seems like a huge step in the wrong direction. The thing I loved most about the absolutepunk community was being able to easily read other's opinions and join in on the conversations. Having the discussions in a completely separate area as the actual news posting will most likely lead to way less discussion and unfortunately, way less of me coming here to get my music news.

 

I'm on board with the separation. I do feel like the fact that you have to make a few extra clicks to comment on a specific news post will force people to think for an extra 5 seconds before posting, which could (hopefully) deter some of the more idiotic/problematic comments.

That and by his own admission, it'll help keep Jason in a healthy mental place, which, you know, is pretty neat as well, I guess.

 

The only place I commented on (and read the comments) was on the news articles itself so I'm very happy that this forum exists. And I'll check it often too. Hopefully we can bring the news discussion here without the bad stuff that the older format allowed.

Also, I get that you want to keep things separated Jason (and I hope people come here to discuss stuff) but if the transition doesn't happen I think linking the respective thread on the article might work. I totally respect your choice of course and I like it as long as there's a place to make Tom Delonge jokes of course ahah

EDIT: Also, speaking of spam accounts, have you thought of employing a system similar to Neogaf where you can only register with a paid email address? (or a college one for example).

 

Nailed it.

 

I'm not sure I quite understand how this will work....this is the biggest change for me by far not being able to comment on front page news.

 

Was very late when I posted this last night. It does make more sense to me now. I guess the only thing I'm still a little confused with is the point of this particular thread?

Edit: Nvm I get it now. I get confused easily on mobile sometimes.

 

Thanks so much for setting this up. I know the comment threads were kind of the bane of your existence on AP.net, but I appreciate your understanding that a lot of us come here in good part to see not only the news articles but people's observations and commentary about them. I just noticed the little indicators when you mouseover the news threads, and that's how I ended up on the forum section. A subtle but good way to get you straight to the comments.

On the bright side, you don't see how many comments there are on the news thread, so that will deter you from using comments as a metric for popularity

Completely unrelated, but what do you think about providing access to the archived version of AP.net to supporting members? I think quite a few people (myself included) would find that to be a nice bonus for financially supporting the site. You could do the same thing moving forward with paywalling access to posts that are, say, older than 6 months or something like that.