Old games on LFG map

etropic

Is there any plan to 'trim' the listed games that show when LFG? There are some 50 in my area, and clicking through the newest games I can find are haven't been touched in two years. More in over 5 years. Its' hard to tell how much active use is actually going on.

UselessTriviaMan

I concur. Is it possible to purge old, unused campaigns after a long period of dormancy? I see a LOT of campaigns on the map that were named but never actually filled out in any way.

Unknown

Rather than purge them from the system they should be placed into an On Hiatus status and we should have options to select when searching to look at "Planning, Playing, On Hiatus, and Complete" individually to help narrow down what might be worth jumping at. I don't think we should clear out all the old ones, there are some Complete Campaigns here on OP that have a slew of great stuff that it would be terrible to lose due to it not being active.

Just my two cents on the issue.

Sorwen

I agree with alex_redeye. There are some really nice Campaigns that have finished that give great ideas both in the site and the story. And some are just fun to look at. :)

etropic

Can't disagree with that suggestion. Although content management can get tricky when you have to preserve everything forever. The filter option would be ok. In the end though, having hundreds in 'On Hiatus' causes it's own noise. There should probably be a no activity limit or something.

Anyway, at this point I'm just glad to see that there are at least 3 other current users who are not in my campaign!

twiggyleaf

Alex_Redeye idea. Agree.

twigs.

GamingMegaverse

I would just like to not have a blank space for the systems again.

Unknown

Well, what could be addressed to have less clog in the "On Hiatus" category would be to simply make a new bucket called "Inactive" that can be associated to some kind of defined threshold of time passed since any kind of edit (without the game having been manually placed into "On Hiatus" or "Completed" by the GM as I feel these should act almost as a block to getting pushed into the "Inactive" bucket).

Mixed with all of this we should have an option to select Campaigns that are specifically "Looking for Players" as an extra filter that can be applied along with any of the other filters. This opens up a few more credentials as searchable which should in turn help to narrow down the items presented on a search. This also keeps things available on the site so we don't have to be concerned about losing some of the outstanding content that exists on the site.

Pushing even further, we could consider adding in another bucket called "Resources" that would apply to a lot of pages on OP. I have looked at tons that were setup by the community as a dump for plots, npcs, css, etc. If these pages could be kicked to their own kind of bucket it would also stand to clear up some of the searching functions here on the site.

Finally, we could consider having some kind of community interactive voting system that could be used on the Campaigns. This could be used to set a threshold that ensures a particular page will never be removed from OP as the community has voted on its ongoing value. This would now open the doors to add a clause to the Terms of Service that expresses that a page that gets eventually dumped to Inactive may have only a certain time frame before it is removed wholesale (which can be of benefit to OP due to storage space aspects of keeping unneeded content around) unless the Campaign has reached a certain number of votes to protect it from the removal algorithm.

Combining all of this you get a system that encourages community members to engage more with other Campaigns that are up on the site, and help to leave some of the in house moderation in the hands of the members which pulls workloads from the staff. It should present you with a better layout when approaching searches and have added benefit when trying to find a game you can get in on. Finally, it poses a way to clear out unneeded content while preserving the diamonds in the rough that have popped up over the years of OP existing.

Oh, as a final mention, the voting system could also start getting tied into the Campaign of the Month voting as well which would pull a little more weight off the staff and clear up the messy way we presently have had to try and get Campaigns promoted (saving that kind of voting for the Campaign of the Year).

So, overall I feel like this is probably the best route for OP to try and make their way down as it feels like it will have the most added benefits to the community and site as a whole. These bits and bobs could be tweaked as needed and the framework leave a decent amount of room for that at a developer level. I think that is about all I have to say on this matter.