Hello all,

So as I'm sure all of you know, BW will be receiving a patch 1.17 as the prepatch is mentioned on the front page. While this isn't confirmed, what some of you may not know is that according to the Korean BW scene, blizzard is working on a remastered version of BW. Rumors include high resolution sprites, revamped interface, custom hotkeys while keeping how the game plays the same. Considering the size of the Korean BW scene, and the fact that blizzard has consistently posted job offers about revamping their legacy games, it seems plausible. As such, this would be an opportunity for SEN to revitalize some if people care. I understand that most of us are well into our 20's, 30's and 40's at this point, and most might be okay with the idea of SEN just fading into the distance, but in the case that some of you do care, it is time to start thinking about it. I personally have no steak in the matter, I am not going to go back to map making, and I only pop in to this site every couple of months, but nevertheless I thought it would be good to bring up the matter as some food for thought. This site and map making was a big part of my life back in like 2003-2007.

If anyone actually feels like doing something about it, I'd recommend trimming down the forums majorly, removing all of the SC2 stuff (leave that to sc2mapster), and the melee stuff (leave that to teamliquid). Also an updated modern skin would be nice.

The planets skin was beautiful, the planets skin has not been adapted, it's SENs biggest problem

Also "steak"

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 11 2016, 1:34 am by jjf28.

Skins are fine IMO, as they all looks pretty modern to me.

Just want to correct this, no one is claiming that there will be custom hotkeys.

It's silly to remove a bunch of forums and content.

No its not.

Just make like 5 forums tots and improve the shoutbox.

Sc1 mapping
Sc2 mapping
Sc1 modding
Null
Tech

What else does this site use other than that? LOL

I don't think collapsing the forums into a smaller number of groups would be particularly helpful for any goal. To me it seems a pretty neutral move activity-wise, but would make things that were previously sorted to some extent, harder to find. If SEN finds dev-time we might consider a nice event-based/polling-based site design (full notification mode!), perhaps a memeral reward system so we know who's the dankest, and the many bootstrap components we could be abusing

I think it would be beneficial to condense some of the subforums, especially those that are less trafficked like SC1/2. When we do get the remaster many of the users will be interested in that alone. Also, depending on how much they do change in the remaster compared to the original it may be a good idea to create subforums dedicated to the remastered only. If there's significant changes some SC1 posts may become incompatible with the remastered version.

I agree with culling the forums. As long as people are being pointed in the direction of SEN numbers should swell. Once east is fixed official channel bots should go back up too.

Trimming the forums makes sense, but don't remove content.

I would do (from top to bottom):
* One SC2 general forum
* One contests forum
* One SC2 assistance forum
* One SC2 melee forum (maybe just merge with general forum?)
* One SC1 general forum
* One SC1 terrain forum
* One SC1 UMS forum: merge assistance, theory and ideas, and tools
* One SC1 map showcase / production forum
* One SC1 modding forum
* One SC1 melee forum
* Keep all the Other forums (hard to see how to combine them, or maybe just get rid of 'Serious Discussion' and merge into Lite, because the rules about strict citation etc haven't been applied in years and frankly were pretentious anyway)
* The wiki and clans forums don't need to exist; I think these you could just delete or archive somewhere.

I think that the SEN is NOT the place to go for anything SC2 related, so why are we keeping the SC2 forums here?

Not sure why we would cut down modding or mapping for SC1. Doing so would be kind of a disgrace to SEN itself as we used to have a very large modding community.

I do think we should merge the "StarCraft 1" and "Starcraft 1 Melee" categories together. Not entirely sure what is the point of not having them combined.

Then we have SC2 which currently has three categories consisting of 12 subforums which, combined, have less posts than our SC1 UMS Mapmaking Assistance subforum. I would like to see these all merged into a single category with five subforums at most. SC2 Discussion, SC2 Melee, SC2 Assistance, and SC2 Showcase would probably be enough. This has been bugging me for about 3+ years now when we realized SC2 just didn't have a mapping community like SC1 did. At least not here or with any of us, SC2Mapster seemed like it was doing alright with it though.

That alone would greatly cut down the length of the forums page.

+1.

For reducing the number of forums shown, SEN alrady supports that on a per user basis:
Settings -> Display:


So everyone can decide how much they see, given that the topics are in the correct categories, which is the case for all but maybe a couple exceptions.


Planning and doing the suggested mergers will not only leave some people unhappy because they wanted different changes or no changes at all, but it also costs a lot of time which someone has to do. Resources that are better spent elsewhere.

Some of these forums have not been touched in years though, not months. That seems more like nobody has put thought into this kind of topic.

Does the person/s capable of effecting any of these changes even read forum posts anymore?

I think the banner needs to be changed. A newcomer coming to this site won't even know wtf this site is about. They could infer it's about Starcraft based on the screenshots. But if they are unaware of the map editor's name they wouldn't be able to connect Staredit with Brood War. And they don't know that this is a UMS community.

Banner should have a slogan reading something like "number 1 SCBW custom map community" or other such names. I'd be hesitant to use UMS either because that's a confusing acronym for newbies. "Custom maps" is more readily understood.

Except SEN is not number one.

How about most pretentious SC1 mapping community?

What's number one?

What, pray, rival SC1 mapping community is beating us?

Being the best doesn't necessarily mean you're good.

That said, I don't think it's necessary to corroborate promotional taglines like '#1 denny's waitress'. You can just slap it on the header and people will at least know to expect shit pancakes. Same goes for putting '#1 SCBW Custom Content Community' (since 'custom mapping' isn't all we do around here).

As for forum consolidation, I think it's fine to merge inactive subforums. Archiving the clan threads is probably a good idea, too, and if the wiki is a dead effort, archiving that might be prudent as well. If we can find something that we agree on as far as forum organisation, I don't see a problem with trimming down.

Bigger issue imo is that nobody knows SEN exists. If the web presence were higher, we'd probably have more people.

CPR SEN anyone?