🤔 Thinking about tags

I'm starting to think about tags - not necessarily game tags, but just getting used to the idea of using them more.

e.g. If users saw that their games were open on the My Games page then they might remember to close them.

Pills?



Or parallelograms? Parallelograms are a GP thing.

I like the parallelogram. And I think this would be a worthwhile idea. Though if I could ask for an improvement to the My Games page, it would be adding links to the forums as well as the Details pages.

Do many of us not treat 'Full' as the same thing as 'Closed'?

...and it kinda works like that. But if people drop out of the game then it automatically becomes advertised again whether you wanted new players or not.

I'm trying to encourage people to stop advertising games as open when they're not open. This is so that the "Join a Game" page can start working again. At the moment we funnel new users there, they find a game, click "Apply to join" but they might as well have clicked "Apply for disappointment".

Just reminding GMs that they're still advertising games might gently nudge them. @skeptical_stun showed me his "join a game" page yesterday, and it had one of my games on there - and I definitely didn't mean it to be.

Yeah. I am not saying it correct, but people treat it that way because the software makes it act that way.
They might be surprised when they suddenly get applications to a game they thought were closed.

Maybe the Full tag should not act the same? We don't have a waitlist mechanic, but if players could keep applying even after the game was 'Full' but get placed in such a queue for consideration it would create a distinction between being Full and Closing a game, and incline the GM to Close it.

I am not a fan of automatically closing game --when the game hits Full, or after a time-- no GM should find themselves surprised that their game is closed while they were waiting for more players.

Once the game is full, maybe we can add a nagbar (like the 'someone applied' one) that the GM needs to deal with. The nagbar also could come up for any game that the site thinks are dormant but still Open as well.

Yeah. The random applications and the nag message happens at the moment. That's what normally causes me to close a game.

...and then I have to compose a PM telling the person I'm sorry but the game is full.

This was Antiproduct's first experience with the site - it was for my DoIP game. But I have a bunch of others like this in my outbox where I've had to apologise to new users for my "not really open" games. This is a pain for the GM and disappointing for the player.

Working out how to join games is confusing enough without needing that. We do need a fix. :(

There are helpful players who try to direct new players to the right place and explain how things work, but many who play on the internet are not the types to enter with fanfare and an introduction, so they are left skulking around trying to work things out for themselves. (Please don't automate an introduction for them, that would be considered a violation or privacy.).

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I know I joined half a century ago, but did not say anything, just looked around and decided this was not the place for me (the site was rather broken then, and also coincidentally, broken each time I came back every few years).
Since I did not speak to the people and only judged the site based on its software merits, I did not see the value and went elsewhere.

Good point about not auto-closing a "Full" game. I've been accepted to full games before with the GM asking me to apply only for me to have to tell them to invite me instead.
It seems like a sensible feature in theory: Game is full, no more applications
But in practice, I think it gets more in the way, rather than help.

Nudging the GMs from the system side to close manually seems more sensible.