Life In 19x19

I've been thinking a bit about the organization of the subforums, along with the types of posts people generally make on the forum.

There are many purposes for this go forum, and people make a wide range of posts. Personally, though, I find the "Study Group" type of posts most informative. It seems to be the category to use if you want to learn or show new joseki, if you have an interesting go problem, if you want to talk about endgame, if you want to talk about fighting strategies, ... The list goes on and on.

But for all of these different types of study, we have a single subforum named "Study Group" to throw everything into. It's even somewhat difficult to spot amidst the large number of existing subforums:

Introductions and Guidelines
Off Topic
Announcements
General Go Chat
Beginners
Amateurs
Professionals
Go Rules
Forum/Site Suggestions and Bugs
Creative writing
Tournaments
Game Analysis
Study Group
Teachers/Club Leaders
Study Journals
1-on-1 Malkovich games
Big Brother Malkovich games
Rengo Games
Other versions of turn-based games
Go Gear
Go Books
Go Book Reviews
Computer Go
Gobans and other equipment
Trading Post
New Products/Upgrades/Sales
Go Club Discussions
American Go Association Forum
Australian Go Association
European Go Federation Forum
Singapore Weiqi Association
IGS
ASR League
Insei League Events
KGS
Turn Based Servers
Tygem
WBaduk
Kaya.gs

My opinion is, this single category doesn't do justice to the broad range of topics we could be discussing. As a result, people post very interesting questions about joseki variations, for example, and title the post as "joseki question", which is totally reasonable given that such a title distinguishes the question from the wide range of topics that could be included in the "Study Group" category.

The organization of the subforums may seem to make little difference. But my hypothesis is, if we add more specific "Study Group" questions, it will encourage a wider variety of "Study Group" discussions, which I think would be great. For example, if we had a subforum called "4-4 point josekis", I think it would encourage discussion on such specific topics. Even if we had a subforum called "Joseki", it'd be a step in the right direction.

In the end, it's the content of posts that matter, but given the list of subforums we have, I'd personally like to see more of a focus on study material.

I think your idea is great.
I have been around for a very short time and I think I myself created threads in wrong places... though I can blame only myself for that, being pretty lazy and not taking that much time to explore the forum seriously before posting anything...
I'll try to do better in the future, but I can already say that subforums about specific areas like joseki tsumego and such would be very useful to post/consult tactical information.

Dontbtme wrote:Bored with skillful play? Watch my blunders on my YouTube Channel

I just wanted to say, they may not help anyone improve their go, but your videos are certainly entertaining.

Joseki, fuseki, endgame subforums? Though I wonder how easy topics are to bin.

What about histogramming Game Analysis into subforums by ranks?

Study group subforums by study topics (such as "joseki") are dubious because such would overlook many unlisted study topics. However, I agree that "study group" is too broad. I would prefer some subforums like these:

Research (such as exploring new opening theory)
General Study (such as studying general aspects of openings)
Particular Study (such as studying a particular opening position)

Currently, lots of thread titles pretend to be general (such as "opening study") while they are, in fact, about a particular study (such as a particular opening position). I need to open every such thread to find out if it interests me. A distinction between general and particular would help me greatly. Contrarily, not everybody wants to read research because related threads can easily be difficult to understand and seem long and boring for uninterested people. Putting research in an extra subforum easily solves this problem. The forum Game Analysis is unsuitable for non-game study of specific positions.

So currently much occurs in General Go Chat because Study Group is too unspecific and General Go Chat is the defensive choice. Overall I think that currently by far too little study occurs on L19 also for a great part because Study Group is too unspecific to encourage much study.

This is a volume dependent question.

A "heap" might be an adequate data structure is there are only a handful of things in it but not if there are a million.

So is the volume of messages to this section of the forum so high as to justify breaking into subfora?

Mike Novack wrote:This is a volume dependent question.

A "heap" might be an adequate data structure is there are only a handful of things in it but not if there are a million.

So is the volume of messages to this section of the forum so high as to justify breaking into subfora?

I thought of this in the opposite way. While I do feel that the category is too broad (and thread titles are sometimes vague), my underlying ambition toward more specific subforums is to promote a higher volume of "study group" threads.

Maybe I am overly optimistic, but I felt that if, for example, we had a subforum for new 3-4 point joseki, perhaps people would be more inclined to consider posting threads on new 3-4 joseki.

Maybe it's not the case, but I was hoping that more study related subforums would encourage a higher volume of study-related posts.

Kirby wrote: I thought of this in the opposite way. While I do feel that the category is too broad (and thread titles are sometimes vague), my underlying ambition toward more specific subforums is to promote a higher volume of "study group" threads.

I just hit the view unread posts button. I barely register what our forums are until I need to make a new post. If there was just one forum called "lifein19x19" I would be fine with it.

If I need to search for specific posts, I use the search button.

oren wrote: I just hit the view unread posts button. I barely register what our forums are until I need to make a new post. If there was just one forum called "lifein19x19" I would be fine with it.

If I need to search for specific posts, I use the search button.

I suppose I use the forum in the same way - I don't bother looking at the subforums much. So perhaps it would be better for me to simply say that I'd like to see more "study group" type of posts, because that's what I'm ultimately interested in.

OTOH, maybe the only way to get this to happen is to make more such posts myself.

oren wrote:

Kirby wrote: I thought of this in the opposite way. While I do feel that the category is too broad (and thread titles are sometimes vague), my underlying ambition toward more specific subforums is to promote a higher volume of "study group" threads.

I just hit the view unread posts button. I barely register what our forums are until I need to make a new post. If there was just one forum called "lifein19x19" I would be fine with it.

If I need to search for specific posts, I use the search button.

I also just look at the new posts list without any interest in what specific forum anything happens to be in. My impression from reading questions posted is that many people who ask questions just post them where ever they feel like without looking for a particular sub-forum to post in.

I thought the following might be of interest in regard to the question of creating subforums of Study Group. This morning I did a search of several terms in that forum. Here are the results.
Sorry about the alignment.

Could we crib sensei's library's board search, or tag posts with boards or something?

Beginner/Amateur forums have some redundancy with study group, I think. I wonder if some people worry whether a post will be accessible to their rank.

Joaz' Index to useful posts ... is something really awesome.

(First of all, thanks for the moral support daal I appreciate it)

RobertJasiek wrote:Study group subforums by study topics (such as "joseki") are dubious because such would overlook many unlisted study topics.

Even if it didn't list all the appropriate topics, I, for one, would be glad to be able to consult such a subforum since it wouldn't be convenient to just use the search button to gather information on a specific subject, as Bill Spight already demonstrated:

Bill Spight wrote:

Code: Select all

Term                                      Occurrences
-----

Study group searches

joseki						too common
question					too common
problem					too common
[...]

tsumego					725
fuseki					703
opening					610
endgame					674
yose						182
attack					481
[...]

I'm quite new to this forum and I suspect there's a lot of past information here I could use... But as we saw, words like 'joseki', 'tsumego' and 'attack' while describing whole subjects on their own, are also used in everyday conversation on Lifein19x19...
On the other hand:

Loons wrote:Could we crib sensei's library's [...] tag posts [...] or something?

If it was feasible, that would be great! Not only being able to put some tags on a thread would help us in organizing information but it would do so without worrying at overlapping topics or subtopics, e.g. 'fuseki', joseki' and 'star point'...
Tags like 'beginner', 'double digit kyu', 'single digit kyu' and 'dan level' could be applied as well...

I think it is an interesting idea. One worry that occurred to me is that I think I feel more ready in general to jump into a forum if it seems there is a good amount of current activity. My thought is maybe if I saw a bunch of separate forums but the date listed at the top was months ago for each of them, I might feel discouraged from posting there. So, I think on my end if I see a forum that says "study group" and there's lots of current threads on a wide variety of topics, I will feel more encouraged to get in there. If on the other hand I see a variety of subforums it increases my worry about which one to post in and if some of them have old dates I will feel less enthusiasm about posting there.

I think this is kind of a way of repeating Mike Novack's point above. I like how he put it. If there was really enough content being generated in each of the forums it might be ok, but it does seem there is some risk that it could decrease activity rather than increasing it.

Kirby wrote:I thought of this in the opposite way. While I do feel that the category is too broad (and thread titles are sometimes vague), my underlying ambition toward more specific subforums is to promote a higher volume of "study group" threads.

Do you have any data indicating that people would love to make more "study" posts but are thwarted by the lack of specific enough forum?

Personally, as somebody who just click the "unread" button, I think the idea by itself is interesting, but I would approach it differently. I think a preferable solution would be tags rather than bins (i.e forums.) Each post/thread could be tagged with multiple tags, like "#joseki #taisha #advanced" or something, and the search could then easily filter exactly what you need no matter how the forums are organized. This would allow for a smaller number of broad-topic forums which would still be usable in a narrow context.

#WhatDoYoThinkAboutThat?

PS>
Not sure how hard/easy something like this would be to code into the phpBB, though.