[SUGGESTION] a sub-forum for user and game server admin communication

I'm wondering whether there can be a sub-forum for the communication between players and game server admins.

Each server would have one thread, and it can be used by admins for announcement, by players for bug report or suggestions.

This sub-forum should be different from "Server Administration", in which admins discuss about configuration.

Having a separate sub-forum (hopefully) makes it easier for new players to find it.

Perhaps it can be called "Game Server Announcement" or "Game Server News" under Community. Or something like it.

Thoughts?

I think IRC is the best medium for this. I already do this with most servers/admins that I already know. Granted, not all servers have their own IRC channel but many admins are already easily reachable on one of the many IRC channels.

I very much like that you were able to quickly giving me feedback and I was able to chat in real time with you to solve a problem.

However, I fear that IRC may be too high a threshold for some new players; its penetration is also much shallower than a browser. We can see a huge difference between the number of IRC users in Xonotic channels and that of Xonotic's player base.

I'm also thinking about an easier way to make announcement, updates, or just list the maps. On IRC, the subject would be too long, or I would have to run an IRC bot, adding maintenance complexity.

How about I try one thread? If I'm the only admin who finds the need, then obviously it doesn't make sense to start a new sub-forum for one person.

But these kind of threads exist already in the Server Administration category.

I understand that and that's what I'm gonna do first.

I'm just saying it's rather difficult for (especially new) users to find it among others.

You should probably prioritize your efforts on players who like the game enough to know how to at least communicate with it's community and not waste time brainstorming how to make things easier for new players that don't know what they really want. Bug reporting capabilities are handy, but how much faith do you have on new players being able to tell apart a bug among properly working features, on a game which takes lot on unintuitive gameplay exploits for granted?

What I'm trying to say is if the Server Administration board is too hard to reach then I think you're advocating for an audience that in the long run doesn't really matter.

Also, don't throw away the IRC suggestion, you can set it so that when someone chats in the server, it sends a copy of the text to the IRC channel and vice versa. It's the easiest way to monitor things that are going on in your server.

Thanks. I definitely like the IRC channel way -- it's interactive, real time, and gets the problem identified quickly. SPLAT proved to me that it's super useful.

Good point about focusing on the players who actually have deeper insights of problems.