Good morning/noon/afternoon/evening/night/day (I hope I didn’t miss any timezones ) everyone!
@jomaxro here, and for those of you who do not know me I am the newest member of the moderator team here on the Stonehearth Discourse forum (along with @Geoffers747, @SteveAdamo, @Relyss, and @8BitCrab). I wanted to take some time to write a bit about the current State of the Discourse, what you can expect to see in the coming days/weeks/months, and open the floor to your thoughts on where we are, and where you would like us to be a year from now.
##Background
Some personal background first: I have been following Stonehearth for close to a year now. Bit the bullet in June shortly after it arrived on Steam, and have been hooked ever since. Lurked around the Discourse for a while, and came aboard in September. And on the first of November (wow, almost 30 days! How time flies…) I joined the moderator team. My background (in real life) is in Computer Science and Education, and I also spent significant time working for a computer help desk, so I have some tech support background as well. Enough about me, onto the Discourse!
##Discourse Stats
The Discourse has been around since 2013, existing way back when during the Kickstarter, and continuing to grow to where we are now. Today we are 5500+ users strong, with over 9,000 topics and 141,000 posts. We gain an average of 8 new members every day, and have given each other 178,003 likes! The most popular category is Support (yes, this is a game in active development ), followed by Suggestions and General Discussion.
##Support Category Updates
Being over 2 years old, our Discourse was in need of some TLC (Tender Loving Care), and we started that process this month. If you frequent the Support category, you will hopefully have noticed a few changes. First, we have introduced 2 new subcategories to help manage the large number of reports received. The first is Previous Build Reports
. Over the previous 11 Alphas, especially at the beginning and with the Steam release, many, many reports were created (thank you very much!), but we were not able to keep up with the organization. In order to help ensure that current issues are visible, all threads not updated since the first Alpha 12 release have been moved there. The second is Crash Reports
. We (the moderators) and the devs are always concerned when the game fails to launch or crashes. Crashes were previously housed under the Performance
support category, but that could be deceptive as Performance
tended to include lagging and other gameplay related issues, and a crash report could get lost! Additionally, the information needed to assist with a crash is very different than for lag, so splitting them apart helps insure that we can get all the information needed to provide good support.
###Report Templates
Next, our Bug Report
Category (as well as Crash Report
) have been configured to include the report template by default. That means, if you create a report in one of those 2 categories, you should see the report template appear in the editor before you begin typing. This template is very, very helpful to everyone (the moderators, the devs, and even the community). It is helpful to the moderators as it allows us to route the issue to the proper dev, as well as tag the report. It is helpful to the developers as it includes all of the common information needed to provide a fix and/or support. Finally, it is helpful to the community as it allows everyone to see what the issue is, and like/post if they are seeing the same thing. That being said, please don’t copy an engine error into a bug report and click create. We don’t have any way of helping you if we don’t know what is going on that caused the error!
###Topic Tagging
Lastly for our support category, you may have noticed some new information appearing underneath the topic titles.
These “tags” are a new tool the moderator team is using to help organize the reports that come in as well as provide you, the community, with some useful information. These tags are currently in use in the
Support
category/subcategories. I would like to go over some of the tags you are likely to see so you will know what they mean:
First are tags used to denote the “status” of the report. Each report will likely include a tag for the affected build, for example a13dev2320
would indicate a bug that has been reported in Alpha 13, develop-2320. A typical report would then progress in the following order:
-
confirmed_by_users
- indicates that one or more forum members have replied in the thread with the same bug, and has been confirmed to not be an isolated incident. -
acknowledged_by_devs
- indicates that the bug has been acknowledged by a developer, and they have added it to the running list of issues to resolve. -
fixed_for_next_build
- indicates that the bug has been resolved by a developer, and is set for release in the next build. -
resolved
- indicates that the bug has been resolved and the build with the fix has been released.
There are 4 tags that may be used in place of the above progression:
-
no_longer_applicable
- indicates that the reported issue may have been a bug, but the feature and/or code reported is no longer in use, and thus the bug report is no longer applicable. -
not_a_bug
- indicates that the reported issue was deemed to not be a bug, but perhaps a misunderstood, intended experience. A recent example of this would be reports of “No Daily Reports” which was the result of the added setting for Hearthling limit. -
not_reproducible
- indicates that the reported issue may be a bug, but the developers were not able to recreate the issue in their testing, and thus cannot fix the error. -
duplicate
- indicates that the reported issue is the same as a previously reported bug, and the topics have been merged.
Additionally, a large assortment of tags are used to indicate what the bug appears to be related to, or if certain information, like a log or a save, have been provided. Below is a sample of what you can expect (this list grows/shrinks with the currently reported bugs):
ai
, building
, campaigns
, combat
, crafting
, crash-dmp_provided
, crashes
, desktop_tuesday
, engine
, farming
, hearthling_therapist
, items
, log_provided
, mining
, other
, pathfinding
, performance
, renderer
, save_game_provided
, save-load
, shepard
, sound
, storage
, terrain
, trading
, trapping
, ui
, workers
##Suggestions Category
Now, outside of the support threads, the next area where you should start to see some changes is suggestions. There are over 1,300 separate topics inside of the suggestions category. Some may have already been implemented, some may be completely outdated, and some might be really, really awesome and should be seen by the devs! Whatever the case may be, expect to see some new subcategories added to the Suggestions category, as well as some new tags being applied to the topics. No need to change what you do to create a suggestion: you will still create it as a new topic in the main category. Keep an eye out for these changes in the coming weeks!
##Feedback
Finally, I want to open up this thread to you, the community, which is really what this forum is all about! What do you want to see on the Discourse? What could we (the moderators) do better/differently in the year to come? Do you have any ideas on ways we can make the Discourse better?
#Thanks for reading
To those of you in the United States, I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving with family and friends. To all of our users, I would like to wish you a joyous holiday season and a happy and healthy new year !
-Josh