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Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 7:51 pm
by psycopathicteen
It just feels strange because SNESdev was one of the most popular forums on this website.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:13 pm
by dougeff
You've just been 'otherized'.

(to be considered abnormal, no longer part of the 'us' but part of the 'them').

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:21 pm
by never-obsolete
The site is NesDev, so any other systems would be considered other.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:33 pm
by Sik
I guess it feels as odd because there isn't really a SNES counterpart to this site (so the better question would be: why not do that then?). But admittedly the biggest problem is that burying it inside another subforum will make it harder to reach when compared to the systems that don't have such a subsubforum.

EDIT: by the way, if we're going to talk about reorganization: shouldn't the homebrew subforum be placed higher? It strikes me as odd that it's the fifth link when the whole point of this site is to encourage making NES homebrew.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:53 pm
by tokumaru
Sik wrote:shouldn't the homebrew subforum be placed higher?
Well, that's for actual ongoing projects, and to begin a project most people have to learn about NES programming, graphics and music first, so it kinda makes sense. But then even the newbie section should be higher, and NESemdev lower... I don't know.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 9:08 pm
by Sik
While that's true, it's also true that making the homebrew section more visible could encourage people to aim for that instead. (and yeah, the newbie section probably deserves being first, since whatever is the first link is what newcomers are going to notice first)

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 9:35 pm
by Memblers
Two Bender avatars in a row made me want to read those posts in Bender's voice. :)

The SNES section could warrant subforums of it's own, it's unarguably related to the NES, and there are a lot of interesting stuff to follow with hardware, music, game dev posts. I'd imagine most regular users are using "view unread posts", but the different categories seem like it'd be more approachable to new users, because there's a lot there.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 10:43 pm
by Sik
"View unread posts" is a link that's rather easy to forget about and I bet a lot of people are only interested on what's going on in a few subforums. Dunno what other people do, but I imagine that the most common thing is to actually check which threads in the subforums you care about have the unread icon. In this sense, subsubforums are actually quite annoying.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2016 6:35 am
by Drew Sebastino
Does anyone even look at the sub forums? I just look at "View active topics".

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2016 7:49 am
by Sik
I guess I'm the only one who does? =/ (probably because it's much faster to scan for orange icons without clicking on anything, if an icon is white then I know to not even bother checking further)

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2016 8:41 am
by freem
You're not alone, Sik; I do the same thing as you.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2016 8:43 am
by Bregalad
Me too. I scan for orange icons. Now there is weird icons and I don't undersand what's going on anymore.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2016 9:37 am
by Drag
Chiming in for "View unread posts". It's easier when your interest is broad enough to cover several subforums here, and when you visit frequently enough for the list to stay just one page.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2016 9:53 am
by Sik
OK so it looks like this is split into two major groups?
  • Those scanning the icons
  • Those checking a list of unread posts
The problem being for the former. There's no way to tell if the new posts belong to one of the subsubforums until you go into the subforum (or skip straight into the subsubforum and hope you guessed right). In either case it means an extra barrier that didn't use to be there earlier. I assume that this wouldn't be anywhere as bad if the subsubforums links still showed whether they have something new or not from the index.

Re: Why was SNESdev relocated under "other retro dev"?

Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2016 10:04 am
by tokumaru
That's one of those controversial things that are bound to split people no matter what. Should we vote on this?

Personally, I'm not bothered by the extra level because I'm not particularly active in any of the forums that got demoted. Not surprising, considering I'm very focused on NESdev'ing, and the demoted forums are the ones that don't have much to do with that.