It's Time for Real Change

Discussion Forum Overhaul + New Administrator

Hey all!

As per our 2025 roadmap[x.com] that we released last year, we have spent January recruiting our new administrator and also a second writer, and we ended up concluding the process much quicker than planned. We have our brand new administrator and writer installed right now in the form of High Caffeine (also known as Caff). Caff has been with the group since around 2019 and has been an active member in our Discord and also a Patron of ours, so I'm thrilled to have him join our admin team. Do please be sure to give him a warm welcome! Caff will also aim to write some articles for me during my more particularly busy weeks.

Next up, which we have officially started today in the form of internal talks as to what it may look like is our Discussion and forum overhaul. We touched upon some of the details in our Roadmap announcement two months ago, but in short, over the next few months, we intend to:

• Add in more forums to help better organise discussions being had.
  
• Adding in a forum of all of our announcements to make finding older announcements easier.
  
• Our pinned discussions offering advice and guidance and tips will be rewritten, as they are all outdated.
  
• The Steam Game Sharing Thread will be retired in the near future, due to its very existence encouraging more disorganised discussions that are tricky to keep tabs on.

We have been discussing what kinds of forums we should start to introduce and I'm always keen to get community feedback where possible. After a discussion with Occular Malice, we came up with the following forums to help split our discussions up more appropriately:

• Rules & Information - Our forum for our rules and our how to help threads.
  
• Asset Flips
  
• Dirty Devs - Discussing a developer/studio more as a whole rather than a particular "game" or whose anti-consumer practices may encompass topics that go into more than one forum.
  
• Dead Games - Alerting of games that are multiplayer only with no players and/or early access games which have been abandoned.
  
• Review Manipulation - This includes review bombing incidents (positive and negative) and exposing fake reviews.
  
• Scams/Fraudulent Activity
  
• Steam Store Policies & Updates - Policy changes or developments with the store as a whole, or generally talk about Steam's stance on "x"
  
• Copyright/Trademark/Legal Issues
  
• Censorship
  
• Harassment
  
• The Positive Pool - A place to share good games, good developers or good gaming experiences.
  
• Other

Over the next few weeks, me and the mod team are going to be working through on a Sheet to work out where to move all of the threads we have currently, as opposed to moving them on a gradual basis just to make sure we can do the decision making before moving anything and to ensure disruption to our regular forum activity is mitigated as much as possible, so instead of a 2 month period where we are seen to be moving threads back and forth and a new forum popping up every now and then, we can hopefully aim for it to take less than a week.

Of course, all of these are just tentative, and we're keen to hear everyone else's feedback! Are there any other forum suggestions? Anything you like with this plan or dislike? Do let us know!

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Special thanks to our Patrons Stefan, Luke and Nin-Nin for their continued support! Become a Patron today by visiting our page either via my X profile's pinned post or through visiting our #Roles channel on Discord!

Also, I've started posting a lot more frequently on both X and Bluesky with both Steam related news and gaming news as a whole, I've had really positive responses on these, so if you're keen for an active feed on both Steam indie news and also notable AAA news, do check out my profiles on those sites!

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E-mail me: mellowonline1@gmail.com