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This joint is hoppin'... Can't keep up

José Herring

Lost in Cyberspace
This place is hopping now and I can't keep up. I've lost track of even threads I started for months thinking that the thread died only to find out it's kept going without me.

I just posted a response to a thread and then found out that there was at least 5 or 6 responses on other threads while I was posting my response. Then I realized that this place is hoppin' way more than I remember.

I've missed a lot of threads that I would have been interested in. Get shoved in my face teaser threads that I have no interest in because the thread makes it to zillions pgs before any product is even released.
Is there an effective way to manage interest? Would something like Push notifications work that way I can pay attention only to the threads that I want to pay attention to? I rarely ignore threads maybe that might work on the "something big this way comes" type hype threads. How do you manage your time on the forum to make it most productive?
 
This place is hopping now and I can't keep up. I've lost track of even threads I started for months thinking that the thread died only to find out it's kept going without me.

I just posted a response to a thread and then found out that there was at least 5 or 6 responses on other threads while I was posting my response. Then I realized that this place is hoppin' way more than I remember.

I've missed a lot of threads that I would have been interested in. Get shoved in my face teaser threads that I have no interest in because the thread makes it to zillions pgs before any product is even released.
Is there an effective way to manage interest? Would something like Push notifications work that way I can pay attention only to the threads that I want to pay attention to? I rarely ignore threads maybe that might work on the "something big this way comes" type hype threads. How do you manage your time on the forum to make it most productive?
Use the ignore for threads, I have done this on the new spitfire modular threads that I am not really interested in.

I also "Mark all threads as read" when I have gone through the new threads. I find it easier as I don't have a huge number to look at when I next go to "What's new"
 
This place is hopping now and I can't keep up. I've lost track of even threads I started for months thinking that the thread died only to find out it's kept going without me.

I just posted a response to a thread and then found out that there was at least 5 or 6 responses on other threads while I was posting my response. Then I realized that this place is hoppin' way more than I remember.

I've missed a lot of threads that I would have been interested in. Get shoved in my face teaser threads that I have no interest in because the thread makes it to zillions pgs before any product is even released.
Is there an effective way to manage interest? Would something like Push notifications work that way I can pay attention only to the threads that I want to pay attention to? I rarely ignore threads maybe that might work on the "something big this way comes" type hype threads. How do you manage your time on the forum to make it most productive?
I click Ignore on a ton of threads. Everything about Mac (I'm on Windows), offers from some small sample library producer I've never heard of and have no interest in etc.

Doing the above helps me a lot to keep the flood of new threads under control.
 
I too think it's getting a bit ridiculous and impractical. I wouldn't complain if it was all super productive discussions about actually making music, but a high amount of posts seems to be just people killing time with joking about e.g. buying too many string libraries and then not making music with them etc.. I think some of that would be better moved into a chat, ideally integrated with the forum so that there is no barrier to migrating discussions and the people there don't feel like rejects.

A day or two ago I almost made a comment about a user who made 30 posts in a single thread about an unreleased library, and that came out to nearly 10% of the posts in the whole thread. To me that seems a little excessive...


Is there an effective way to manage interest? Would something like Push notifications work that way I can pay attention only to the threads that I want to pay attention to?
At the top right there is a watch button next to the ignore button. I use that on threads that I made myself or on threads that I have high interest in but that don't get bumped often enough to show up on the latest posts feed over which I normally browse the forum.
 
It's been bugging me, too. Right now, you have to go to page 6 of the Latest Posts listings just to catch up on the last 24 hours. The first two pages don't even complete the last two hours worth of new posts! So if someone asks a question for which only a handful of people might know the answer, then unless one of that handful is monitoring the forum within hours of when the question was asked, the thread will quickly get lost in obscurity.

I don't know the solution, because almost all the threads in Latest Posts seem to be legit topics. There are a number of threads where the responses have devolved into chat, which I'm trying to lessen, but that's tricky, because declaring certain conversation to be "useless chat" is controversial. People get very touchy about it, and in many cases, seem to honestly not understand the difference, which means long conversations on my end, not to mention hurt feelings on their end.
 
One thing I’ve noticed is that the number of small developers seems to be growing steadily and thus so is the total number of offers posted by same developers here on the forum.

Not saying it’s a bad thing and I don’t really have an answer to it, but it certainly is contributing heavily to the daily volume of new posts.

Try going to the Latest Posts-page and start counting how many of those posts are by small developers.
 
It certainly would be a touchy subject to cut the playful banter but I found the suggestions here very helpful so far. I was having a bit of FOMO but putting certain speculation threads on ignore is really a good idea.

Also, changing my behavior a bit. I mean by now people are aware of the fact that I'm a witty and funny guy, I don't need to prove that over and over again with silly but humorous post. :)

Also, looking at my own posting habits, commenting my opinion on stuff that I don't even own. It's one thing to ask for information, it's another to offer an opinion on something that I don't even own. That's just a wasted post.

The forum has grown up from a free for all to where I need to really focus attention on the stuff that matters to me and only offer advice on things that I actually know about. So once I got info on a product ignoring long threads about libraries and plugins I don't own seems to also be a good idea for me.
 
It's also helpful to use the Ignore forum feature for the areas you have no interest in.
Yes, funny I was just thinking about this and then I read your post. Even ignoring the threads that I've lost interest in or never had interest in has completely transformed the experience and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Now I'm thinking about ignoring just parts of the forum that I never visit or have no interest in.
 
It's also helpful to use the Ignore forum feature for the areas you have no interest in.
You can ignore entire subforums??? This is a game changer, thx so much for that information!


It's been bugging me, too. Right now, you have to go to page 6 of the Latest Posts listings just to catch up on the last 24 hours. The first two pages don't even complete the last two hours worth of new posts! So if someone asks a question for which only a handful of people might know the answer, then unless one of that handful is monitoring the forum within hours of when the question was asked, the thread will quickly get lost in obscurity.

I don't know the solution, because almost all the threads in Latest Posts seem to be legit topics. There are a number of threads where the responses have devolved into chat, which I'm trying to lessen, but that's tricky, because declaring certain conversation to be "useless chat" is controversial. People get very touchy about it, and in many cases, seem to honestly not understand the difference, which means long conversations on my end, not to mention hurt feelings on their end.
I was gonna suggest removing both commercial announcement forums from the latest posts feed because until something is released, those threads have questionable usefullness imho. And once any significant library is released it seems to me that without fail a new thread in sampletalk is dedicated to it. At times there were 3 different threads in the latest post feed, that discussed the same release, which I found very annoying. And browsing the forum via that feed, like many do, I never know in which of the forum sections the thread actually is and at times that leads to people (myself included) ignoring the special rules for the commercial announcement threads.
I'll try out how my forum experience changes with putting those forums (and some others) on ignore.
 
I find myself occasionally asking, “Holy crap, how'd I miss this?” and it's from June. On the other hand, I have found several conversations curtailed recently that slightly annoyed me. I don't think that there's a good answer. This is just the price of the success of the forum. It's a good problem. The watch button really helps for keeping up with the threads I care about, assuming I identified them to begin with.
 
This is a community as well as a resource, and people come here both to learn and to have fun with their peers. I think it's great that people have a place to go where they can geek out over orchestral libraries, even if a lot of their posts are just silly banter.

The banter doesn't bother me, because I am a voracious user of the Ignore feature. Pretty much any thread that discusses Spitfire or string libraries gets an instant Ignore for me because I know it's going to become a lingering hot topic.

Just a few moments ago, someone posted a request for a choir library suggestion. It had 0 replies, but I put it on Ignore anyway because I expect it will explode with several pages worth of responses.

I currently have over 1,400 threads on Ignore. This makes scanning the list of recent posts each morning go so much faster. Most of the time I don't even have to browse past page 2.

Guess that won't have any real impact after all...
It will; it's just not instant. I'm not sure if it takes a specific period of time or has to do with refreshing/reloading your browser, but the Ignores will eventually take hold and you'll notice the difference.
 
I don't know how the forum software here works but an interesting solution could be to have an optional "Bump Thread" checkbox so if you're posting something casual it wont bump the thread.


One thing I also see a lot of is people posting videos or some questions on really old sale threads that should either be a new thread or posted onto an existing conversation topic, a rule could be easily made here pertaining solely to necro-bumping sale threads in particular. I'd definitely not want some rule like that applied to every thread though as old conversation topics are always still relevant to VI use.
Another sorta solution would be to require any devs that want to advertise to close their thread after the promotional period is over, it seems that this site is crucial for the sales of these companies so they might probably be more than willing to follow a new rule like this, and really it'd help their ads stay at the top because they wouldn't be competing in bumps with posts in years old threads in the announcements sections.

Reading Polkasound's post above reminded me of something:
A seperate subforum for "Recommend me a Library" or "X vs Y which should I buy" type threads would be great, that'd clear up a lot of stuff especially around black friday.
 
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One thing I also see a lot of is people posting videos or some questions on really old sale threads that should either be a new thread or posted onto an existing conversation topic, a rule could be easily made here pertaining solely to necro-bumping sale threads in particular.
This does draw some complaints, although I'm sure the confusion it causes is not intentional. What would be great is if posters in the Deals threads had a little calendar to mark the start and end dates of the advertised sales, and when the sale ended, a little red Exp icon would automatically be added to the thread title to show the deal is expired.
 
This does draw some complaints, although I'm sure the confusion it causes is not intentional. What would be great is if posters in the Deals threads had a little calendar to mark the start and end dates of the advertised sales, and when the sale ended, a little red Exp icon would automatically be added to the thread title to show the deal is expired.
Yeah I agree, I think I made a whole thread suggesting something like this in this section.
I just thought of an alternative: Bumping can be disabled after the promotion period instead so people can still post and respond to those that have commented so they will get the notification and this will still prevent the flooding of months-years old deals threads constantly being pushed to the top
edit:
I definitely did make one but unfortunately it didn't inspire much conversation.
 
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