Metropol

Bail wrote:But the fact I don't post that much doesn't correlate to I'm not there. Discussion in the mod area and over RTPS is ongoing. But if it helps I'll try and be a bit more vocal.

Jovis wrote:

Bail wrote:But the fact I don't post that much doesn't correlate to I'm not there. Discussion in the mod area and over RTPS is ongoing. But if it helps I'll try and be a bit more vocal.

But isn't it a sign that you're less interested in the forum?

eoin wrote:

dosxuk wrote:In previous years, Question Time falling off air (albeight for a few seconds) would have got a thread to itself, with detailed discussion of what could have gone wrong, queries about what the "5" meant, what they should do to prevent it happening, and finally an answer from someone in the know as to what did happen. Instead we got about 5 posts tucked away in the BBC One thread.

This.

I've been reading (and occasionally posting on) TV Forum since late 2003 (I started reading around the time when News 24 relaunched, with Jamez providing leaked images of those awful lower thirds, which nobody believed could be real because they used about 40 different shades of red combined with teal and orange). It was before the "good old days" that are often reminisced about here, but things were certainly very different when I joined. Threads were about relaunches and presentation tweaks. If I remember correctly there were little or no generic threads for news channels. These then became commonplace, there was some debate over their role and the pro-generics won out. I still can't remember why.

With nothing of note actually happening on these news channels and a new forum (The Newsroom) having been created purely to house the megathreads, they became the ideal breeding ground for the kind of inane rubbish that the forum is plagued with nowadays, the notoriously shite ITV News thread being the earliest example.

This then spread beyond news channels to news organisations in general. The generic threads became so unbearable that they were split into presentation and presenters. Finally, in the last two or three years, this phenomenon made it over to the main forum where channels now have their own megathreads with no defined purpose, full of dull posts related vaguely to the channel, intermingled with the odd interesting nugget about a genuine change in presentation.

These threads have killed real discussion of TV presentation. Think, for example, of all the times that the News channel has tweaked or completely changed a countdown, or the many minor presentational changes that Sky News went through after its disastrous 2005 relaunch, none of which had their own dedicated threads. Sometimes new threads about minor changes are created, only to be merged by mods into the existing megathread.

Obviously this is not the only reason for site's decline, but it's a biggie, the main one in my opinion and I don't think it gets the credit it deserves for ruining TV Forum.

Bail wrote:

Jovis wrote:

Bail wrote:But the fact I don't post that much doesn't correlate to I'm not there. Discussion in the mod area and over RTPS is ongoing. But if it helps I'll try and be a bit more vocal.

But isn't it a sign that you're less interested in the forum?

Nope, it's bookmarked on all my browsers, iphone etc, I'm on there pretty much every day reading things as any member would as well as various mod stuff.

But Pete (and his snazzy graph) has a point, the current style is generally one of hiding things that aren't approved, perhaps this is a mistake as people can't see what is isn't acceptable. I've mentioned it to the others and I suspect we will put together a rules and forum etiquette thread and be a bit more present.