A Community knowledge series?

[ninjillyParticipant 11673xp 0]

I’ve been thinking a lot since the radio show a couple of weeks ago where the Discord Vs Forums chat yet again got hashed out. I’m not here for that, clearly we all have our preferences and it’s just circular arguments at this point. What really got me thinking was the way Warren described the purpose of the forums. To be a searchable wealth of hobby knowledge (I definitely paraphrased that!) So my question to the community is what can we teach people? What advice would past you have found helpful? Give this week has seen more traffic to the forums, it seems like as good a time as any to ask it.

The passing on of knowledge to newbies is much more common in RPG circles where sometimes the wealth of advice can be overwhelming. In wargaming there is plenty of information about how to paint minis or build terrain for various budgets but something that I think is lacking is basic tactical advice. Tactics are such a fundamental part of our hobby games, regardless of system often times, and not found in many other fields of nerdom. Various videos have covered bits of it over the years but searching through video content isn’t great and discoverability is the crux of all the arguments going on right now about the site. It might be something that could be done as a forum thread initially and then collated into a project (unless we get collaborative projects ?)

What else do other people think we can give the wargaming community beyond our own little echo chamber? Is a tactics series something people would be interested in helping out with?

[timchubbKeymaster 3166xp 1]

Sounds good, i would love to add a stack exchange type thread type here, something like you get at https://rpg.stackexchange.com could be really cool, would also be right at home as a tab on a games hub page

Same for being able to give explainers for a given rule, i.e. unit cohesion or something like that.

[limburger 21713xp 1]

the projects system could do that part of the ‘knowledge sharing’ already, couldn’t it ?
I know most people tend to focus on painting stuff and showing of their latest work, but there are those who do post step by step guides of their work.

I hope people will use the system for more in depth battle reports and all sorts of things that could be useful to someone.

The biggest issue however is  being consistent and clear when starting forum topics and projects.

Being able to highlight answers in a topic would be pretty cool. It saves browsing for a hidden answer somewhere in a long thread.
OTOH … I haven’t seen many ‘requests for clarification’ type of questions in these forums.

[ninjillyParticipant 11673xp 0]

Absolutely the Project system could, I was just trying to think of a way to bring the group knowledge together in a conversation (and also the information being more searchable in forums rather than projects). The kind of battle reports you are talking about sound great but as you say, they are a lot of work. Personally I don’t like batreps, they just don’t interest me but I’m always keen to see people try to come up with more interesting ways to show off our hobby.

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 1]

There are a lot of ways to use the project systems for information. If we could have a tag in the system for those kinds of projects it would help. Maybe a tutorial tag, or research tag. Maybe even real world examples tags. I have a project going myself that is basically pictures of various areas in the real world as guides for people creating gaming tables and such. Haven’t been able to work on it much what with being stuck inside a lot more, but if there were ways of easily finding projects like that it would be nice.

[blinky465 17028xp 2]

It sounds very much like many of the things people would like to see going on on the website are being hampered by the platform it’s built on. Which is a real shame. Mainly because if there’s one thing that “grinds my gears” it’s when technology holds back progress instead of enabling it!

[sundancer 42985xp 0]

“FULL ACK” as we used to say….

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