This is something that I’ve had on my mind for a while so I thought I’d type it up. I think the Star Wars fanedits and preservations needs a bit of a clean up and reorganisation.
There’s a lot of threads in both categories, well over 1,000, as there are a lot of users, but it means everything is mixed in together. Ideas for edits, edits in the works, completed edits, inactive and unfinished edits and requests are all put together, meaning it can be a pain to navigate at times.
A lot of threads end up becoming simply request chains with everyone asking for the same thing over and over for years while the edit is in development and after its completion. It clogs things up and stops discussion. I’d propose that we make a separate section simply for requests and trying to minimise that kind of post as many people sign up just to request popular works such as Adywan, Harmy and Hal9000, even though there are detailed guides by now on how to get your hands on them. People often double up and makes posts in threads and threads of their own to ask for them with the ever popular Markdown default text as they don’t bother with a body text. Also I think it should be more common to ask through PMs as those posts really clog things up. This is the one thing that drives me up the wall more than anything as I open a thread looking for some legitmate discussion, and find a chain of requests.
I’d like to split the ideas/in the works edits from the completed edits, but I don’t know how viable that is. Beacuse I can rarely tell if an edit is done or not based on the title and first post. It often takes some digging for me to see if the edit is official done and released, or still needs some work done. There is often just a jumble of new TROS or TLJ edits and it’s hard to see what their status is if any as many edits have one post and then are subsequently abandoned/ I know there are index threads, but everything is still mixed in together. The new IDEAS tagging is pretty good as now I can telling something is just a conception and I feel this is a good step in the right direction.
I do caution against too many subcategories though, since there is no real search, people won’t know where things belong, so either we will get lots of duplicate posts, or else topics will just go dead as less eyes get into the various sub-forums.
Sorry for the garble, but I felt it should be said over here instead of FE where I had originally put it.