Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

We (the admin team) have had a request to be able to visually differentiate, before going into each thread, which is a serious lore discussion and which is more silly/fun.

As we want to encourage both, as we do feel both should have a home here, we thought the least obtrusive would be to mark the threads that were leaning more towards silly (as there are less of them). We wanted to use the emoji's but unfortunately they are still not working as they should in thread titles.

So for now, until the emoji's are fixed, please mark your thread (Silly) before the title. I will give you guys some time to do it yourselves and then we will be going through and helping out with that. Now if a "silly" thread leads to a more serious discussion, then by all means just remove the marking.

'S is for Serious,' said Gimli. 'That is easy to read.'
'Nay!' said Legolas. 'Serious threads do not use the lore markings.'
Aragorn stood for a moment in thought. 'S is for Silly, I guess,' he said at length.

Like the idea. Like a simple marker better than emojis in thread titles, even. Not sure this implementation quite hits the mark.

We can always just keep the S then ;)

And what isnt hitting the mark? @Elenhir

The joke is that S stands for both silly and serious, @Winddancer. From a user experience perspective, that will cause some confusion.

True, either we keep the S and then it is up to people to figure it out the old fashioned way until they know what S stands for. Or we come up with a different letter. Though even that, they will have to learn what it means. Say we put F for Foo, which lorist is going to deduce that is what it is? :P If we type out the whole word, then that will take up too much space. So, maaaybe just maybe, people might catch on pretty quick? Or what would you suggest? @Elenhir

Pfft. You're management. Solutions are your domain. I just find the problems and then waste my time finding appropriately referential ways to highlight them.

Is title space that limited, though? What's the max character count?

No idea how long they are, that's a Narv domain. But look through the longest title, would you want to add [Silly] to that. Or just [ S ]

Awful lot of empty space there in the middle of my 1080p screen, itching for etching.

Thing is, if I dont make the space, its the strike code so the headline gets a strike through it >.<

Hilarious. I mean, that could work. That's certainly rather silly.

Ducky suggested F for Funny/Free

F

By all means continue to make elaborate threads about trolls. They're one of the more underdiscussed beings in Tolkien's world.

In all Seriousness, I would opt to actually type out the word [silly] or [satire], as it would make it more user-friendly to any newbie wandering into Lore for the first time who might otherwise be Bamboozled.

But but I like bamboozling!

What about "J" for Joke? Or [joke]?

Whatever goes inside them, can we just use parentheses? That avoids the whole question of whether formatting will come into play.

Tara! Dont give them more options!!

Hahaha, just trying to resolve the bracket debate so we can focus on what to actually call these silly threads :P I wasted too much time playing with formatting on Discord so I'm trying to make up for it!

I like the differentiation! Mainly because it makes it clear silly threads are welcome-- and I think it might help people feel more likely to make a post and ask a question, since it can feel like your questions are silly / repetitive, and sometimes they are, but that can still lead to great discussion.

I do think the (S) is a little confusing, since my first thought was that it meant 'serious'. Other letters I suppose are not a whole lot clearer.

We could use a silly face, like this: O_o (though I guess that looks more surprised than anything. Surprised at the silliness?)
..How about this adorable penguin? <(")
Or this very smiley face: ^_^

Okay, that's all I got. Sorry, Windy. More options.

EDIT: Missed Sil's post-- I also like the idea of typing out a word, so people who don't know what our short hand is (new members, or people who don't often head into the Lore fora) will be able to tell what's going on.

I vote for prefixing silly thread titles with this: (Silly)

Yes, I think that's clearer.

after reading all this I vote for (Silly) too for what it's worth

(Silly) it is