Player controlled "retirement/snooze"

Turning off all toggles is for dead games, so there's not really a risk of it leading to a game dying. It's an alternative to clicking "Leave Game," which kills a game much faster than this would. This is a way to save access to games that are no longer active, to keep for reference/nostalgia, but avoid it cluttering your page. Another use case is if your story in the game finishes, but the rests of the players continue playing another story arc, you might not want the notifications and clutter for that game but still want to keep access. Otherwise, I don't see why anyone would turn off ALL toggles in an active game except by accident. I think it's an easy accident to fix because of @ mentions and Messages, but maybe we should also include a warning message, if all toggles are turned OFF a pop-up explains you'll lose access to the game from everywhere on the site except this "My Games" page. That might help avoid that accident from happening.
I agree with this. I think GP has a strong community and it could be because of design choices like this.

I don't see the point of this if they just come back when there is a new post. If there is no new post then they will vanish from the 'Latest Posts' anyway. But coming back should be a user choice.
When the only other option is to remove oneself from the game to get it off the list, this seems like the lesser of two evils and less likely to lead to game-death.
That does already mean they were not interested in that game, else they would notice there was no activity and see that they had muted it.
Some people don't use emails for updates, some people might not want to get updates on the Front Page. It should be up to them.
What if someone has absolutely no interest in Boardgames, but keep getting posts about them in their front page? Or if they don't care for the AMAs, or the developement?

Denying them the ability to say what appears on the front page means they will just stop looking at it.
That sounds like a problem to me. If 'plenty of people would like a thing', maybe we should reasses these conflicting 'goals of the site'.

The place I want to hide the games is the 'My Games' page. I actually don't see a need to hide game on the Front Page, but that is just me.

If a game is inactive, you don't need to turn off notifications. You won't get any.
This seems like an edge case but I understand this use.
Exactly my point.
I'd appreciate at least a warning message or ask for confirmation. That should seriously mitigate the risk of accident. So good idea.
This was about the front page, not the latest posts site.
Except that if you accidentally removed yourself from the game, people can see that and react. If you accidentally muted the game, people will only see that you don't post anymore and will have no idea whether you lost interest or what. Also, I've never seen anyone accidentally leave a game but I have seen people accidentally mess up permissions and settings.
If you're in a lot of games, one not updating in a while might slip your notice. It has happened to me if I accidentally marked a thread as read (much less likely to happen now that I can mark them as unread after opening) or if a post somehow scrolled to page two of notifications without me noticing.
I feel like there's a big difference between your email feed which you use for plenty of things being spammed by fifty emails a day and a symbol being marked in red on the page you use just for gaming anyway.
But I'm not worried about someone who never checks their front page for updates turning off notifications there. I'm worried about someone who exclusively checks their frontpage accidentally doing that and not noticing.
I see that point and if those threads were more active than they are, I might consider it an issue. But boardgames receives a post maybe once every two months or so, for example.
And I would argue not everything should be able to be turned off. AMAs? Lots of people say the strength of GP is its community. Even if you don't want to participate, I think it's good to see that community activity happen. (Might be nice to have a mark as read option that doesn't require you to go into the thread for this, though)
Development? We already get plenty of complaints about updates happening without proper warning. Better not make it even easier to not see development happen.
If plenty of people wanted GP to be an anime fansite, should we restructure the site to turn it into that? As I mentioned before, the focus of GP is that it's a community-driven site. That's the identity that people advertise it with and like it for. Just because an undefined "plenty of people" would like a feature, doesn't mean it needs to be implemented (even if it would be good on its own) if that implementation could hurt the site as a whole by shifting its focus.

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Anyway, I've laid all of my concerns out plenty of times before but most people in this thread at least seem to like these suggestions. I don't. But if they happen, they happen and that's fine. I don't think they'll ruin the site. I just don't think they're necessarily improvements.

This is a good point. Forcing content on people could actually damage community engagement.

Maybe instead of ignoring community forums from the Community Posts Section, we should add a "Favourites" community section, which is an opt-in section?
Really? Interesting. I assumed that page was really only used as a list of games page, not really an access point, but fair enough. For my suggestion to work we need somewhere that lists all your games that you can choose the setting for each. I had thought the My Games page was good for that, but maybe we need a My Games Settings page and a fourth button for whether it's visible on the My Games page?

Just to clarify, you have active games that you want to hide on the My Games page? Otherwise, the ALL toggles OFF move into spoiler idea would work for you.

I'm in or run 26 games and I never use the Mygames section at all or even glance at it. My dream is to have a bigger latest games field/column/space. I know, I know, it's just dream, don't shoot me. ?

I only really want to hide inactive games on the My Games page. There are some where the GM has vanished, and it is stuck there, my only other choice it to leave the game and loose access to the posts.

The subject line of this thread is 'play controlled retirement...'. I want to be able to 'retire' games that I am not the GM of.

[quote="Windyridge"]... My dream is to have a bigger latest games field/column/space ...quote]

Mine too.
Three times bigger at least! :)

Or... user controlled length?

Even better!

At least for now you can click on the Latest Games Link to navigate to HERE which is a bigger list.
Yeah, so I think if all toggles OFF moves the game into a spoiler, like retired games, it would be the equivalent of player controlled retirement. But maybe we need a separate button/toggle to do that?

Right, but when I'm posting in all those games sequentially, for just one game that is off the entry page I have to click on it, post in it, refresh, go to latest games on the entry page, click on latest games posts and then click on the game.

One solution of course is to play/run less games. ?

Never! ?

User chosen length would be a good option.

Another idea is a section to show "least recent unread game post." That way it shows the threads that have been waiting the longest first and once you deal with it, it vanishes from the list and the next least recent unread game post will pop to the top so you can respond to that one next.

Rather than that, I would still prefer a feed that only shows all your unread threads and nothing else

I don't think we need a separate button for this. But I don't care too much what we have to click, to get there. We can iron out the exact user interface details based on what works and user feedback.

It should be obvious, though, that toggling off the final one moves it to the 'spoiler'. We don't want to surprise users. So a button may make that clear.

Yes, please.

But this is a different topic and deserves it own thread so it does not get lost.

This is ideal.

O-kay. There's nothing like a clear consensus, and this is nothing like a clear consensus.

Moving this thread to nope.

Really? I thought we had pretty good consensus that player-controlled retirement is a good idea! We're just discussing how best to implement it. I thought the discussion was very useful to understand which aspects of my idea are not clear or not useful based on how others use the site.

The discussion got off-topic at the end for a moment, but that was called out pretty quickly, so a new thread could be started.

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I'll give one last pitch based on the feedback so far, otherwise I'll drop it:

Pros:
Player controlled retirement for inactive games would be a good thing

Cons:
Too complicated
Too much risk of accidental muting, etc
Removing from "Latest" feeds on front page could be detrimental in some cases


New Pitch - keeping it simple:
A "retire game" button on the "Game Details" page that is available for Players.
It moves the game into a retired games spoiler under the "Games I'm Playing" on the "My Games" page.
It removes the game from the "Games Forum" section of the "Forums" Page.
It removes the game from the "Your Games" section of the Front Page.
But new posts in the game still show up in the "Latest" feeds.
Retirement of a player is indicated on the "Game Details" page (maybe a label "Retired" next to the player's name?) and sends a notification to the GM, so they know the player has retired. If they need to get the players attention they now know they will need to @ mention or Message the player in the future. This will help avoid retirement by accident.
Retirement is reversible, so you can "un-retire" later if you need to, or if you did it by accident.

I think this is much more simple for users, avoids the things people didn't like, and catches 90% of why people want player controlled retirement. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.

I think the one case this misses is if you retire from an active game (e.g. your character's story finished but others continue a new story arc, the game moved in a direction you aren't interested in, etc.). In this case, you'll still have new posts popping up in your "Latest" feeds which might not be ideal for some people, but this would still be the case if we don't implement retirement at all, so I don't see this as a reason not to implement the parts of retirement that we all agree on.

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User-controlled customization of which games go in the "Latest" feeds should be a different topic. I had initially thought it could be part of a suite of settings that included retirement, but now I think it is better to keep it as a completely separate topic since that has much less consensus.