Guild Wars 2

Do we want a bump button?

Suggestion title: Add a bump button

Brief description: Add a button on the toolbar of our own threads, where we can basically bump the thread to the top of the first page. Can only bump one thread every 10 minutes.

Explanation:
This addition to the forums is a well-known one throughout professional, well-established forums because it allows well-thought-out topics to be seen, and people who care about their topic will keep bumping, while people who don’t really care can let it go.

How it will work:
You can bump one thread every 10 minutes. When you click the bump button, the thread will appear on top of the first page of the corresponding sub-forum.

First and foremost this idea will help people post their topic in peak-hours, where the overflow of new threads will push their thread far down, and as most people generally only view the first page, will help them getting their thread read.

I don’t think a Bump button will help. The front page holds 27 topics. If you got, say, 100 people bumping at once, then 73 of them posts are going to get lost anyway.

I’d say organise the Suggestion forum into different categories (Content, Mechanics, Events, Fluff, Cosmetic, UI; something like that). That way you’ll have less posts, crowding one place, making it less likely that post won’t be seen.

I would have to say no, I hope this never gets added…why? because everyone tends to think their own posts are important…if people could just click a “bump” button, I’d bet page 1 would be cluttered with post many people would find irrelivent.

skirge, the bump button has proven to be a successful feature on many other forums, and the way it is now, you could sit for 2 hours thinking and writing an awesome topic, only for it to be discarded in the first 2 minutes if you post at the wrong time.

Yes, people might think their own topics are important, and keep bumping them, but the real important threads will still be first because during those 10 minutes people can post on the topics they find important, bumping the important threads first on the list.

I don’t believe this is a good idea for an MMO forum. It’s an absolutely excellent idea for a more discussion/debate oriented forum, but the general type of poster on an MMO forum is far more likely to simply do it “because I need people to see my thread and answer it right away.”

For the size of the playerbase this is definitely one of the more classy MMO forums I’ve read, but a bump option in this environment is inevitably going to be abused more often than used to keep an interesting discussion within the field of view of people just arriving on the page. As you said, it’s used throughout Professional, Well-Established forums. It is almost a given that the community of such forums are Professional enough to treat the bump button appropriately. An MMO community as a whole is not.

It’s not necessarily great etiquette but if someone needs an answer to a question it’s a much better solution to simply double-post than to implement something with potentially disastrous effects.

So you’re saying it’s better for the MMO forum to be cluttered with multi-threads, even if that topic has been put a lot of thought into? I’m talking about for example a story thread, where you post a fanfiction on maybe 1500 words, and then it gets discarded right away and there’s no way you’re allowed to re-bump it.

I hope you will reconsider this as it is useful on any forum, and it cannot be abused as much as you think, because one person can only bump ONE topic ONE time in 10 minutes, or we could even raise it to 20 minutes. I think the benefits of a bump button far outweighs the consequences in any type of forum.

Capn, certainly no disrespect to you, but

“but you could sit for 2 hours thinking and writing an awesome topic” <—- This is a personal opinion, and precisely what I am talking about. “IF” it was truely an “awesome topic” the nature of a forum like this would keep it on page one anyways.

If such a feature were to be available for an MMO community, then I personally don’t think it would be a good idea to allow more than one bump a day per account. One person every 10 or 20 minutes is kind of losing sight of just how many people use the forums, even if they aren’t actively posting. Any kind of timer that would allow multiple bumps throughout a single sitting of forum-browsing is going to cause more chaos than it will help to keep interesting discussion from migrating to another thread.

I’m not entirely sure about the protocol, but there seems to be a method to have threads stickied. If sticky-ing a thread is open to request/review then this is the best compromise for a thread with meaningful discussion going on. If it outlives the discussion or its purpose it can be unstickied and life would go on.

If it’s the type of thread where someone creates it because they have a great idea/story/whatever they want to share and no one else is posting in it to keep it on the front page, then that’s just a hit to the ego a person has to take once in a while. And as I said, if it’s a request for knowledge and the person needs it to be addressed a double-post is a much better solution as it is just as short-term as the issue the poster wants to have addressed.

Thanks TheDaiBish, this is another suggestion entirely, one that I’d really like to see.

If a bump button doesn’t work, this would be the next best thing IMO.