This'll be a bit of a long post. Hopefully still makes sense by the bottom...
If someone needs a personal channel, why not have it temporarily instead of permanantly?
The subject of personal channels is fairly contentious but, practically, differs very little from the one-use game channels that get created. Putting aside possible possessiveness issues (e.g. "it's my channel, get out") my only substantial concern is creating unnecessary divisions. Been there, tried that, and it leads to stagnation and us-them problems.
However... voice communications are different to text ones, notably in that once you get past 3-5 people actively talking in a channel you do need some agreement in place to ensure that people can make out what's going on. It's here that I feel that private/personal channels have their day.
To be clear, I really don't like them; they offend me on grounds of community principles. But beyond me passionately disliking them, I think there's actually fair grounds for keeping them.
Which brings me to:
The other option for this I'm thinking of is we put these 'personal' channels under another channel so that those of us who don't want to see them are able to collapse it?
Here I'd feel perfectly happy. I believe that you can unsubscribe from the root of a tree and, in doing so, hide the areas underneath. It might have been more complex than that, but something in that vein.
Furthering that train of thought We could also go so far as to change "Default Channels" to "Games" and have a tree structure instead of everything in one long list?
Categories versus lists... this comes up as a topic in more spaces than this.
One perversity is that categories create padding that ends up being worse than the lists they were there to replace, if used anything other than sparingly. Worse in the sense that the categories themselves don't end up being used so they're just useless space in the UI and increase the potential for confusion for less technically able users.
Still, Default Channels was an experiment in creating spaces for people to go to instead of constantly creating throw-away channels. I think it's been fairly successful, though I think could be spun back into the general mix, as suggested.
Personally thinking of changing everything to 'generic games' channels makes it a problem with people populating a games channel i.e. "Shooter" and other people joining that channel having no idea what's being played or what have you.
Conversely, people camping, say, the Company of Heroes channel while playing Left 4 Dead is a somewhat common occurance. People join TS, pick a channel, then wander between games with the group they came onto TS to play with. Sure, some sit on TS just to see what's going on, but I think many/most treat it more as a specific-use utility than that.
In that sense, a "Shooter" channel is potentially more useful. Still, general point stands: being able to see, on TS, that some people
might be playing a particular game is certainly beneficial and helps bring THNers together in games a little more.
We do have a second THN TS server running on prom... I don't know if it's worth trying out different styles of channels on there or just doing it on the primary server instead...?
I think you might be talking about experimenting with configuration on the second server, which would be okay (assuming that it's parked and purposeless just now). To be absolutely clear, though, we're not splitting normal TeamSpeak usage between two servers unless there's a technical limitation that requires us to. One community, one server, no confusion, no division.
This also treads on the area of the number people we have with Server Admin on TS3
We discussed SA provision a number of months back amongst the Admins. The result (as yet not enacted) was an agreement to change the way SA works and add a new layer above SA.
Currently, one SA can make another SA. Any SA can do pretty much anything on the server. This leads to, over time, an uncontrolled proliferation of the "totally wreck TeamSpeak" power. Seems like a bad thing to me...
So, in revamp, I think what we most likely do is add a "Super SA", who gets the "make new SA" power and overall configuration access. Then "SA" gets a lot of power, except on the lowest level structure, which remains controlled at the Super SA level.
It's not much of a change, but it does make things a little saner while not crapping on good works done by current SA's.
Also, noted on your suggested structure. I'd had similar thoughts, though I think our management policy would be different to luc's thinking:
[...] admin approved and will last as long as according to need (possibly with regular checks every so often).
Broadly, I agree with you, but with caveats.
Foremost, THN operates in a federated meritocracy. While we (the Admins) need to maintain a semblance of control because otherwise our maintenance tasks become unmanageable, we also need to keep our "authorisation" tasks at a low ebb. Mostly, THN just ticks along and we don't need to do much with it, but partly that's because we control certain critical elements and have, in full knowledge, left other bits to fall where they may. I guess the thing to remember is that we all do this in our spare time and, in my case, directly taken out of time I could have put at paid work.
So, what's more likely is that we'd create some basic structure that is inviolable, provide the usual federated permissions to people we can trust, and then let them get on with whatever it was that they were doing, including proliferation (in a limited way) permissions to make their lives easier too.
allow anybody to make a channel within the Chat section, for private chats.
Yep, noted. I think that blends in with the thoughts on personal channels above.
So, a structure might look as follows:
- Away
- Chat / Lobby
- Games [category]
- MMO (Generic)
- Shooter (Generic)
- Strategy (Generic)
- Battlefield
- Company of Heroes
- [...]
- Team Fortress 2
- Terraria
- Groups [category]
- World of Warcraft
- [... WoW sub channels ...]
- EVE Online
- [... EVE sub channels ...]
- Private, Personal, Temporary [category]
- [... various existing personal channels ...]
- [... temporary throw-away channels for private chats ...]
In that structure above, anyone would be able to create a channel in Private, Personal, Temporary. Any SA would be able to create a channel in Games. Specific assigned people (if possible) would have control over specific parts of the Groups tree. Anything at the bottom of the tree (categories and Away and Chat) would be locked for change by anyone other than Super SA, which would mean that only Super SA could create new Group channels.
So, ya, wall of text.
Of course, still need time to implement all this and now I need to get back to work.
Thoughts and constructive criticism always appreciated, though.
