Everything in #announcements should be on the front page

This is largely an opinion post, but to be blunt, I think this website is dying unnecessarily. But I also think that it's super easy to prevent that.

Take a look at the front page of the website. It's the most important page of this whole site. This is what everyone sees when they first arrive, and also probably what everyone has bookmarked. And it hasn't been updated with a news post in over 10 months. But over in the Discord, news posts are being made all the time in the announcements channel! This community is alive and well, but to anyone looking at the front page of the website (which is how a lot of people consume news in general), it looks completely dead.

Prior to the website getting hacked in 2024, whenever something was posted on the front page, a forum topic was automatically created from that post. There was also a button underneath each article saying something like "Discuss this article in the forums (9 replies)." You can tell that this happened because the formatting looks weird in the first post of these topics, and the replies are mostly by new members. Lots of people have gotten their start on these forums directly through that button.  Here is the last news topic created before the website went down. You can see the automatic first post with different formatting, and you can also see that we got some new people replying, which I guarantee would never have happened if that button wasn't there. Since the website came back in April 2024, that button prompting people to discuss news articles has gone away completely, not only from articles posted after the hacking, but also from all articles written beforehand.

My solution is simple: first, we bring back that button. Then, every time we post something in #announcements on Discord, just copy and paste that announcement to the front page of the website, fixing formatting if necessary. (Unless it clearly is just a correction or addendum to a previous post, in which case post it in that news post's forum topic.) That way, we will keep people who aren't in this server updated about what is going on with the game and community, while also encouraging people to engage in the news posts with the Discuss button mentioned earlier. We could also link the news article or forum topic on the title of the Discord announcement post for easy access.

Doing this would also make the timeline of news in the community much, much easier to follow. On Discord, you are limited to scrolling back through #announcements and reading in reverse order, or maybe doing something fancy with the search feature. And very often, the app scrolls down to the bottom by default if you leave it for a while. But on the website, you have the choice of viewing the news updates as pages on the front page, pages on the News tab of the page, or as topic titles in the Rules & News category of the forums, plus the ability to search for greater precision. And the website doesn't reset your position if you move away from it for a minute like the Discord app does. The forum topics would also allow for dedicated discussion of each article, rather than Discord, where everything is dumped in #general. The latter to me is way harder to follow and keep on top of what everyone is talking about, but more on that in the "personal context" spoiler at the end.

Oh, and one more thing: this approach of copying and pasting announcements to the front page of the website would probably require an update to the accounts on the website to give everyone with permission to post announcements on Discord those same permissions on the website. Or if that isn't desired, maybe someone else (thearst3rd or RandomityGuy, probably) could make it look like the right person posted the article. Or they just copy and paste it themselves, and it looks like they wrote it. Or they create a new staff rank on the website, sort of like how we used to have "Global Moderator", but just for people to write news stories. Regardless of what is done, as long as each announcement gets posted to the front page with an option to discuss, I think that would go a huge way toward revitalizing the website, and it would also take minimal effort. Heck, even just having one admin copy and paste all future Discord announcements to the front page while leaving the rest of my suggestions as mere possibilities in the future would be better than doing nothing.

I hope you all can see where I'm coming from. I just think this would be an easy change that would be very beneficial for the health of the website and the community.

Secondary request to fix incorrect display of staff members on the forums: 

My dream scenario: 

Personal context for anyone curious: 

NF wrote: But on the website, you have[...]the ability to search for greater precision.

I definitely find the forums' search function much harder to use than Discord's. No contest.

Restructuring the forums seems like a good idea. It's pretty clear that it hasn't been touched in ages, and, even aside from the board selection, what's really questionable are the threads that are pinned in each topic. Most obviously are Threefolder's old level building tutorials, which... are fine, especially since Nockess's isn't complete yet. But Nockess and Daniel definitely have resources that seem more relevant nowadays, as well as some Constructor tools from both HiGuy and Keppy that I didn't even know about until Keppy told me about them recently, which Threefolder's tutorials certainly don't mention (I'm sure they just came out after they were written). All of this could absolutely do with a bit of a rethink and modernization.

NF wrote: Also, on Discord, there is no way to know who is a staff member and who isn't if someone is offline, especially since offline users are hidden from the list now that our server is big enough. That's why I don't know if my tentative list is complete, because I don't even know how to check it!

Discord does have a very nice member list that you can search through with all sorts of filters. However, it's not currently public on the Marble Blast server. Why's that? Well, I suggested making this public a little while ago, and, well, according to some experimentation from Doomblah... for some reason, viewing this member list is locked behind some other (quite high) permissions that it absolutely doesn't need to be. Stupid Discord. But, yeah, that member list would be super useful... if we could actually look at it! [Insert Timmy Turner's dad here. 2012 ass post]

NF wrote: the ability to have more focused discussions without being interrupted by other chats

Discord's threads can already solve this issue if you really want. You've pointed out the flaws with this earlier in your post already, but the forums have plenty of their own flaws as well. It's much more cumbersome to open up a whole new website and navigate through that a bit to get to where you really need to go to talk, than it is to just switch to the app (or possibly even the server) that you already always have open anyway. I suppose reorganizing the topics as mentioned before would mitigate this a lot, but there's still a lot to be said about accessibility. Especially when every single message from everyone takes up the entire goddamn length of the screen. The forums don't really work for actual conversations as much as they do long-winded discussions like what we're engaging in right now. But most people really don't want to (have to) write an essay every time. Oh, and, plus, all of that is only considering accessibility when actually at your computer. Discord absolutely blows marbleblast.com out of the water if you're on your phone.

NF wrote: I don't treat Discord announcements with the same weight as website announcements simply by nature of the platform on which they are written.

This makes sense. And, for most channels, I would agree that this line of thinking is sensible. However, some channels like #announcements, #quote-of-the-day, #polls, #tourney-info, and #tourney-announcements definitely aren't used as instant messaging channels, and clearly hold a bit more weight to them when something is posted there. I'd also tack on #new-videos and #new-releases here, but to less effect.

Also, about the MBU WRR deadline announcement, I absolutely get the feeling. However, I'd blame the announcement being 10 fucking days ahead of time instead of, like, a couple months, and a lack of an event being created for it, over the lack of an announcement on the forums. Nothing else is really posted on the forums anymore, so the WRR wouldn't be any different. New levels, new videos, tournament info, and even (most) new updates to the game have been living on the Discord server for a while. And a single post among all the others in #forum-posts is definitely gonna get a lot less attention than a post in #announcements lol. And that's when the Time Capsule isn't going on and filling the whole #forum-posts channel with updates about that.

what's really questionable are the threads that are pinned in each topic.

I missed this, thank you for pointing it out! That would be great if we could pin current resources on the forums.

for some reason, viewing this member list is locked behind some other (quite high) permissions that it absolutely doesn't need to be. Stupid Discord.

Stupid Discord.

It's much more cumbersome to open up a whole new website and navigate through that a bit to get to where you really need to go to talk, than it is to just switch to the app (or possibly even the server) that you already always have open anyway.

Very true, and I agree. I was more just ranting my own personal opinions in this section, but if you don't have some sort of weird mental block around Discord threads like I do, I'm sure Discord is vastly superior in terms of easily finding and accessing information with a simple Command + K. Also, you're right, it's way better on mobile (except for jumping to the bottom of a chat you were trying to read when you reload the app).

That rant I made isn't really important here. What I really want to convey as my main point is that we should be updating the front page of the website way more often, and whenever there is a pinnable message on Discord, it should probably also go on the forums in some form.

However, some channels like #announcements, #quote-of-the-day, #polls, #tourney-info, and #tourney-announcements definitely aren't used as instant messaging channels, and clearly hold a bit more weight to them when something is posted there. I'd also tack on #new-videos and #new-releases here, but to less effect.

Yes, and my "dream" scenario would be to have everything posted in those channels to go on the forums. But here I just went with #announcements because that's the most important. Another annoying thing is that Discord often doesn't show the "unread messages" badge telling you to scroll up or down to read unread messages, so often #announcements will be off my screen due to being at the top, and there will be no indication that there's an unread message there. Maybe I can adjust notification settings so that I always get notified when something is posted there.

However, I'd blame the announcement being 10 fucking days ahead of time instead of, like, a couple months, and a lack of an event being created for it, over the lack of an announcement on the forums.

You're right, of course. I'm just being annoying.

NF wrote: Another annoying thing is that Discord often doesn't show the "unread messages" badge telling you to scroll up or down to read unread messages, so often #announcements will be off my screen due to being at the top, and there will be no indication that there's an unread message there.

It's been a habit for as long as I can remember to scroll through the channel list to check that everything is read before being done checking on the server. And this should be even easier for you since I know you've removed a lot of channels from your channel list.

Different themes, you say?



I have an obsession with Dark Reader and Stylus (technically you can do everything in Dark Reader). So if the staff are interested, I have some CSS suggestions.

Do share the dark mode suggestions, could add them in if they can be implemented.

Oh hell yeah, I just assumed making any major changes to the site would be way too hard because it's, like, all based off of some other site template or something or whatever you want to call it.