Yes! And with the new way, it wouldn't even matter. He could post to the forum based on substance alone. If his post ends up in the wrong place because he didn't set his profile up right (as will def. happen), 2 clicks from us and all his content around UMD is auto-updated to reflect the new setting, even if he has already made 1000 forum posts, or uploaded a zillion pictures. This part has already been done months ago, and I'm already adjusting people's content settings this way all the time. I just need to give yall some filter bubbles so the forums can work like the rest of the site already does.




Yeah. It's not usually very effective to try and "simplify" things for the general public by making them longer and more descriptive. It's more informative, but not simpler, and people actually pay attention to it a lot less.


Thanks! I'm gradually gearing Advanced Search to be moved off of that page to underneath the current main search bar as a drop-down. Simplifies things on the backend and gets us closer to mobile possibilities. I love these little talks tho, so that's why I do em. Everybody sees things from their own perspective, and I like mashing their opinions up and settling on the best idea possible. I can't think of everything myself and I love that people give enough of a shit to even take time to write a complaint about something. It does confirm the need for only gradual change though. People do NOT like change.


On the backend, all the forums are just one big single forum. When you click on "Messy," my software goes and pulls only the messy posts. So it's already a filter-based system that relies on the poster putting things in the right location, which is part of the moderation issue. I am taking one more thing away for the poster to think about, by auto-tagging all his content in accordance with his "I post male / female content" setting in his profile... but IF he wants, he could set any given post however he wants. Less thinking for the user, but added flexibility when you want it. And it's not fewer choices; there is one more: You will have separate male wet and messy forums, making it 4 effective forums instead of 3, but hopefully with the simplicity of only 2. It will finally bring the rest of the site into being substance-based and then filtered based on user gender pref.


There's that phrase again Updates to this site are something that I do every single day. Sometimes something's broken, and sometimes it can just be nicer or prettier or easier for us to run. There has been no feature ever added to UMD (even the most beloved ones) where I haven't heard people say it's not broke, as if that's an argument against improvement. If there is a learning curve that lasts a few weeks that makes things easier for years, then that's where I want to go. Plus, there is nothing new to "learn." Just post to wetlook or messy and forget about it.


Simplicity is the point! That's great that you are seeing exactly what you want. But I have to cater for a lot of people with a lot of different tastes, and I try to take everyone into account. I try to err on the side of reduction, simplicity, and automation, while actually increasing functionality for power users who want it. You only have to click one bubble once, and the *entire site* is filtered for you. You say you never used any filters, but I see that you are using the genre filter to only see female content around the site. How is it working for you?


I love the idea of tagging the posts somehow with the level of sexuality, but that's a bit too subjective to moderate I think. Where would we draw the line, and how would we explain that line to the user? And how would that forum be more deserving than, say, a clothed vs nude forum? I've always thought that forum proliferation wasn't the answer, and could almost never be fair.


Every. New. Feature. is like that. I remember when I added the little thumbs next to forum posts. Everybody complained! Now when one is missing, my inbox blows up. After this many years doing this, you get the insight that people will give you friction just out of fear of change rather than about merits of the change itself, and it's not always easy to tell the difference. These types of long threads are like my diamond mine where I gather brilliant ideas from you guys who get it.


If the new forum is on a different site, sure. But if it's on UMD, it's still on UMD. People are fapping to the charity videos no doubt, so we shouldn't kid ourselves. If we are going to confront the moral dilemma of posting that content here, then we need to be decisive and make it site-wide policy. I made a separate site back in the day just for PG, but I think only like 5 people showed up, so if anybody wants to make such a forum site again for this and run it themselves, they have my full support.


Yeah that's a separate discussion. Your request was just the latest in over a decade of "hey make this new forum" and it's a great idea, but probably no better than a dozen others that any of us could list right now. What nobody ever requests is simplification and reduction, instead of corralling people into more arbitrarily categorized forums.

New ideas are pretty much guaranteed to get shot down. But I get interested in them and want to give them a fair shot. That's why I did spend months making that PG site years ago that nobody ever went to. UMD itself did have a PG filter too, but nobody used that either so I took it off to reduce overhead, and I chalked the "PG Complainers" up to a very vocal minority.


Great advice! The "D" in UMD is for directory, and I list all the forums I know about here:
https://umd.net/sites/all?cat[3]=1
Use them! We kind of do everything here because that's what our visitorship says it wants, but the wam community is not just here. Support your favorite wam forums out there, and please let me know if you know of more.


It's been split pretty evenly for as long as I can remember, but the PG people always think there is more X, and the X people always think there is more PG. Grass is always greener. But if you look at it more objectively, you'll see it's pretty much even and has always been.

So if I post a video of me being slimed while getting fucked doggy-style is that male or female wam? It seems that people who want female & male content separated are the guys who really don't want to see another dude's dick. So if there's a cock in one of my videos and I consider it female wam since I'm the one getting messy would I then be pissing people off who don't want to see dicks?

I am just trying to understand the practical issues here when it comes to being a producer on this site. It seems like people are making this an overly complicated issue.

That's another problem with the current setup. People posting mixed content don't know which forum it should go in. And sometimes they try to cross-post. Going forward, if it's messy it goes in messy and if it's wetlook it goes in wetlook.

I think that individuals would rather have a site that fits them just right when they come here, without them having to click any preference. But that takes away choice from other people because we are all different. I think that asking visitors to click one bubble isn't too much to ask, if it gives them and other people the same flexibility.

And what about completely neutral topics?

My taste is to see female wam, but am I to understand that this idea would mean Splunch notices posted by me would only appear in the female wam section, and the guys wouldn't be invited because it wouldn't appear in the male wam section?

If it ain't fucked, don't fix it.

At the risk of stuffing myself into a hole here, I kind of need to point out that this felt a little condescending Messmaster. Up until that post, the majority of posts had been against it, for various reasons, generally given in some detail. As a result, this reply felt kind of like, "well you guys don't know what you're talking about, so I'm doing it anyways, enjoy!"

I know that after the post was made, there were supportive posts, and I know that an argument could be made either way. I myself think the boards are fine as is, because no filter system is perfect, but at this point I'm not going to post a more impassioned or lengthy defense because I don't feel that there'd be a point; it looks like your mind is made up, regardless of what we would have said in either direction.

I guess what I want to say is, if you want to enact a new board policy and ask for opinions, please be careful how you brush those opinions off - the tone has largely felt like an adult explaining to a child what's good for them (which is fine for a parent, but assuming we're all adults here, comes off problematically).

That phrase again! What you describe is just as it is now: If you post your notice to the messy forum (aka female messy), it won't show up in the male wam forum at all. If you want them all to be "invited" then that's what I'm trying to do by combining female and male. Then when you post your Splunches, they really will be shown to everyone on the messy forum, unlike how it is right now.

The only people who won't see your post are the people who are purposely filtering all their content to not see any female content. Either way, everyone can view your calendar event.

MessMaster, after reading the posts in this thread, majority of the users do not really want a new filter system. So why implement it? I hope you don't mind, but I'm just trying to understand, on a business level.

I honestly did not mean to be condescending and I'm sorry if it came across like that. I did start this thread to give a heads up on what's to come, as well as to see if any alternate ideas were out there. It's a visceral response to just say "I don't like it" or "not broke don't fix it" but that's more of an emotional response than an actionable one, and that's what I was talking about, although I probably sounded unthankful. There have been some great ideas from Mhalver, Smess, Dm1, wtf, and others, and I'm taking notes all the time, but it's good for me to be reminded that people are just really used to how things are.


Yes, it was made up, right in the OT. I didn't say so and I should have. All I was looking for was insights, and insights I got!


Sorry if that was how it came across, but I really didn't mean it that way. When someone says something, I do my best to understand it and respond to what they actually meant. And sometimes what people really mean is "this is comfortable for me and I'm just used to it; please don't mess up the flow" which is really flattering in a sense and I respect that. But the whole point is to find how to not disrupt that flow, yet make it easier for new visitors and for our backend. That people interpreted the exact opposite was likely my fault, so I go into evermore detailed explanations that exactly address their concerns, and that can come across as being pedantic. I'll have to take better care in how I word things because I NEVER mean to be condescending to my visitors. I'd have to kick my own ass off of this site.

I think this could be a brilliant idea, and resolve not only the "Physics, Chemistry, bookls by Spanish authors" problem, but also the rarely discussed issue of CD and Trans* wam.

I'd suggest that rather than radio butons the selectors are tickboxes, so people can pick more than one, and that the set should be:

* Cis Female
* Trans Female
* Cis Male
* Trans Male
* CD (male crossdressed as female)
* Mixed

The "Mixed" category would be for anything that contains more than one of the categories.

And to resolve Mike Nomic's issue, also have a posting category of "Neutral" (or "Community Notices"), which is only available to trusted users, and results in posts made using it showing up in all forums.

Any change on any heavily used forum tends to generate howls of outrage, but once in place most people seem to adjust to things pretty quickly and after a few months no-one even misses the old version.

One comment on this thread - that drop-down that lets you pick what forum the reply goes in always seems to default to Wetlook. Can this be changed so it goes to the forum the user was reading when they hit Reply instread?

PS: Are we not allowed to post in HTML any more? I'd made that set of selectors a nice bullet-point list but UMD stripped the code. :-(

You can still do things like bolding, tables, linked images (as long as they link to UMD images). But many tools have recently disappeared like special characters (japanese, British pound sign, unicode characters in general), use of style definitions for images and probably other elements (no way can I do a post like this again: https://umd.net/forums/what-celebrities-would-you-lik#476362 ), and for whatever reason the "target" attribute of the anchor (link) tag; the latter I like to use because links don't always come up as clickable here. Really we've had an inordinate amount of freedom before in this respect, and I can totally understand that being reined in. But it is a bit of a bummer.

There are some real concerns posed by users, and I am listening, but some of them are a little misinformed about what I was trying to do (my fault--a lack of proper explanation). But more than that, there are a lot of great ideas coming out of these lengthy posts, which I'm definitely going to implement.

When I make a change like this, it's not just for change's sake. I'm hoping to reduce confusion, make categorization more straightforward, and make the moderation job easier, plus finally integrate the forum into the rest of the UMD's gender system to make the code consistent and more manageable, which is a biggie for me. If I can manage to make it so people generally have the same or better experience than they have right now, then it's something that should be done, I think.

I could have just gone ahead and done it, but I try to gather insight from the community, not to ask their permission, but to hear what they say. It might turn into a debate, but I don't care. I let people speak their minds and I speak mine, and as long as we are listening to each other we'll end up with better ideas.

I like the idea, I find I mostly inhabit the Messy forum and I often forget to look at the Male WAM one which is a shame as there can be some good stuff in there. It'd be great to be able to see both in the same place.

Thanks for the ideas! I am thinking of adding an "other" or "mixed" button, but really it's tied into the UMD's overall gender filtering system. I developed that months ago as a way of trying to deliver site-wide content that's user-selectable as male or female (or both), as opposed to the headaches of making new forums, etc. This high-level approach means that it needs to be kept as simple as possible so it can just work everywhere eventually. I can technically add more selections, but it will be on a site-wide basis so I want to put a lot of thought into that.

Do you have the ability to make a global post? I don't think I enabled that for anyone

That drop-down was a stupid bug. I've fixed that--it didn't do anything anyway if it was a reply. I added it to the form so that OT posters would be able to control where their posts went. I have certain HTML restricted--hit me up if you want me to consider adding any tags.

I really think that you should try for some sort of mixed option instead of just male/female. I figure that we ultimately have four categories:

1 - female only in the scene
2 - female messing up a male
3 - male messing up a female
4 - male only in the scene

If I want to be nitpicky, there are probably more (female messing up a female and only a single female, etc), but these are the major ones (I didn't add a male and female messing up each other category either).

The male/female option basically covers 1 and 4 very well, but 2 and 3 become a judgment call on which option to check. As a straight male, I obviously am interested in 1 and 3, but I also am interested in 2 (which often ends up in the existing Male Wam forum). You have gay male members who are interested in 4, but some of them may have interest in 2 (or maybe even 3) as well. Other members may be interested any combination of those 4 you care to imagine.

Right now it is difficult for me to find 2 without going through 4 as well. Unlike some people, I am not greatly offended about having to stumble by some of category 4, but this is kind of the problem the separate forum was meant to solve, and in this situation it is too strict of a cut.

I don't think you need all four of those categories (or the huge number of subcategories that they could break into), but I do think a "female only/ male only/ mixed" division may make more sense than just a "female/male" division and then give the users the option to search for combinations "show me 1 - only female content, 2 - female and mixed content, 3 - male and mixed content, 4 - male content only"

You will still get some content tagged wrong (particularly mixed content tagged as one of the gender specific categories), but that is going to happen from time to time no matter how you do this, even if you can minimize the occurrences.

Smess, you are the man. I'd love to pick your brain on some things. I'll hit you up sometime on inbox if you don't mind

Feel free I ain't no web wizard really but I've got the hat :dunce:

That is intentional on the part of the moderators. Example: Last week I posted the epitome of #2 in the Male forum, where it belonged. BUT because I knew a lot of guys who only browse the "Messy Forum" (AKA Female Forum) might like it, I made a separate post here (in the Messy Forum), alerting folks to the existence of said clip. I also posted 4 "teaser" (AKA non-messy) pics, so there was no chance anyone browsing this forum could accidentally see Male WAM and be, you know, scarred for life or something.

Anyway. Within 30 minutes my "alert post" had been moved into the Male WAM forum because it "fit better." Meaning I had a post saying "Go to the Male Forum to see this"... in the Male Forum. Directly underneath the post I was directing you to.

I deleted the now-completely-pointless alert post immediately thereafter. Lesson learned.

So yes, a "mixed" option would probably alleviate some of this.

And if you post a video of yourself being slimed while getting fucked doggy-style by a dude wearing a Bea Arthur mask, is THAT male or female wam?

I don't know the answer, but this does give me a SENSATIONAL idea....

right now it's:

- Messy

- Male WAM



People pay even less attention to acronyms and inconsistent chains of options.



Messy - that would be why people post male stuff... because it's open... just says...

- Messy


Kinda like having individual signs over adjacent doors reading:

- Bathroom

- Male WC

- Disabled


Think that through a minute. What would happen over the course of the day?


Because I'll bet that's exactly what's happening here.



I would start by changing the signs rather than go in each room and re-engineer it so people choose once they had already entered.

Call me crazy.

Um, people of any gender who want a bath use the bathroom. Men who need the loo can use the Male WC, and women and disabled people have to share the disabled toilet? Or is that also men only and women have to either pee in the bath or go somewhere else? :devil:

Aside: It's like that bizarre habit of calling toilets "restrooms". To me a restroom would be a room with a lovely deep carpet, amazingly comfortable couches and armchairs, gentle music, marble columns and polished dark woodwork, and uniformed attendants of your preferred gender(s) to fetch you cold drinks and platters of exquisite Belgian chocolates.

True Story: my elderly mother once roamed round an airport for 20 minutes looking for a toilet. Finally she asked for help, saying to the person "there's plenty of rest rooms, but not a single toilet I can see". 100% true.

and yes, calling it 'bathroom' always feels incongruous to me, simply because in most British houses the bathroom IS a totally separate room.

I used to get on my high horse about bathroom being unnecessarily prudish a term, until someone pointed out that toilet actually meant to wash & tend to your appearance, hence many childrens' confusion when reading in 'Just William': "She made a quick but effective toilet" !

ah the beauty of language

Well, I hope if it DOES proceed, (since it seems to be a fait accompli), there is an extensive tutorial on how to work the new system. I suppose on the plus side, I won't have to worry about where to post stuff featuring Nadia Valentine! Will the existing threads still survive? I'm thinking particularly of the "Female-Male WAM Forum" thread in Male Wam, which is essentially a heterosexual thread but we know to go straight to it, (pardon the pun), and to avoid the non hetero material. And when exactly are the new changes taking place? Will the other forums still exist, such as "Classifieds", "Off Topic", "Polls", etc? Can I just say though, I don't think folk are ungrateful and we all know you do a great job M.M., it's just change can be a little frightening. Cheers!

Tinkering?

Again??

MM, don't you remember what happened last time?! :splat:

I tinker pretty much every single day. That you guys don't really notice it is a compliment

Tisk tisk.... Jaykain causing trouble I see. Please report to me immediately. :splat:

The upcoming "Alerts and Events" is now on the UMD homepage, left. Only a Splunch in there right now, but you can always add more!

Don't forget that when you make a forum post, you can automatically make an associated Alert / Event right when you make the forum post.