The community is what made this site, without it, we're nothing.

Seriously, can't you just have a stricter community forum, with like 5 topics?

We've said it quite a few times now. We plan on bringing The Coffee Shop back, with a couple revisions and rules. Don't act like it's the end of Bricks in Motion.

Can we have the War Room back? It was only really immature patriotic teenagers who were causing the problem.

Also like LEGO, make parents confirm the age of people joining.

Last edited by zerowellies (July 4, 2010 (09:55am))

Scrap it.

Yo, Smeagol imma let you finish, but NXTManic should be in charge!

No Smeagol your cool, and this change is for the better.

Not really because it's a site about brickfilming, not about 'personal stuff.'

The Trip - BRAWL 2012

Maybe you should have openings for more moderators. I personally fonts miss the coffee shop but I can tell people want it back

YouTube uncompleted project: filming not in progress

It's good that people are able to articulate themselves on this issue and the decision wasn't an easy one.  I think the Coffee Shop forum can be a fun place when people are mature, and though I initially resisted the suggestion from the staff of closing the forum for a while I came around to the idea because the Coffee Shop has been where most of the recent problems in the community have blossomed.  I really don't want to just "kill fun," what we ended up deciding to do is far less drastic than what many people were recommending to me.  I would rather not have some über-strict forum with five threads, but obviously the current incarnation of the off-topic forum was a source of some problems.

If this is true, it's a sad commentary in my opinion.  While a sense of community is beneficial, talking far more about things unrelated to our primary common interest than the hobby itself doesn't seem like it could be that beneficial for the community's original goal of helping each other become better filmmakers.  The site has lost its soul, but not because we closed the off-topic forum; it's because we haven't had an interesting discussion about filmmaking in years, and that's what used to make this community a great place.

That said, I will take this opportunity to agree with something SmallTime said:

That's essentially what we're doing here.  The forum won't be closed forever, but one more warning thread, despite the mostly positive response toward it, isn't going to redeem the place overnight.  As Hoogle said, this sort of move isn't unprecedented, we just want to give that part of the site a breather in order to help it, not destroy it, and when it comes back there will be some revisions along the lines of what's been suggested here.  I'd rather not discuss a re-opening date because I feel like that would undermine the purpose of closing it somewhat, but suffice it to say it won't be all that far away.  For the time being, feel free to use the chat; I'm also going to move "Café Corner" to the 'General Film' forum for the time being.

I'm uncertain what you mean here, given that the "Production" process is quite clearly given a single forum.  That said, I have added one new forum called "Post-Production," it originally seemed like a good idea to have fewer forums but they all got to the point of being filled with literally hundreds of topics of a wide variety of subjects, and the boundaries were so loose that we moved several threads a day because people couldn't figure out where to post something.  The current, new forum divisions may not be perfect, but if you have a superior solution I'm all ears.

I have to say that keeping the 3 stages of production in 3 different forums is definitely the best thing to do.  Each stage can bring up many different issues and like Smeagol said one forum can overflow. Each stage of production has many different types of issues and it's best to separate them into different forums.