by Divemistress of the Dark on 05 Feb 2007 17:04
Or when people post only links, with no explanations of what they are, I will very rarely bother to click. Simply because on a lot of forums, people will post "hilarious jokes" that take forever to load, crash my browser, or just...aren't...funny...
Honestly, I think attempts to play 'Net nanny are futile at best, at the moment. If you think we're getting a lot of new people now? You wait until the guys start playing a for-real tour. Or even next week, after they go on international television. Unless there's a new Police board with forums, this place is going to get so busy we'll be lucky to be able to log in, much less post anything.
I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect people to contain their excitement over what's happening. I do think you should consider that all the excitement that's coming along *with* the extraneous posting is partly what's motivating people to go out and find news.
I can't imagine anyone trying to slap a trademark on his own way of enjoying their music, and calling it THE way. The fact of the matter is that this band, like a lot of different bands, means different things to different people. I skip a fair amount of posts myself, but I don't think telling people what they can and can't post is the way to handle it, nor is calling attention to the skipping. What do *I* care if people want to post technical details about something I'm not interested in? Especially given that people from all over the world come here with different sensibilities and ways of sharing them. I'd sure hate for those folks to be scared off - especially the many users we have for whom English is a second language - for fear of violating a bunch of content-related "rules".
I admit I've found it tacky when people have only posted here a handful of times, then start writing posts to Stewart begging him to hire them, but I think that's probably par for the course as well, especially when it's not that easy to find contact information for his support staff. At any rate, he's been famous for a long time, and I'm sure nothing like that shocks him very much any more. I do worry it's going to make him shy away from coming here, though, if all he ever sees is requests for him to perform personal favors for people, the sheer volume of which I'm sure no mortal being would ever be able to accommodate.
All that said, let's not make this into a nightmare for Gio, OK? I'm sure he's got plenty of stuff going on without trying to enforce a lot of content-related "rules" for adults who ought to be able to handle themselves appropriately. That said, maybe subforums is the way to handle it. I doubt Gio or Eu. has the time to do that right now, is the only thing. I think Sock's plan for volunteer moderators is a good one, too. Other ideas might include limiting the sheer number of topics one person can start per day, or requiring a wait of X number of minutes between posts. I'm on a really huge political discussion board, and those rules seem to work well - also, people can be given a rating of 1 to 4 for the content of their posts, with folks with higher rating averages given more privileges (removing offending "troll" posts, etc.)
We've heard, however, there *will* be a new Police board soon, and maybe that'll serve as the diffuser for some of all this energy. Maybe suggestions we make in this thread will be taken into account in the setting-up of the new place. Probably that will be the case, and having had this discussion will turn out to be a good thing. However, I think expecting this one to stay a nice quiet little community is not very practical. Just some $.02.
On Google - site:stewartcopeland.net "your keyword here" - thanks DM!!