Death, Shit, and Jesus!
 

NOTE: The first bit of this thread is not aimed at the staff, but at all the Off Topic users.

OK originally I was thinking that this "silly season" would pass on it's own, but lately we've had a surge of absolutely awful threads. Could we all please try to rationalise our threadmaking?

For instance;

• If there's already one "silly" thread, don't make another. Making another silly thread makes people hate you.
• Topics about defacating, pornish stuff (do you like boobies?), masturbating, and dying, all fall under the catagory of "silly". But for the rest of it you'll have to use common sense. For instance, don't make loads of topics like "have you ever got your dick caught in something?", because apart from being rediculous they mostly only involve "yes" or "no" answers, and the only entertainment they offer is a good opertunity to tell the threadstarter that they can shove their bandaged dick up their arse.
• Topics involving death and sex as part of a larger debate are not considered "silly". These topics can be anything from abortion to euthanasia, and are considered good stuff because they often invoke lengthy, brainy debates that rock your planetz0rz.
• Consider threadmaking to be a privelidge, not a right. You're entertaining the whole forum, so try to keep it ... entertaining. If you can't do this then you shouldn't be making topics. Simple.

Now for the bit that's aimed at the users AND staff;

I would like to suggest a system in which people can be rewarded for all the really good threads that they make, and penalised for the crappy ones. But I've got no idea how this would be done, so everyone start making suggestions.

Hey i know those reward systems, where members can give one (-) or (+) point for evry post. It's like post count, but just point count... pretty cool. But the bad side of it is, that then there will be the popular ones, and the unpopular ones...

Dunno... Check it out yourself... :S

I find it all to be a matter of opinion. You can't tell people what to post and not post (unless it's against the rules or annoys the majority of members). I think most of the topics you're talking about are things people are generally curious about; the masturbation, breast argument-ish, and reading on the toliet threads got a lot of attention and replies. (The toliet one to a lesser extent, but meh.)

Most people replied to those without complaint, so I really don't see what the big deal is. However, I will agree the forums are in need of some more brain-stimulating threads.

I agree with both of you... but I think we at least need to encourage people to do well. Yes, those topics got attention, but they mostly ended up getting closed because people were just joking around in them. I don't think that there's any denying that they were totally lame, and I'd argue that there isn't really that much in the way of curiousity going on there.

I dunno really where I'm going with this... I just think we should do something... we should be encouraging people to do better. I'm not telling anyone what to post and what not to post or anything like that, but I am making a suggestion for how they can post better, more meaningful threads, and I'm asking people to PLEASE be more sensible about it. It's honestly doing my melon that we've got all these awesome members and rarely do they ever start good debates. So perhaps it just needs a little kickstart again?

I can agree with that. Earlier, I was checking something in FAQ and noticed the question, "How do I rate a thread?" http://www.oddworldforums.net/faq.ph...vb_thread_rate If people agree that some encouragement is needed, I think this would do the trick, assuming this whole rating system is possible.

I'm pretty neutral on this though. Since it's all warm and summery here, the easy-going threads seem sort of appropriate.

Yes I suppose that's true... we can't be all serious all the time, we'll always need a bit of jokeyness. But you can definately have too much of a good thing.

I suggest that we make this rating system more well known... because I certainly did not know it was there.

I never noticed there was a rating system on this forums, but I can't see the menu, where is it?

It seems that the rating system may be disabled. If you click on the "Thread Tools" menu, it's just got print, email, or subscribe. I can't find any other small menus that have anything of the like in them...

I was about to point that out, it's definately not there, so Alcar obviously hasn't enabled it.

Knowing Jelsoft like I do, they'd probably charge extra for that feature. Jelsoft seem to like doing that.

How about, Dino, if you think this forum is full of 'silly' threads, you visit other forums more often. Or make your own.

Either way, stop telling people what they can and can not post.

I like the threads we've had lately, because it means I don't have to wade through everyone's walls of text to get into the coversation. Whenever we have deep threads people make hour long posts and it just gets boring.

And if you don't like the threads, don't visit them, it's not like they're taking up other topic space. You can make your precious 'serious threads' yourself if you really want them.

Why are you being so hostile and defensive? This is just a SUGGESTION posted in Forum SUGGESTIONS and Help. It's not some demand. While I'm fine with you disagreeing please don't make fun of my opinions or act like I'm attempting to force them on you.

Trust me I'm not denying that you're entitled to your opinion, and if you think that the threads we have now are fine then you're perfectly entitled to feel that way, and I welcome your contribution because I need to know if the majority of you feel that this is all unnecessary. But at the moment I feel differently to you, and I think that there should be more encouragement toward serious debates and really cracking good threads, as we don't have any of them... at all... so I'm making suggestions for how I feel that should happen, and why I feel that it should happen. Is that unreasonable? Please point out where that's unreasonable.

Again, if you still disagree after that, then you're entitled to. Just get off my case about me telling everyone what to post and how to post it... because that's not what I'm doing. And if you feel that is what I'm doing then I'd ask you to pay closer attention to what I've actually said.. but if that still isn't good enough for you then I'll say it here; I'm not telling anyone what and what not to post.

Well, I'm not really on anyone's side here, I just think the rating-system could be fun :p.

True but then we get people moaning that they only got one star or people using voting as a weapon against others who may not see it so lightly. Ok, that's a bit of an extreme example, but i can't think for a second of a member who liked every other member here. Except maybe Abe 16.

<3 Abe 16!

You've got good insight into this. I can see you'd make a decent admin.

I can say with experience that what Hobo is saying is true. People DO use it as a weapon, they DO use it as an e-penis booster, and it does cause problems. I can totally understand why Alcar hasn't got it implemented because when I had it on my forum, it caused some problems among some of the more whingy self important egotistical members (like for instance, me :p). So I ended up pulling it, but I did implement a thread rating system, which only allowed postive points to be given. But it's so much simpler to just avoid it altogether because working out how it would go is just a headache.

Ah, well. I was just throwing that out there if a lot of people agreed with you. Like I said, I'm pretty nuetral. I like the easy-going threads, but one or two more serious threads wouldn't hurt anything every once in a while. I think it's mostly due to a lot of the major posters being on trips and such. Overall, I don't really see any major problems with OT right now.

I figured someone would mention the problem that Hobo brought up. I bet that'd probably happen too. Plus, I think most members would be too apathetic to vote. But again, I was just throwing it out there for an option.

Dino, I'm surprised you only had positive points able to be given out on your old forum since you're wanting members to be penalized for crappy topics here. :\

I'm not really on any side about this right now because I don't really see any problems on OT or anywhere as of now. But I still think your idea is an interesting one, Dino. Perhaps if things get out of hand again, then it can be looked at more in-depth. ;)

Yeah well I had to perform this balancing act between making sure it wasn't used as a weapon, and making sure people were rewarded for decent threads and therefore encouraged to make more of them.

Most penalising was done by the users, if anyone did anything really stupid, me and the mods would just let them take care of it. They did a pretty good job of humiliating people for making silly mistakes, and that made people more cautious, and value respect more. There was no need to hand out warnings.

Ultimately though the mods were all powerful and had the final say in what went on - if they felt that a ragging was punishment enough then they would leave it at that and advise the person involved to wise up. They were the absolute cream of the crop, the best forum members, and everyone sort of huddled around them and followed their lead. You were encouraged to make a special effort to stay on the right side of the law, and actually it made for a very clean, self sufficient community, which followed the example of several really decent people by preference.

It was all about encouraging self betterment, and you've got to create a certain environment for that to happen.

Uh-huh... And why exactly did your wonderful forum come to an end?

Management dispute. There was a disagreement over who was paying for it, who had paid the most, and who therefore owned it. I wanted it to continue despite this disagreement but the other guy involved wanted to drag it down with him, so in the end I had to close it down. A temporary EzBoard was set up but after a full on members meeting we decided that the forum had basically been killed off, as the domain and hosting didn't belong to us and we'd lost many members who had sided with the other guy. The risk involved with starting up a new forum wasn't worth it, as we'd already lost the topspot on google and the genre was overcrowded with similar more successful forums. So the members all left to go to other places and I never saw any of them ever again.

Sorry to take this further off topic, but was your forum about? Was it on a specific topic, or was it just general discussion?

And I still don't think any kind of system will work to get better topics. If people can't think of a good topic, they can't think of one.

Unless you created some kind of inspiration machine and you called in Inspiratron 2000 and you zapped people with it.

But somehow I think it's easier just to wait for your 'good topics'.