Carl2291 said:
What would you change about the rules? Be tougher on spam and obvious trolls? You said a while back that you had ideas. I wanna hear some! |
I'm the guy who spurgeonryan's whole "Don't listen to the veterans!" thing is about, because I stand against everything he stands for
The idea is that the rules of the forum, as much as the mechanics of it, will greatly shape the kind of discussion had therein.
A few ideas:
1. Much harder cracking down on trolls. One would not, for instance, go into a Valkyria Chronicles topic and go "Man VC just ain't that great, geez." That's trolling, even if subtle by this site's standards. It's another thing entirely if one is in a Fire Emblem topic and goes "Man Fire Emblem is way better than VC, geez." That's at elast context-appropriate, and isn't in the middle of a crowd that is going to want to fight you for saying that. Same concept applies to trolling hardware or companies. Away you go!
2. Crack down on spammers. Make them hurt. Is that by banning spammers? No. You just take away the venues by which they spam, which means No More Spam-Ass Forum Games. The Person Above You and Elimination Threads, specifically, would need to be destroyed. Keep the Mafia games, or other games which are actually constructive games that promote discussion, but they need to be cordoned off from the main topic forums. There would be no exceptions to this.
3. One game, one thread. We do not need multiple topics about, for example, TANK! TANK! TANK!. They could all fit in one thread. Same with ME3, or Zelda, or Fire Emblem. The same could be used to talk about larger collections - M.U.G.E.N.'s Vita thread is the perfect example of this at work. Long thread, perfectly civil, has all the information one could want, plenty of good discussion, and people are glad to share news with someone instead of makign them search for a specific post. Have a Vita thread. Have a Resistance thread. Do not have more than one of each. Duplicate threads would be locked. Repeated offenders would be banned.
4. Enhanced moderator accountability. The moderators need to be policed by the administrators in the same way regular users are policed by the mods. Now, admins are there primarily to support the mods, but they're also there to review complaints and make sure that no mod is overstepping their bounds. If they are, they get their shit kicked out. Moderators would not be elevated to that status because they are friends of current moderators, they would get the job because they seem like the best pick, and they have the right combination of friendliness and ambivalence. This enhanced accountability would be necessary, because:
5. Enhanced moderator discretion. "Trolling" is fuzzy as a concept and no hard-and-fast definition will catch all of it, except for maybe "Being as big an asshole as possible without technically breaking the rules". It's up to the mods to decide what trollign is, and it's up to the mods to ban the Hell out of trolls.
6. A definite, concrete limit on sig sizes. For instance, one would be allowed no more than one image totalling less than 150 pixels in height and 600 in width - or probably smaller. One would not have a block of text larger than such an image. Users who break this rule get their sigs turned off. ALSO NO GIFS ABOVE A CERTAIN KB SIZE.
There are other changes I might make, but those are the primary tenets right there
