About GC....And other things....

[UWAOOOOU]

How about this: Del Murder spam is acceptable, and CrashNUMBERS spam is not. Agreed?

YES I AGREE!!!!!

Of-course.

[Raistlin]

Whatever happened to Equality among Members?

edit: well, it was cool when I was thinking about it

...?

[-N-]

Whatever happened to Equality among Members?

edit: well, it was cool when I was thinking about it

That's one of those things that's funnier in your head.

[Big D]

If you take a little time to think of a reasonably deep topic, you can end up with fairly spam-free discussions in GC. Looser and more informal than EoEO, but still thought-provoking. My two GC threads seem to be working ok - the one on workplace romance (inspired by Kishi), and the one on postmodernism.

[Raistlin]

...I haven't checked in GC, but if it was titled "True romance in and out of the workplace," then it is an instant classic.

[Raistlin]

I'm double-posting so people will see this.

http://www.eyesonff.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67539

Read that thread. We had a great discussion going - with people posting regularly, until a small handful of members decided to spam it up with irrelevent comments. Who were these members? Were they newbies who didn't know better? Were they spammers who ignored authority? Were they anything that people in this thread have been complaining about? No. They were mods and veteran members.

I guess Big D and I were the only ones in that thread who cared about serious discussion.

[eestlinc]

I cared about a serious discussion but everyone ignored my comments.

[Raistlin]

I didn't ignore them. I actually agreed with them(for the most part), which is why I didn't respond. I was busy debating with Big D.

[Del Murder]

Since when does you agreeing prevent you from responding?

That thread was far from out of line.

[Raistlin]

No, I just meant that I was busy arguing with Big D.

And I know it wasn't out of line. I was just pointing out that people complained about legitimate threads taken off-course.

[The Man]

I can't even read a complete thread in General Chat anymore. There're so many off-topic replies that aren't even funny in most of them that I really have very little interest in reading anything posted at this board.

It got to the point where I made a poll at Fool's Gold asking which board had more spam. Twelve people voted that EoFF had more spam, two people voted that FG had more spam, two people voted the obligatory "Other" option, which got changed to "Ook" to represent the Other account's recent transformation into an orang-utan. There were a couple of other responses that said the boards had the same/similar amounts of spam, but FG's was readable and EoFF's was not. Granted, it's probably a bit skewed since regulars of one board are more likely to prefer it, but it still speaks rather strongly since Fool's Gold was initially created as a spam-tolerant, laid-back alternative to EoFF (albeit one where people could discuss things that weren't Final Fantasy games in greater depth).

Really, I don't think it's a matter of any individual staffers doing a bad job. I simply don't think there are enough staffers to maintain an orderly community. It used to be I'd go away for a month and there would be 800 new threads. There're 2,453 new threads, and the last time I visited was on July 15th. That's a tremendous amount of growth, but the number of staff members has actually seen a net decrease since when I joined (I think there were something like fifteen Knights, albeit only four administrators). There just aren't enough people to do the job efficiently. And it's showing. With a larger staff, staff members can actually sit down and talk to members at length about what they're doing wrong instead of just giving them warnings. It's a far more effective strategy. (Edit: I should probably point out that this is why Fool's Gold has always had such a large staff to members ratio compared to most other boards).

there's a bunch of other stuff that I don't really feel like going over here. I'm not sure I'll even bother posting here much in the future, since I'm going to be taking a much fuller courseload this year, but it's something to consider.

[Del Murder]

I can't even read a complete thread in General Chat anymore.

Not even one?

[Yamaneko]

That's a quality thread right there, though.

[The Man]

well, that one goes without saying, and I just read the screen name tournament thread in its entirety as well. I suppose "can't even read a complete thread" was a bit of an exaggeration. But if you pointed me to a random active thread in GC, I probably wouldn't be arsed to read through it.

[Del Murder]

You actually made some good points, but it seems like for the most part people are enjoying the way it is, and only a handful have a problem with it. If that handful grows, then maybe something else should be done, but for now things are running pretty smoothly.

I agree that deleting posts isn't much of a deterrant for spam so I suggest that we edit the posts and/or issue warnings in the future. I remember the Ciddies thread where two (or three) people would have an irrelevant conversation in the thread, then the posts would be deleted, and then the same people would go right back at it again. That bugs me.