Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Jan. 21 2008, 15:41 |
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Quote (larstangmark @ Jan. 21 2008, 18:03) | And who the hell posts on this forum just to gain postcount? That's just weird. I guess I must have been one of the people you refer to, but as far as I can remember the main participants (?) in the poll were active in other discussions on the forum as well. |
No, of course you're not one of the ones I was referring to. The people concerned are no longer here - that's how big a part of the community they were (they went quiet of their own accord, at least as far as I remember). You're probably right that it was mostly regulars who were posting there - like I said before, it was over a year ago and all I'm left with is an overall impression of how things were. I was already decreasing my level of involvement with the forum at that time, as far as I remember, so I might not even have seen all the topics in question - I'm just saying what I remember, in a hope that it might help people to understand what happened. I could be like admins on other forums and just say "The admin's word is final" and ban everyone who's posted in this topic, if you'd prefer . I can say only that the concerns I mentioned before were the ones which I remember as bothering us at the time, and if topics were deleted, I believe that would be why. Why those topics were deleted completely and not just moved to the 'trash', I don't know. Generally, if there's a topic I think ought to be removed for one reason or another, I'll put it there - it then at the very least gives time to look through it without any pressure. There are occasionally ones which contain things which are obviously upsetting people, which can't be saved by deleting a single post, yet which may contain things which are worth keeping - I prefer to remove them as soon as possible, sit and twiddle my thumbs a bit while I work out how to edit them to make them work, then put them back again...the trash area is very handy for that.
Going back to people who post just to bump up their post count...it does happen here. It's not very common, but I can think of one or two cases, one of which was back at the time of some of those deleted topics. It tends to be teenagers, rather than the people in their twenties and upwards who tend to hang around here. You're right, it's an odd thing to do, but some people place great importance on the numbers next to their name - I suspect it's because it's the only thing they feel they can achieve (it does tend to be people who have nothing to say, which is why the topics more heavy in discussion usually repel them...it's not exclusively the case, but it usually is).
As far as a warning for topics about to be deleted goes, we'll certainly bear it in mind and give warning whenever and wherever possible. With housekeeping type stuff, that'll be no problem, but there are occasionally those cases, as I mentioned above, where we feel it's important to get stuff out the way quickly. An example would be if someone posted a topic with Mike's address in it - I'd not want to leave that hanging around for long enough for everyone to read a warning that it's about to be deleted...obviously that's just an example that comes easily to mind, and one of many possible situations that would lead to a topic being binned as quickly as possible. The chances are that the majority of posts in a topic like that would be along the lines of "I don't think you should have posted that..." anyway. The other instance would be when a lot of people are asking for a topic to be deleted. Obviously we don't delete things on request without good reason, but there have been times when a topic has clearly upset a lot of people and requests for its deletion have been posted in that topic. We won't always delete those, but we might, so if you see a topic with posts like that in it, it would be best to take that as your warning - if we take the decision to remove it, it'll be because we want to get rid of it quickly, before anyone else gets upset.
What we'll do is make it policy to not actually delete topics, but to keep them in the trashcan for a while (shall we say a month?), so that people have a chance to alert us if they feel we've overlooked something.
Regarding popularity, I'd not say it's our major concern. Of course the place needs people, but our aim is to build the forum that we want to see and that we want to spend time on - otherwise we'd be running a Britney Spears forum or something like that, which would no doubt be way more popular than this! We do listen to suggestions for how to make the forum better, and all of us look at other forums quite regularly, which is how we form our opinions of what's best for tubular.net. We do continue to revise those opinions, but ultimately, like Olivier says, we have a direction which we've been going in since the beginning - the kind of discussion we try to encourage here now is the kind that the forum was created for.
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