I have received complaints about the quality of some of the threads and messages posted to the forum these days.
If I see a thread that is out of control, I can and do mark it as Read-Only. This effectively shuts down the thread. However, I just don't see a majority of the rogue threads.
So, my question is, should we try to inhibit the noise and improve the quality of the responses in some way? For example,
Let me know your thoughts and feelings on this.
Jon
We could institute a weighted voting system of some kind to limit the noise. Threads with too many negative votes would be closed (read-only). Messages with too many negative votes would be removed.
I suspect this would just generate a load of worthless bickering from bruised egos.
We could require forum users to login to reply to message threads. I would only want to do this if we can make it painless for legitimate users.
As pointed out by others I also suspect this would not deter timewasters.
I think you have two options: 1) Do nothing. 2) Vet all posts before they appear on the forum.
As a general note to others: The complete nonsense posts are mostly made by people wishing to do nothing more than provoke a reaction. The usual description for this is trolling. Usually it is rather more subtle than the ones we see here - Usenet contributors, for instance, would ignore them completely. Unfortunately many of the regular contributors here don't seem to be able to spot these and try and ridicule them in the same way they ridicule genuine posts from desperate students. This is exactly what they want - if you want them to go away then just ignore them.
Removed posts seldom leads to bickering. An existing post can be read again and again and produce more agitation. A lost post will not be missed - most people wouldn't even know that it did exist.
People loosing a post have basically three choices. - ignore it - scream about it and loose more posts - repost again, but this time using a filtered language and less personal attacks.
Most normal people would choose alternative 1 or 3. The problematic visitors would go for alternative 2, but after having lost enough posts it would be no fun anymore to just loose their posts without being able to trig large numbers of irritated responses to keep the war ongoing.
Recognizing trolls? The problem is that a troll and a really lost noob with wrong expectations make very similar posts. If we just ignore all posters who looks like trolls, we will at the same time ignore lots of people who need help. So a troll here or there will feel macho for getting people to waste time on a dummy thread. I can live with that - it is still their loss to possibly be bright but have stayed at a maturity level closer to what could be expected of our closest pelted relatives.
"I feel if Keil tech support could just glance at the posts occasionally to block or wipe the undesired post, [...]"
If Keil had the time then it would probably be easiest with just a "report this post" button. Very quick to implement and works quite well, but requires some form of attention on a 24x7 basis. This concept works best for national sites, where most posters are in the same time zone as the private or organisation that hosts the site. Distributing the role to a subset of the regulars can solve the time-zone problem but be a bit problematic since many posters will feel that one or more of the "user-space" moderators will have received more power than they where capable of wielding.
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