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I write this post asking that those of you who think that this Forum should be reserved for one-liner posts, webcam games, halfway-clever off-topic "inside" Bungie jokes/references, and locked "how do i change my name?" threads kindly refrain from posting such thoughts here.
The Problem
Notwithstanding the apparent feelings of some users here who think the Halo 3 Forum and other public forums on this site are "under control" or "doing just fine," I think that most would acknowledge that an intelligent discussion in those forums has become impossible. Indeed, make a casual reference about "intelligent discussion" here in the Community Forum, and you will immediately receive three or four sarcastic comments in response.
It does not have to be this way. Multiple recent polls have shown that the vast, vast majority of users here are of high school age or older. Polls are not scientifically reliable, of course, but even common sense and a little bit of observation of what people talk about on this site can lead us to the same conclusion. Moreover, many of us are at the university level or higher. At these ages, people should be expected to act more mature. I am convinced that with a little bit of encouragement and prodding, this result is attainable.
A Culture of Intelligent Discussion
I have mentioned, in a few of my posts recently, a sociological epiphany-of-the-obvious that I had: on this site (as in most situations in real life), people react to and conform to the behaviors of those around them. I have seen the very same users who post one-liner spam and flame comments in the Halo 3 forum come to CompoundIntelligence or the Community Forum and create a well-thought-out, coherent post. And I have seen the opposite -- users that I respect from their posts in the Community Forum or in CompoundIntelligence visiting the Halo 3 Forum or the Flood and changing their behavior and posting style to become 12-years-old all over again.
It is indisputable that most of us would like to be able to go to the Halo 3 Forum and have an intelligent, rational discussion. Over the course of the day today, I observed as a very thoughtful and well-written post by a user named Adreniline in the Halo 3 Forum disintegrated into petty flames and spam solely because the thread mentioned MLG. As Recon marveled when he closed the thread, "Once again, a thread about a Halo game that mentions MLG has become less about the game, and (once more) about MLG (and the assumptions/presumptions from both sides of the street). . . . Amazing." (emphasis added)
This kind of thing is not okay. Locking threads that go out of control is like the oft-cited example of the general citizenry standing by and thinking it's okay that they just enable the police to arrest criminals after they've already committed the crime, yet ignoring the factors that cause crime in the first place. We are the citizenry, the moderators are the police, the criminals are the bad posters, and the crime is the bad post.
Our moderators are excellent enforcers, but we cannot blithely rely on them while ignoring the underlying causes of our inability to to understand or post rationally in the Halo 3 Forum. If we dare to purport to want the same thing that the Bungie staff wants out of the Halo 3 forum, we must do more. As we can easily observe in other places on this site that are rife with Halo 3 fans, this high-quality-posting culture IS attainable. Yet we, the loyal and longtime Bungie fans, sit back and do nothing to try to help attain it in bungie.net's most popular public forums, instead saying that merely enforcing the rules against bad posts after they already occur is sufficient. But as can be seen at any hour of the day in the Halo 3 Forum, this approach is not good enough.
Not the Bungie staff but rather the Community -- the source of 99% of the regulation, administration, and culture inherent in these forums -- needs to encourage a culture of intelligent discussion. Do this, and you will find your own experience much more enjoyable. Those of you who find the Halo 3 forum far too frantic for real discussion and retreat instead to the sanctuary of the private groups will finally be able to emerge and have real discussions with other fans of the game.
We all need to help with ideas and actions if we are going to help to slowly turn around the culture of spam and flames resident in the Halo 3 Forum. So, to start, I have devised the following idea.
An Idea: Variable Spam Filters
Bearing in mind Achronos's admonition that "Everybody is an idea man," and acknowledging at the outset that I have little perception of either the "stealth user-trust rating system" or the technical difficulties involved in implementing the idea presented below, I'd like to still make a proposition and submit it to the Community Forum for criticism and/or comment.
1) As we all know already, Achronos has a subcutaneous, stealthy "trust ratings" system working on this site right now.
2) As we also already know, the Bungie.net spam filter prevents you from posting more than once within a certain amount of time, somewhere between 30 seconds and one minute.
Well why not combine those two concepts into a much more severe system that would encourage longer, better thought out posts? I introduce the Bungie.net Trust Rating-Dependent Variable Spam Filter.
New users who start out with some certain trust rating (we don't know whether it is a comparably "low" trust rating or whether it is comparably "average") are restricted by the Variable Spam Filter to posting say, once every 6 or 8 minutes (sample somewhat arbitrarily chosen for discussion purposes). As their trust rating goes up, their Spam Filter timer goes down. Develop a high enough trust rating, and your spam filter might go down to 10 or 20 seconds. Moderators and site admin, of course, would have no spam filter at all (0 seconds).
Receive a warning or blacklisting from a moderator, and your trust rating goes down. Inversely, your spam filter increases. Log in on an alternate account and your trust ratings on both accounts go down (hopefully). For "untrusted" users, their spam filter goes up to 25 or 30 minutes -- even when not on the blacklist.
Benefits
Such a system would have immediate effects on the quality of posts in the forums. By restricting posts to only once every few (or several) minutes for new or "bad" users, they would be both encouraged and forced to put some time and thought into their posts. I hypothesize a distinct decrease in one-liner insults, flames, "youfail" links, and sarcastic comments. Users most likely to post such garbage in the Halo 3 Forum are the very users who would be losing the most (wasting one of their few available posts) by posting them. This may be painful for them, but it will force-feed them the culture of good posts.
Even "alt" accounts would be useless (assuming, as I do, that Achronos's trust rating system takes this into account) -- first, logging in on an alternate account in order to post again quickly would reduce the trust rating on both the original and alternate accounts. Second, new accounts would start out with a low trust rating, thus confining them to posting once every several minutes also. And users who try to alternate between accounts to post more frequently only find themselves being able to post LESS and LESS frequently. Ha!
As for "trusted" users, they have earned the right to post frequently as well as to post the occasional one-liner in exchange for their observation of the forum rules and conventions of contribution to good discussion. And clearly, they are much less likely to abuse the spam filter. If they do spam, they get a warning or blacklisting and suddenly find their allowed response time increased.
Detriments
Again, I do not know how complicated this kind of thing would be to code -- I am not much of a programmer. But if Bungie employees and others (such as many of this forum's regulars) really are finding themselves currently unable to participate in a rational discussion on the public Halo 3 forum, it might be worth it.
Second, this idea, like so many others, contains the ever-present possibility of "elitism," otherwise known as bragging that you can post every 10 seconds. Frankly, I think that talking about this kind of thing should be encouraged, as it will make other users want to be better users in order to raise their trust ratings. To avoid the ability to figure out ways to game the system, the exact time would be a secret and the "anti-spam" filter would continue to display the same message that it always has. Furthermore, while it would be publicized that the spam filter was dependent on your trust rating, exact methods of raising your trust rating beyond "follow the rules" would generally be a secret.
Third, I can see this idea becoming quite annoying in private groups, so this system would be for the public forums only. This would also enhance its secretiveness.
Fourth, this would require diligence from the mods in warnings and blacklistings, knowing that every action they take, even from the smallest warnings to the most severe bans, would have an effect on that user's ability to post thereafter. I do not see this as a problem, though -- the mods are already quite diligent in the Halo 3 Forum and others, and this would be unlikely to negatively affect their moderating.
Conclusion
Well I'm just about at my character limit, so I'll leave this for you guys to comment, critique, question, and peruse :-)
[Edited on 08.01.2007 12:38 AM PDT]