- sesquipadelian
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- Exalted Mythic Member
etc etc/glaringly obvious/and so on, and such <=Not redundant!
Posted by: Cr4ne Style
Taxes do nothing to affect the share of wealth, since taxes are only applied to income.
So that's not even a part of the conversation at all, so it's pointless talking about it....
"for a "best" moral to exist, there must exist the "best" moral base. If the base of morality varies from location to location, culture to culture...then there can't be an absolute moral..
Posted by: x Foman123 x
I have devised the following idea.
An Idea: Variable Spam Filters
As we all know already, Achronos has a subcutaneous, stealthy "trust ratings" system working on this site right now.
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.
i have read your post and here are my thoughts: my points in my first post apply to your idea and your idea would do little if anything to increase the quality of posts in all of the threads.
the trust system COULD NOT accurately assign points to users based on the quality of posts. all that it would do is make it harder for people who make inappropriate posts (those that break the forum rules and are worthy of punishment) to make quite as many posts as they do now. no program would be able to detect all of the posts that break forum rules, and mods would still have to get involved. if your plan were in place, all that it would do is add the wait time for offenders to post, but they could still post quite often, and they could surely add to the clutter in the threads quite efficiently. let's suppose that a bigtime jerkball was suspended and flagged for being a bad poster, and your design was in place. well, then they could only make some number of posts a day, but they could still post loads and loads of times per day, and they could still make countless posts that are devoid of thought or value. they might not be able to pound out 10 rotten posts in one hour, but they could still make 10 crappy posts in any given day.
also, you seem to presuppose that adding the amount of time between making posts will cause posters to add more thought to their posts, but there is no reason at all to suppose that this would be the case. if a person could only post after waiting 10 minutes, there is no reason to think that he would spend that time crafting a well-conceived post. instead, it just means that whatever he wanted to post really fast will now require a wait.
in any case, your idea will do nothing to solve the problem that you have with the forums. given the flexibility and freedom of the bnet forums (we can make countless posts and do so with virtually no delay or mediation), the best that i can imagine that we can hope for is something along the lines of what i suggested. but, that system would do nothing to increase the quality of posts in the forums, it would just make it easier for mods to find and punish people who make posts that vreak the rules.
EDIT: here are specific benefits that you suppose would result from your plan:
Posted by: x Foman123 x
Benefits
1) Such a system would have immediate effects on the quality of posts in the forums.
2) 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.
3) I hypothesize a distinct decrease in one-liner insults, flames, "youfail" links, and sarcastic comments.
4) 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.
5) 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.
none of these will result from implementing your plan.
1) no it would not. as i have made clear, your idea will not be able to qualitatively assess posts, so the trust system wil not be directly tied to the quality of posts made by a given users. all that it would do is make it so that rule breakers could not post constantly. but, since they could still post many times a day, they could still fill the threads with crud.
2) no, this simply does not follow. all that it would mean is that users must wait to make additional posts. it does not mean that users would spend that time putting thought and effort into constructing posts. a person could make a post with an inane comment, step away from the computer, pick his nose for 10 minutes, make another inane post, return to nose picking, make another inane post, and so on.
3) no, this would only be true of people who make posts every few minutes all of the time. people who make this kind of post could still make the exact same kind of post, they would just be forced to wait a few minutes between new posts.
4) no, this is also false. we have no evidence to support your claim that there is correlation between how frequently a person posts and the quality of his posts. some jerkballs may make only one post a day but only make dumb posts, some jerkballs may make 10 posts a day and always make dumb posts, and some jerkballs may make 50 posts a say and only make dumb posts. all three of these kinds of dumb posters would be able to continue to make as many dumb posts under your system as they would without it, so your plan is not efficacious.
5) trusted users under your plan would not necessarily be persons making thoughtful posts, they would merely be people who did not break forum rules that would ding their trust ratings. again, the primary reason that your system cannot work is that you cannot construct an accurate system to assign value to posts. a person could earn a high trust rating yet never make a clever or insightful post, he would simply have played by the rules.
and, here is a quote from achronos from another thread that is consistent with my claims:
Posted by: Achronos
You're right - an automated system cannot make value judgements about the content of posts... but it can use information about an account to determine a different thing: trust. It is entirely possible for the system to make an educated guess as to how "trusted" you are. By this, I mean it can look at the sum of your history here and decide "hey, this guy is a troublemaker" or "hey this guy gets warned every once in a while, but is otherwise okay" or "this guy is squeaky clean".
Remember, the purpose would be to try and make sure that someone can't escape their past, even if they create a new account. The tricky part is to make sure it is newbie friendly - that real new users aren't screwed by protections against spammers. However, I have an idea about that, but I'll keep that to myself for now.
[Edited on 08.16.2007 4:16 PM PDT]