- icefirei
- |
- Noble Heroic Member
Okay, I've typed all of this up as I've read through the thread. Here are my thoughts, reasoned and balanced to the best of my ablities. Or patience. These are by no means my ideas, I've just summarized the ones I like and would support.
First things first: Members must be notified of the rules in some way or another. Maybe not letting new members post in a forum until they hit an agree button after a short summary of the rules pops up. In fileshare, the publish button could be easily fitted with a little notice outlining those specific rules too.
As for the forums, I've always thought, since the H3 boom, that the Halo 3 forum should be split into a MM and a Halo 3 Campaign forum. They already did it to Halo 2, and if any forum ever needed segregation it is the Halo 3 forum. Or, more likely, more emphasis needs to be put on the fact that Optimatch is the preferred MM forum, not the Halo 3 forum.
Restricting posting in MM and Fileshare (except screenshots) to accounts linked to Gold memberships would be ideal. No second accounts allowed. But by cutting it down to just the forums that are for discussing things that only "gold" members, you wouldn't have the problem of people not having access to other forums. The whole "walk the walk" thing, etc..
Now, banning people from MM. This could pose a problem (accidental or undeserved bannings), but that problem is easily circumvented by only allowing banning pending approval from "Bungie staff" a la Banhammer. The bannable offense would have to be rather serious, and could not arise from negligence (i.e. they have to know they're seriously breaking the rules). I like the idea of a "recommend for ban" option available to the moderators.
As for the Files Forums, the problem I see with letting downloads bump files is that there can only be so many files in the top... You would eventually have the same 15 files being continually bumped. It's a vicious cycle: a popular map gets downloaded and bumped, putting it on the top of the list again, then another user sees it, downloads it because of its popularity, and another user, and so on, just because of the file's popularity. Now, this may not be a bad idea except that it unfairly hampers the growth of another file that just got posted later. The first files to be around would be by far the most successful.
Now that I've seen how many ideas have already been worked over, it kinda makes this post a bit pointless, but oh well. And this is all coming from somebody who's only recently become active again on the site (I was active for a while in '02-'03, but as my new account shows, there was a considerable relapse). There's my input.