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Posted by: prometheus25
To me, the solution is education. New members go straight into the Halo 3 forum and see bad behavior, so they act such. If, when you were growing up as a kid, you had nudist parents that had alcohol-enraged arguments, chances are, when you're older, you'll be walking around the streets naked, screaming at people and thrashing your bottle of booze everywhere.
If we would set outstanding examples of good behavior throughout the community, people would want to act like them. Right now, they see these funny insults, and try to out-flame each other becuase it draws attention. We need to draw attention away from the flames and direct it towards a positive model. Elitism be damned.
Agreed 110%. If I may be so bold as to quote myself from a previous thread that I created about three-and-a-half months ago:
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."
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.
[Edited on 11.14.2007 12:19 PM PST]