- Demerzel
- |
- Senior Heroic Member
I am somewhat on the fence about this issue, but I'm leaning slightly towards a no in this case. I think that it could help to deter spammers, because they would have to wait a few hours before they could post and they might think that isn't worth the wait. There will be those who have the patience, but that whole thing is really only a minor part of my opinion.
I don't know that a waiting period would be all that effective in getting people to read the rules, though. For example, say that someone is paying their first visit to bungie.net and they're the kind of person who likes to spontaneously sign up for web boards the instant they see them. They create a WLID and a bungie.net login, and then access the forums. If they're immediately confronted with a discussion that they have a strong opinion on, they will not be able to post in that thread until the "no posting" restriction is lifted, which could be a bit of an inconvenience.
It might be good for some of those spontaneus signer-uppers who would immediately create a bungie.net account and might need a bit of a stop sign saying "Whoa, hold on a second, take some time to browse around the site before posting", but the fact of the matter is that a decent amount of the population most likely looks around the site before they create an account. For those people, it might be a tad inconvenient to have to wait to participate in the forums.
I know that I personally took the time to get acquainted with the basics of the forums before I signed up, anyway. I checked out the rules, but I did not read the ToU or the CoC when signing up -- I knew that I wasn't going to be using bungie.net to inconvenience anyone else, and I certainly wasn't going to do anything illegal. Just using your common sense when posting should keep you out of trouble, and I think that if everyone did that, we wouldn't have the problems that sometimes arise, like spamming, which ultimately creates suggestions for this kind of feature.
I think that there's also an attractive social element to being able to sign up and start discussing things instantly, without having to wait to be able to post. Again I'm using myself as an example because I can only speak for myself, but I would rather be able to create an account and start talking to people right away, instead of having to wait.
I think that we're fine with the system we have now. People who break the rules get punished, and I suppose that's really what matters in the end.
[Edited on 03.06.2008 4:03 PM PST]