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Posted by: UL7IM4 G33K
The mind of a rule breaker is to break the rules. Why would he do more of something that is breaking the rules when it isn't breaking the rules anymore? I think making it OK kinda takes the thrill out of abusing it.
I disagree again. They're not usually intentionally breaking the rules because its a thrill. They're breaking the rules because its a means to an end. They want their topic to be noticed, so they bump it. Most of them don't even seem to know they're breaking the rules. We might just be talking about tow different things here.
Based on this logic, we could remove the post button, since allowing people to post may allow spammers to spam, and less spam would result by not letting anyone post. That is the logic I am getting from you. I prefer a more positive outlook and less absolute and cowardly way of doing things.
Now that's just absurd. Why did you use a strawman which is obviously not even close to what I'm suggesting? I thought the point of using a strawman was to create and attack something which I might plausibly say. In my earlier post I said forums are here for discussions. How would disallowing people to post at all do that? This attempt at negating my point was totally not needed. Actually, its so inane that I probably won't be able to take anything you say to me seriously in the future. That's a shame, because I really do respect your opinion and ideas. I may disagree with them from a policy standpoint, but that's all. There really was no need for that.
I highly doubt that is the reason people bump. I usually bump threads that I feel deserve it, including my own which go unnoticed. I hate making duplicate topics, and therefore when I bump a topic I don't want to repost, I get banned for it.
Again, your anecdotes differ from my own. They also seem to differ from the general consensus. You kind of admitted to bumping because you thought it was needed. Clearly, if it had not been posted in in awhile, you might be one of the only users who think that. Despite how you sugar coat it, you're bumping because you think those threads deserve more attention. As I said, bumping is a subjective method of obtaining attention. That's a mildly destructive behavior on the forums, and I doubt we'll ever decide to simply tolerate it one day. Others might think that their useless thread about mold on oranges might be a worthy discussion, but simply because they think its useful topic, that does not make it useful to people at large.
Incidentally, I do know the usual motives behind people bumping their topics, because they PM me explaining why they did not deserve a warning or a ban because of it. From the horse's mouth, they usually want more attention for the thread. Nothing more.
I have plenty in my time on forums. I have been to forums with ten times as much spam attacks and immaturity that this forum has, and yet all of these features seem to go unabused on all of them save for a few rare occasions.
Maybe the reason it all works on these forums is merely becuase they have filtered all the bad eggs out due to them quickly showing up. Having alot to abuse makes it easy to bring those abusers into the open and get rid of them.
Neowin.net, a forum of 206,074 members has everything from custom avatars to signature images and post counts, and I have yet to see as much abuse as you claim WILL happen. Even if B.net has over 1mil members, only around 500,000 of them have posted, and maybe half that are even active on the main forums. That is barely more than Neowin.net, so my example works out.
Good for those forums, but as I said, THEY'RE NOT BUNGIE.NET. All we can do is agree to disagree there. I don't think those perks will work here, you do. That's as far as we can possibly take that portion of the discussion.
[Edited on 03.10.2008 8:54 PM PDT]