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Posted by: Achronos
Being a difficult problem doesn't make it irreparable. It just means you have to be more creative to solve it.
Think of it this way - solving said problem would impact many thousands of people and improve the community immeasurably. Can you afford not to solve it?Ah, I see. So we need to get creative about solving the problem, instead of complaining about it. Perhaps we could sub-divide the Halo 3 Forum into smaller forums for certain things, instead of just having one jumbled mess. I'll have to elaborate on this more until I can think of a really good idea, though.
Posted by: Achronos
That's called "fixing the symptom, not the actual problem, thus eventually making everything worse."
You focus so much on the threads themselves, but you're not dealing with the actual problems. The threads aren't the problem. The people aren't even the problem. It is one of volume. Things seem like spam that really aren't - they just show up so much because people can't keep track of everything and just give up and post their own version of something that has been discussed a billion times.
That means any real solution has to deal with the problem of volume. Ideally, you make your disadvantage the solution. In this case, we have to take the volume of people and posts and make it a positive thing rather than a negative. Easier said than done, but that's the only way to succeed.
Besides, big challenges make life interesting.Well, your idea to hide posts seems like a good idea, so I'm guessing that's one of the ways you mean by "taking the volume of people and posts and making it a positive thing rather than a negative". So my solution to solve this, again, is to divide the forums into smaller sub-forums. I can't think of anything better than that, unless the moderators want to make stickies for topics. I think I'm still not dealing with the problem of volume though.
Posted by: Achronos
Except that the file forums are BROKEN right now. "Popularity" is being determined by how many times people post. How many replies you can post to a thread about a screenshot should have no bearing on its popularity.
Indeed, as I said before, you're not even supposed to be finding content via the file forum index pages. You're supposed to be going from indidivual file items that you find via other means and then talking about them. The topic index is just an artifiact from using the forums to provide comment functionality to the files.
The problem is that there aren't many good ways of locating files. So, everybody just uses the topic index, and then abused the fact that they can inflate their file's popularity by bumping it and getting their buddies or alt accounts to bump it.I can't think of a good way to solve this problem. The only thing I can think of is to have three sub-forums for each Files Forum. One of these sub-forums would be sorted by new topics, another by most downloads, and another by most recently replied to. It would be time-consuming, but it could help a little bit.
[Edited on 03.21.2008 11:57 AM PDT]