- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Lithium Tea
Well, that's the point. That one corner (gaping abyss?) of the forums has gotten so bad; so vile, that it's being publicly mocked. This is definitely a community issue, and not something that can be left sliding.
The Flood could benefit from more people "leading the way". I don't think some snobs rooting the users out and publicly humiliating them is any encouragement to improve the quality of posting. Lots of the spammers just live off the attention they're receiving, and if anything Something Awful's efforts will give them more. We've all got to pull our weight if we want anything to happen.
Lots complain about boredom, and often use that as an excuse for posting something off-topic. So, if something interesting comes along, it should be posted - a new, exciting internet game, for example. People enjoy this sort of thing, without anything to do during their online period, they're just going to try and entertain themselves in whatever manner possible. Granted, the problems aren't going to be solved thus - but they will at least be reduced. It's also helpful to keep out of some discussions. If a thread contains naught but spam, why not keep out of it, ignore it, report it to a mod, help it go away, instead of posting in it? This might seem like the basics of a "good forum member", but a number of us tend to forget.
I think we should all be doing our very best to keep the Flood from isolation. A while back there were regular Flood members participating in the Septagon, since then they have been shunned out. Whenever possible I try to include Flood details in the Week in Review. More things like that will help bridge the apparent rift between the two communities.
And it's not just the Flood. The Halo 2 forums seem to be without any real community, even though quality discussion can blossom. What really needs to stop is the mindset of "The Septagon is the community" - that's only as true as people want it to be. There was a Halo 2 community tournament recently, posted in the Septagon - and that's fine, it was a community event. But it wasn't so much as brought up in the Halo 2 forums, so members there knew nothing of it. I'm not criticising the way it was run, I'm picking on it because I think it's a great example of what we could do. Yes, posting a link in New Mombasa or Zanzibar would be cross-posting, but perhaps the moderators could make an exception with such a potentially good issue. Nobody should be entitled to break the rules, but not letting a large part of Halo 2 fans know of an upcoming Halo 2 event isn't right.
I could be wrong, maybe such interlacing of the various forums wouldn't work at all, but the more we can spread positive thought around, the better.