- gamertag: S034
- user homepage:
Gettin' all Herodotean up in here!
Posted by: cortana 5
What if I told you, that I think that's a horrible idea?
Newbies kinda need this place. Requiring a gamertag for forums like optimatch is fine, but this isn't the place to start pushing people out.
While people cherish their "intelligent discussion" on this forum, we have to keep in mind that new people need this place, too. It's a vital function for this forum and there's no good reason to push people out.
Essentially, we'd be turning this into a club house for the boys in pretty blue and grey suits.
Agreed. Every single word.
If this forum were made, and if it were the mystical paradise of rationality and reason which seems to be the target here, you know what other forums I'd visit? NONE. I wouldn't touch a damn thing besides the magic button to happysmartlogicland, and I kinda doubt anyone else would, either. You think discussion is bad now? Imagine the barren wasteland that would be the rest of the B.net forums without people who want real discussion raising the level of rhetoric. It would be the online version of the future seen in "The Time Machine." Two different species, one intelligent but delicate from extended periods of being, ostensibly, spoiled, and the other stupid, vicious and hard from having to survive in the mire that would be every other forum. Anyone unlucky enough to get kicked from the elite forum would find themselves torn to bits, drowning in the bile spewed from the proverbial mouths of those excluded from the bright, shiny, awesome place.
Additionally, if you start to put admission criteria on something labeled a "Community forum," it sends a message that those not allowed in are not part of the "Community." It'd be frustrating, staring at the conversations you wish you were a part of but aren't allowed to touch. Yeah, theoretically the new members would keep it clean and be active in other forums to earn their place in the exclusivist one, but I honestly believe that thinking this way is a painfully gross overestimation of how big the perception of the payoff would be relative to the perception of the insult.
You'd say "Pay your dues and you can get in," and all the newbies would say, "-blam!- you, elitist pricks. We're going to Waypoint." Or any of a thousand other online forums that wouldn't tease them or tell them that they aren't good enough to be a part of. Hell, anybody who ever got kicked out would probably say screw it and move on, and before you know it the whole place would be a ghost town with the same five people rehashing the same subjects.
I'm all for fostering more intelligent discussion, but excluding people based on arbitrary criteria isn't the way to to it. You propose a forum where people get booted for crappy grammar and bad argumentation, I'll back that business 100%. But trying to say that you can judge how good a member's post content will be based on whether their gamertag is linked? That bends fifty years of civil rights activism over a chair.
[Edited on 05.17.2012 8:41 AM PDT]