KF's 100 post rule

[Quiet Storm]

I just read that Knifeforums has a rule saying that you cannot post in the political forum until you reached the 100 posts mark. It sounds like that works over there, efficiently reducing the number of trolls.

So let me suggest the following:

Lock the Community Center, Political Arena and Whine & Cheese for newbies, with the CC and Political being read-only and W&C being invisible for them.

No posts in the Community Center till you have at least 25 posts under your belt and have been a member for at least a month.

No posts in the Political Arena till you've made your 50th post and have been a member for at least two months. That's also the point where you get read-only access to Whine & Cheese.

As soon as you have made 75 posts and have been a member for at least three months, you have full access to all forums.

These combined requirements will prevent people from posting loads of non-contributing posts in the on-topic forums, because hundreds of posts are not going to do you any good if you registered just a week ago.

What do you think?

 

[Bastid]

I like the idea.

We have had quite a few trolls who join only to post in the community forums (most of the time political).

As a member and a mod. it does make you stop and think, but it is much easier to reason out the banning of someone who only is here to garner attention or push his/her political agenda with no effort to actually participate in the reason this forum exits. - Knives.

The other forums were created so that the knife discussion forums would be more focused on the reason more resonable people are here - Knives.

 

[Cougar Allen]

One view of those forums is they exist to keep that stuff out of the rest of Bladeforums. Some other websites might be willing to respond to posts on those subjects from newer members by deleting the posts and/or banning the members, but we prefer to allow considerable freedom of expression as long as it's posted in the proper place.

Apparent new members posting in W&C are usually regulars having a bit of fun. Occasionally they're banned members returning to troll, but forcing them to do their trolling in the rest of Bladeforums instead would not be an improvement.

Apparent new members posting in the Political Arena are often regulars who want to express ideas that are unpopular here without affecting their business as knifemakers or dealers. I don't feel we really have an obligation to provide a place for political argument, but it's much more convenient for us to do that than it would be to try to prohibit all political arguments everywhere on Bladeforums. (Look at websites like www.photo.net to see what happens when you don't provide a Political Arena. Especially during the last US election, they were OVERRUN with political arguments EVERYWHERE; it was impossible to avoid it. In some forums it got into almost every thread, even with the moderators deleting it as fast as they could. Drove me nuts, as a member there....)

Some of the apparent new members posting in the Political Arena are returning trolls, too, but again it's better to have that in the Political Arena and deal with it there than to have it everywhere. Perhaps we could be quicker to ban trolls in the Political Arena; I don't know. I don't go there.

Newbies don't often cause trouble in Community Center, and again if they couldn't do it there they'd do it somewhere else....

 

[Spark]

I could always make the community forums for paying members only

 

[Sword and Shield]

I do like the idea of having some set minimum number of posts to post in Community. 100 is a decent number, and those determined to troll will not likely put in the effort of 100 non-bannable posts before entering.

 

[bama_lou]

I could always make the community forums for paying members only

Not Gadgets and Gear, please.

 

[Gollnick]

The 100-post rule has worked very well in the political forum on kf.c. But it is manually-enforced. Unfortunately, while Mr. Quiet Storm's suggested progression is, imho, an excellent suggestion, the forum software as we have it today does not include a provision to automatically enforce such a structure. Spark can take that request to the folks that make the forum software, but don't expect it to be implimented in the next week or two.

Kf.c is a smaller, less-active site and manual enforcement of such a rule on one forum is practical. Enforcing it on multiple forums on a larger, more active site is less practical.



Personally, I have a serious problem with people who participate only in the political forum on a knife discussion site. If you want to talk and debate politics with just anyone, there are many sites on the internet where you can go and do that. The political forum here at bf.c is supposed to be a place for knife enthusiasts to discuss politics with fellow knife enthusiasts. Our mutual interest in knives is supposed to be our common ground. A person who doesn't have that interest in knives doesn't share that common ground.

By the way, this has nothing to do with political leaning. I've found that there are liberal knife enthusiasts, conservative knife enthusiasts, liberatarian knife enthusiasts, communist knife enthusiasts, you name it. The idea is not to filter out liberals or communists or any other political bent. The idea is to filter out non-knife-enthusiasts because those people don't share our common ground. The 100-post rule isn't a perfect way to do that, but nobody has yet to come up with a more effective idea.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

The 100 post rule works primarily to filter out trolls who bounce back with a new name after being banned. They're the kind of people who can't get 100 posts anywhere before they're banned again.

As Chuck indicated, KF isn't a politics-oriented site anyway. At its most raucous, the problem was a few trolls pushing long threads. Now it's so sleepy that they have days with no new political comments.

Trolls require understanding and discipline. Either don't participate in their threads at all, or respond to the issues, not to the other participants. What trolls want most is attention OR a flame fest.

I definitely don't think we need a complex system of rules and post counts and blocked forums. Lets continue to expect everyone to behave properly or ... zap!