Rock wrote:publicduende wrote:Rock wrote:I posted about these ideas in another thread yesterday. Part of what I suggested also included a possible serrated section for newbies who haven't yet proven themselves as sincere, valuable, and real.
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=19968&p=204200#p204200
I threw a few ideas at Winston and he told me to post them here. I don't know about you guys but I get tired of random newbies and anonymous not-so-newbies w/out an ounce of credibility posting all kinds of crazy claims or downright silly stuff here. It's easy to pose, talk tough, make claims, disrupt, etc. when you are invisible.
Reality is, we only have a small handful of active posters at any one time. Majority of these have been verified to some degree by others so are not invisible and have some real skin in the game so to speak. If they go off the deep end, they may just end up being accountable.
A high percentage of newbies turn out to be trolls, frauds, loonies, and other non-desirables.
It probably would not hurt but very likely might help things to make more radical changes to sign-up procedure and granting posting rights. Here is some initial food for thought.
1. Apply Roosh's idea of only allowing new sign-ups at the beginning of each month to streamline things and make filtering a beginning of month task only.
2. Add to No. 1, some sort of approval/interview stage where forum mods and assistants would chat with prospective new posters to decide whether or not each one of them is an asset to this forum or not. Add to that some other non-transparent checks and due diligence to see if person is credible and honest or not. Posting on HA should be a privilege, not a right granted to anyone.
3. Perhaps those who get approved start with posting rights only on a segregated probation section of the forum and only after a certain amount of time and/or number of productive posts (as judged by mods and admin) do they get full posting rights on main board and expat board.
As for main board mods, both E_Irrazary and Jester get my nod to try for awhile and see how they work out, zboy1 remains a solid nay.
If these ideas sound unpractical to apply in reality, please speak up. But maybe also throw up some alternative ideas. We need to get rid of posers, braggarts, fakes, trolls, haters, and generally toxic posters. Let's make this a more authentic and positive place
I think point 1) isn't very useful and point 2) is highly impractical, as there is not much incentive for a new member to be screened. During a hypothetical audio? cam?) interview, the prospective member could always say something and then do something completely different once they're in, hence turning the exercise into a waste of valuable time.
Point 3, as echoed by Array9, is a good idea. A sandboxed section of the forum dedicated to newbies, to test their contributions, or even their willingness to contribute with quality ideas and contents. The only problem is see with this is that a segregated area won't allow new members to interact with posts in the standard section, even when they do have something valuable to say. There is always the possibility that the best comments could be posted in the sandbox and then moved into the standard sections as and when their authors are upgraded, but that would have to be a manual process (or moving and linking) which would be quite tedious and a burden on mods.
Perhaps one alternative idea is to leave things as they are, but introduce a "verified member" label which would be optional and open to all, including existing members. The label would be represented by a tag added to the member's profile (and repeated next to his name in every post) and would be given after some sort of verification process, which might involve given away the member's identity to the moderators, perhaps a veritable Facebook account, or a picture of himself holding a sheet of paper with an assigned, handwritten piece of text. The member's identity would obviously not be disclosed, but would allow Winston and the mods to make a sound judgement call on the member's veracity and good intentions.
But Pt. 1 could save a lot of moderator time cus it would push all the work into a short defined period.
Regarding Pt. 2, we need quality, not quantity. I don't think an interview process would deter someone who was very determined to join our community as an active and productive poster. Interviews are not 100% but they help weed out. A lot of trolls and phonies are gonna be too lazy or worried to go through that. So I think it would improve the hit-to-miss ratio a lot. Just look at this forum over the last few months or years. Has there ever been a period where more than a dozen or so posters contributed virtually all the content. Being totally open has not generated that high number of solid contributors. Perhaps being stricter would attract more higher quality types and discourage the trash posters. I don't know for sure of course but it does seem our totally open method is not working that well.
Pt. 3, sandbox, would be open to all of us to read so it's not like contributions there would be lost.
Pt. 1 - yes, but it depends on how many new members we get and what the onboarding process is. If
all new members must go through a verification/approval process involving Winston and one or more of the mods, then yes, bundling this work in a specific time windows makes sense.
If you guys like my proposal (optional verification to obtain the "verified member" tag), then registration could be allowed at any time (as it's managed by phpBB entirely) and the verification process might be scheduled on specific days of the month, perhaps in a slotted fashion (eg. 5 verifications per month per mod).
I can't know the statistics beforehand, but I don't believe more than 30% of all new members will want to get verified. If that's the case, the bulk of the work would probably concentrate in the first few weeks, when a backlog of existing members will want to show their mugs for the first time. Obviously, a white list could (and maybe should) be introduced for mods and long-time posters. I have personally met Falcon and Xiongmao on a lovely London day and have talked to Eurobrat to exhaustion, so those are the members I can vouch for blind. I also have Phoenix and Irizarry on Facebook and I occasionally talk to the former (and improving on my street Spanish so I can talk to the latter LOL), so they're the real deal too, as far as I'm concerned.
I assume people like yourself (Rock), Jester, ZBoy, S_Parc, Cornfed, Droid, gsjackson, Outwest, Pete and DaveWe, and a few more might rightfully make it straight to the white list. All in all, the verification process could be made to be so much fun that virtually all HA
aficionados will want to join in.
Pt. 2, I actually agree on the idea of an interview (which is a somehow spooky word for "a fun chat with Winston and another couple of mods"). All I am proposing here is not to make this interview an obligatory step to be able to post on the forum. Remember that anonymity is a staple of the free Internet and, for how much more trustworthy a "verified member" can be to our eyes, we shouldn't interfere with a new member's choice to remain anonymous, especially when he can still write great posts. Indeed, if the newbie will want to remain anonymous, he will have to gain our trust the hard way, that is, setting the bar high and keeping it high.
This optional verification while keeping members to post freely obviously needs be reinforced by a stricter ban policy. It's pretty clear to me and everybody else that a genuine troll or a narcissist with nothing more to say will show their true colours pretty soon, and that's when the axe should come down, perhaps without all the drama and ship booting-off metaphors
Occasionally, for members who sound overly suspicious or whose tales start sounding a wee too tall, Winston and the mods might give a choice to go through verification or be banned. This is OK, but should only be used in very specific cases.
Pt. 3 - the sandbox can still be implemented, perhaps bundling all non-verified members. What I don't like about this idea is that yes, contributions wouldn't get lost, but replies to threads contained in the standard sections of the forum cannot be linked automatically, unless the member starts with a header that says "In reply to:
...". It would still be OK for first and "stand-alone" posts. Assuming some new members may want to make an impression by posting something useful, insightful and well written, all the posts considered "gems" might be moved to the standard section.
