Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Originally posted by: Amused
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Let's see. What posts most often devolve into babe threads? How about posts that involve ENTERTAINMENT.
ENTERTAINMENT would involve anyone who is in any way in the public limelight, from rock stars, to movie stars, to strippers, to cheerleaders to football players.
OT has for some time had a huge number of posts involving specifically ENTERTAINMENT.
If these types of posts are constantly devolving into babe threads, and they frequently do for obvious reasons (because butt ugly don't become famous usually in the first place) then these posts all need to be lumped into their own category.
Also every time a new movie comes out, we have multiple posts on the same movie sometimes occurring for weeks later, such as with Batman, and I think the spam in OT would be MUCH less if all of these ENTERTAINMENT posts were removed from this area. And it would also be much easier to look for a recent post on a new or old flick or a recent sports event if they were all in the same spot in the first place, and not buried under a thousand other posts in OT 1 day after posting.
While I also agree that too many sub forums are a bad idea, the purely ENTERTAINMENT forum has been needed around here since these forums started.
See here? This is exactly what is WRONG. So freakin what if you see multiple posts on one movie??? How is this harming you? The more intersting a subject is, the more it will be talked about. And if someone wants to talk about one specific point of a subject why the hell can't he have his own thread????
Trying to resolve every little annoyance is exactly what is KILLING these forums.
Get OVER IT people!!!
And no way in HELL do I support yet ANOTHER fracturing of the OT forum to include a separate "entertainment" forum. It is this very micromanaging logic (or lack thereof) that has destroyed what OT once was.
No offense, Slick. You're new here and haven't seen what OT was both before and after all the new forums and rules. But OT was a MUCH more interesting and engaging place before the forums were split and every little annoyance was addressed. Ideas like yours and whining about mutiple posts on one subject is whats KILLING these forums.
Look, I come from a long line of geeks, and one thing that seems inherent to most geeks is micromanagement and trying to control every little aspect of something. The most liberating thing life has taught me is that doing this is counterproductive in both business, and social lives. It just drives people away.
And the micromanagement of these forums has done just that. Traffic and posts are WAY, WAY, WAY down from when I first started posting here.
Sometimes the best way to fix something is to leave it the fsck alone.
Look, don't be fooled by my low post count or recent status here. I have been lurking here since this forum and website was started, but thanks for touting your high post count as a reason to shout me down anyway though.
I have been visiting here and other tech websites to get tips and help since before you probably even knew this website existed. I have been into personal and business computing since 1980. I have ran my own BBSs and forums and matchmaking software and even ran my own dial up ISP using ISDN when most of you out there who remember were using 14.4 modems. I still run a city website and forums as a hobby.
Your history and post count is only important in your small, limited world, not mine. And your post count arrogance with me and my viewpoint is one reason more posters do not post here or don?t post for very long. They get put off by know it alls like yourself, and simply leave after being repeatedly abused. Because, let's face it, nobody likes an arrogant post count attention whore, much less a forum overloaded with them. And there are plenty of other forums out there where you and others who act like you are not abusing forums and are actively running off new users just for shits and giggles, so that's partly why the traffic is down.
Also this forum software is buggy, boring and has few features available to users. Buggy software drives people off. If they frequently cant log in, or get logged out a lot and dropped, they won't keep trying and stay here. I know this from personal experience running forums and troubleshooting.
And look at all the emails and Ips they block here from even signing up to post.
3. If you receive a message saying your E-Mail address is banned, you can contact the forum moderator to question why. Below is a list of E-mail services that were banned due to abuse, and will not be re-activated upon user request.
AOL
Bigfoot
Excite
Gotoworld
Nightmail
Whitehouse
All domains operated by portofevil.com, aka evilemail.com
4. In addition to the above, all of AOL's system is banned from the forums; this includes their IP addresses. This means that even if you sign up with a different E-mail address, you will not be able to post if you connect to the internet using their service.
So they are blocking nearly half of all emails and IPs out there, because of a few abusers. You think that might lead to lower traffic? Most likely yes?
The other reasons is there is simply less interest now a days in gaining negligible speed increases out of current hardware with the current software that is available. Why risk burning up expensive hardware for nominal speed increases. Only the very anal gamers who think that a 5 FPS advantage will give them the win in online games are even interested in this over clocking hysteria anymore, and they represent such a tiny fraction of the posters here that they certainly won't be adding to our new user base, either.
And I also agree that making this a safe place to post from work is a poor excuse for implementing these seemingly arbitrary rules. What is really behind driving these strict policies is a fear of driving off possible ad revenue. If an advertiser balks at some posts, the people in charge can simply point to all the user warnings and punishments and say "See, we really are trying to control this over sexualized male mob in here, REALLY!"
Now, I also did not mean to imply I was against multiple posts about the same movie, or whatever form of entertainment or sports, regarding different aspects about them. But why do you need 50 Batman threads to discuss the same movie when most are just a spam rehash of the same original thread?
But the fact is you can not run any kind of coherent organized forum and expect one category like OFF TOPIC to take the majority of the forum traffic. That is completely nuts and as an experienced MOD it would drive me crazy if OT had hundreds of more new posts and reposts and new threads per hour than it already does. And I have seen it do just that in the past. As it is, OT and the rest of the forums are barely modable and manageable. And most of these MODS do not get paid or compensated in their never ending frustrating effort to try to make the forums useable for the average low post count user who simply has a few questions.
Which is why the sub forums are vitally NECCESSARY and why I recommended dividing out all the constant ENTERTAINMENT posts flooding the OT area. And the fact these are frequently "babe or dude" posts and are frowned upon just further reinforces this idea.
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