Erk
2nd November, 2007, 04:23 AM
This feels like the 3,000th time I have written this, so let's make it last this time.
Keep in mind I am not, nor do I want to be, an expert. These are the opinions of a guy who happens to know a fair bit about managing a successful forum. I hope they are the opinions of a guy who has learned from his mistakes, too.
In my opinion, Spontaneous Generation should be first and foremost about creation: critique, synthesis, sharing, and commentary. Forum drama, fighting flamewars, and other things waste time and draw away from this. So does focusing on a single piece of software, or even a single kind of creation.
I think Spontaneous Generation should try to keep moderation in the hands of the users. While a mod staff is necessary, they should be relatively unnecessary to running the site. This lets people accept the kind of criticism they want. If they don't want people to tell them their work is bad, they should have the ability to hide from those people; it is not our business if a person chooses not to improve. Likewise, if a user finds the spamming in his discussion thread amusing, then the mod staff should ideally not feel it necessary to step in and delete the spam.
With this in mind, here are my "three ideas".
Subforums are a plague.
The crush of subforums causes two big issues: it makes it hard to figure out where to put something, and it makes new users likely to post in the wrong place. The fewer, the better.
I have some programming ideas to help limit "thread overload" where posts fall off the first page too fast. That isn't going to be a problem for a while though anyway.
Users need access to self-control.
If it's not going to hurt anyone for a user to have access to an option, give 'em access to it. Let users soft-delete their own posts. Let them edit their topic titles. Let them hide their own bloomin' threads! Let them move their threads to different forums (don't let them put up redirects though, that would get messy). Change their user names. You get the idea.
Ideally the users should have so many powers that the mods are only needed to interrupt MAJOR disputes. I think, personally, that users should have nearly-full moderation control over threads they've made, right up to deleting posts they do not like in the threads they've made, and banning users from posting in their threads (I think that banning a user from viewing a thread should be mod-only though). This, obviously, leaves a lot of room for jerks to play around...
...I say, let 'em. If you feel a user is flaming you in his thread, leave his thread. It's his loss for missing out on your critique, since the whole reason for posting here is to get feedback; don't be offended. If he really is being a jerk, he'll soon find it hard to get any valuable response, and his work will stagnate.
Mods may have to step in on longer-term, pointless vendettas. I hope we can count on user control over smaller issues.
In a higher-up sense, I think it's important to keep a wide mod/admin staff, to keep work from falling on a few hardcores. That is harder to manage though.
Dividing between softwares, media, styles, and genres is silly.
There is no reason a pencil-and-paper RPG Game Master cannot advise a short story author on character portrayal. There's no reason an RPG Maker XP game maker can't get advice on pixel art from a painter. A forum for idea sharing and critique does not need to focus on any particular field to be effective; "favouritism" between any platforum, genre, style, medium, etc. is just a waste of everyone's time.
Keep in mind I am not, nor do I want to be, an expert. These are the opinions of a guy who happens to know a fair bit about managing a successful forum. I hope they are the opinions of a guy who has learned from his mistakes, too.
In my opinion, Spontaneous Generation should be first and foremost about creation: critique, synthesis, sharing, and commentary. Forum drama, fighting flamewars, and other things waste time and draw away from this. So does focusing on a single piece of software, or even a single kind of creation.
I think Spontaneous Generation should try to keep moderation in the hands of the users. While a mod staff is necessary, they should be relatively unnecessary to running the site. This lets people accept the kind of criticism they want. If they don't want people to tell them their work is bad, they should have the ability to hide from those people; it is not our business if a person chooses not to improve. Likewise, if a user finds the spamming in his discussion thread amusing, then the mod staff should ideally not feel it necessary to step in and delete the spam.
With this in mind, here are my "three ideas".
Subforums are a plague.
The crush of subforums causes two big issues: it makes it hard to figure out where to put something, and it makes new users likely to post in the wrong place. The fewer, the better.
I have some programming ideas to help limit "thread overload" where posts fall off the first page too fast. That isn't going to be a problem for a while though anyway.
Users need access to self-control.
If it's not going to hurt anyone for a user to have access to an option, give 'em access to it. Let users soft-delete their own posts. Let them edit their topic titles. Let them hide their own bloomin' threads! Let them move their threads to different forums (don't let them put up redirects though, that would get messy). Change their user names. You get the idea.
Ideally the users should have so many powers that the mods are only needed to interrupt MAJOR disputes. I think, personally, that users should have nearly-full moderation control over threads they've made, right up to deleting posts they do not like in the threads they've made, and banning users from posting in their threads (I think that banning a user from viewing a thread should be mod-only though). This, obviously, leaves a lot of room for jerks to play around...
...I say, let 'em. If you feel a user is flaming you in his thread, leave his thread. It's his loss for missing out on your critique, since the whole reason for posting here is to get feedback; don't be offended. If he really is being a jerk, he'll soon find it hard to get any valuable response, and his work will stagnate.
Mods may have to step in on longer-term, pointless vendettas. I hope we can count on user control over smaller issues.
In a higher-up sense, I think it's important to keep a wide mod/admin staff, to keep work from falling on a few hardcores. That is harder to manage though.
Dividing between softwares, media, styles, and genres is silly.
There is no reason a pencil-and-paper RPG Game Master cannot advise a short story author on character portrayal. There's no reason an RPG Maker XP game maker can't get advice on pixel art from a painter. A forum for idea sharing and critique does not need to focus on any particular field to be effective; "favouritism" between any platforum, genre, style, medium, etc. is just a waste of everyone's time.