Arkady
President
I prefer a fairly laissez-faire approach to managing forums like this. I don't care if people insult me, or use vulgar words, or "thread-jack" and so on. The only rules I like to see are those needed to keep the forum usable. For example, I don't like over-use of top-posting, because it scrolls away other posts before discussion can get going. I also don't want to see the forum spammed (e.g., those "you can earn $60k/year from home" type posts). And I don't want it used for illegal content (e.g., kiddie porn).
However, one additional kind of behavior I'd count in the column of making the forum less usable is abusing the ratings system. When posters go through and rate dozens of posts negatively without actually reading them, it makes it harder to keep track of genuine ratings by people who have considered the post before responding, and hard to find replies within the alerts. It serves no purpose other than to annoy, so I'd propose people resist the urge.
As an example, between 11:05 AM and 11:22 AM today, *edited* rated 45 of my posts "Disagree." That's in addition to rating four more of them that way between 10:44 and 10:46. At about 23 seconds per rating, clearly, this is not a matter of reading those posts to decide what reaction to have. Although some of the posts were a sentence or two and could have been loaded, read, and rated in that time, some were longer pieces, including two entries of over 900 and 1000 words, along with several detailed follow ups of a few hundred words each. At 23 seconds each, we're talking about blind rating based on the identity of the poster, rather than anything having to do with the individual post being rated.
I suppose at some level I should be flattered that *edited* would subject herself to twenty minutes of tedium clicking on my posts one at a time, merely to register a meaningless "disagree." But her obsession with me doesn't change the fact her abuse of the rating system hurts the usability of the forum.
However, one additional kind of behavior I'd count in the column of making the forum less usable is abusing the ratings system. When posters go through and rate dozens of posts negatively without actually reading them, it makes it harder to keep track of genuine ratings by people who have considered the post before responding, and hard to find replies within the alerts. It serves no purpose other than to annoy, so I'd propose people resist the urge.
As an example, between 11:05 AM and 11:22 AM today, *edited* rated 45 of my posts "Disagree." That's in addition to rating four more of them that way between 10:44 and 10:46. At about 23 seconds per rating, clearly, this is not a matter of reading those posts to decide what reaction to have. Although some of the posts were a sentence or two and could have been loaded, read, and rated in that time, some were longer pieces, including two entries of over 900 and 1000 words, along with several detailed follow ups of a few hundred words each. At 23 seconds each, we're talking about blind rating based on the identity of the poster, rather than anything having to do with the individual post being rated.
I suppose at some level I should be flattered that *edited* would subject herself to twenty minutes of tedium clicking on my posts one at a time, merely to register a meaningless "disagree." But her obsession with me doesn't change the fact her abuse of the rating system hurts the usability of the forum.
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