It's apparent that the only real traffic on the Main Board is FAQs and people yelling at newbs to go to the proper boards. There really are no threads that are pertinent to main when they could easily go to one of the other boards.

I propose we take down all threads on main, leave just one Admin/Mod Only thread that lists all FAQs and give board post permissions to mods and admins only.

Good lord, I was trying to find threads to back up my disagreement with this, but I find I can't. Actual discussion type threads go in Random anyways, only a minuscule of them on Main, the recent advertisement of groups thread could just be reposted on Random as well, along with the facebook index and whatever, Dollars map could go in Countries, and that's just about it... Good lord. You make a good suggestion. Until someone can counter that effectively.

Main is for topics of discussion, which we have had. It baffles me that people post more of those in random than in main, but that may be due to how many threads in Main we shoot down.

It's hard to find examples of these to follow because of how spammed Main gets, but there are discussion topics. This has always kind of been an issue: what defines a discussion topic? Something that's important? Something everyone can talk about? I'm not going to lie, people tend to put it on a level of seriousness/intelligence rather than objective points like these, shooting down things that seem random or simple, while accepting those that can be discussed at length, and with depth.

Threads like The concept of "Dollars" in reality, Economic and Political state of the world, and A Philosophical Question (very early example of this) were threads of discussion, while any thread involving personal issues or spam-like topics were rejected. In addition, threads that involve things we are affiliated with, like the Texting group and the Email group, belong on main as well.


Perhaps an example needs to be set, at some point, as to what can and should be posted on Main, to make it more interesting. Right now, the misconception is that it's only for direly important subjects. I don't agree that it should only be for site-related things, unless we just split it and make a discussion board completely separate... but that feels a bit more unwelcoming.

There we go, Misuto always comes to the rescue.

Shutup.

This could be done, but it'd be kind of messy to make it only accessible to the mod/admins. It also prevents the community itself from keeping the FAQ updated constantly, and feels like it hands over more power to a ruling class as opposed to the community moderation that the BBS was initially founded on.

As a nit-pick - Posting permissions are used in PHP forums, implementing them in this BBS would be...difficult. Far more difficult than the results would warrant. This is due to each board being completely separate from each other, and each thread being a uniquely generated HTML document.

I like the idea of Main only really being a FAQ kind of deal, but I dislike handing over the community generated content to the moderators after we've worked to keep it updated for almost a year.

The method your asking for this is difficult to implement. And in this case, I use the term "difficult" heavily, because while nothing is really impossible with enough code - It can border on that. Or just an extremely devoted project kind of deal.

I believe it is entirely possible, however, to flush Main of every thread but the FAQ one. That doesn't solve the issue of newbies posting there like idiots, but does solve some cluttter.

We could also combine all relevant threads manually into one super thread, and have that be the sole thread on Main.

Thoughts, MKOLLER? I like/dislike your idea. Discuss it with us some.

Sorry it took so long to respond. I was at a party. Now...

>>3 You bring up some good counterexamples. When I joined this site main was where a lot of the mission-style threads were, so I frequented it. Once missions got its own board I stopped seeing a lot of pertinent content. Perhaps I deluded myself into believing there wasn't a lot of pertinent content to begin with; I don't know.

That said, I would consider the topics you brought up as overarching Dollars issues and that's good. One alternative to my idea would be a photoshopped banner that looks like a BBS post, goes at the very top of the page as a header, and says in big block letters: "For Those of You Who are New: *insert message about posting in introductions here*

I do hope that can answer Ayanavi's question a bit. If we can't readily create a mod exclusive post rule, and if said rule would be widely opposed to begin with, then it may not be worth trying. I do like the idea of flushing Main. There's more than a thousand threads; less than one hundred of those are salvageable.

Alright, with all that in mind, here is my alternative:
1. Keep Main as is, flush all but a few select posts.
2. Create a banner that looks like a BBS Thread, put it at the top of the page, pretend it's a Sticky.

Thoughts?

Incidentally we looked into flushing Main earlier tonight.

Went through all of the threads on main. Yes, All of them.

We have a total of 37 total left, that are relevant to the site now, correctly placed, or just being kept for posterity's sake.

IE: Site birthday thread, thank the admin thread, first actual discussion thread, etc.

I think insertnamehere already emailed Reltair asking about the idea of a board flush, as well.

Not really sure if I like the banner idea though - It seems similar to how we put the board descriptions up top for people to see.

We thought at the time it would make things pretty obvious, but they got ignored anyway.

>>8 Well, that's why I think a banner would be better than the current text message at the top. Flashier, to say the least.

Flashier would get more attention, but I worry about it looking intrusive on the site itself.

Function aside, the aesthetics of a banner for a sticky kind of worry me.

If it has the same visual composition then nobody would notice. I'd say the only difference is that the title wouldn't underline when you hover your mouse over it, and it wouldn't have a New Reply link.

Basically, it would look something like this: A gray square in a white outline, Header that says "ATTN: All New Members"

1 Name: Reltair *TripCode*

*Insert Paragraph of Text Here*

And that's about it.

If it could be gotten to look almost exactly, that might be good then.

I have concerns over what all would be in the content though. It can't be too long, or it takes up space on the page.

But at the same time, if its not longer - It'd just be a flashier method of redirecting people to reading the same threads we're already telling them to read. Who knows, maybe thats what we need since... Well, anything less than smacking them seems to fail.

I think I could give it a try. I have tomorrow night off; I might be able to work some magic in Photoshop.

Bump