Greetings. I hope you've all had a fun, safe weekend without SHH! vampiring all your time. 
As some of you know, while we were booted off Hype for some much-needed maintainance, a good portion of us used our exile time to visit our sister site, Coming Soon!. While there, I kind of got a bit miffed at everyone complaining "Oh, this site sucks compared to Hype!" and, in particular "I miss my avatar and siggy! Now I've gotta spam to get my post count up!" So, I made a thread, and it seems that a decent amount of you guys are somewhat in agreement with me on several ideas. I know most of you aren't even going to bother reading the entire thread once you realize it's over 200 posts, so here's my proposal to limiting some of the more blatant spam and keeping a viable reward system in place.
1--Set up a "Game/Trivia thread" for stuff like "Last thing you ate/drank/wore on your head" or "Three Word Story" that's separate from actual community. Posts in this forum will NOT count towards your post count. This will eliminate all these kind of threads for community so that we can get back to discussing "you know, the important stuff". And by, discuss, I mean pages. Not, at most, 3 posts. There are people who have at least 40-75% of their one-word posts in spammy threads like "Last thing you ate/drank/peed/pooped/wore on your head", or something similar just because they want an avatar/sig/title. I'm all for chat-chat til you're hands fall off. Hell, if you look in Games, I'm in the top 10 in terms of chat thread posters. But there's a difference between chat and crap.
2--User Join Dates will actually contribute to earning an avatar and such, in addition to post count. This way, if you're banned under your regular name, you won't be able to go back to an old name and still have avatars and such. By doing this, I hope it makes a lot of the people who like to "sit on the fence" when it comes to getting in trouble think twice, because they'd lose everything, and it'd be harder to just spam them back. This will would very well with the above idea. To quote a good friend--"The idea behind those things is that they are "privileges" or "rewards" that are meant to be earned by being a contributing member of a community over a period of time." By combining length of membership and post count as prerequisites for benefits, only members who are both active and patient would be rewarded and there would be less benefit from spamming. Also, bans would become a lot more meaningful when you not only lose a few nights worth of spamming, but you can also lose up to 6 months of your life.
Something like this order--
With these ideas in mind, hopefully it would help keep Community feeling more like a Community rather than a collection of random people. Conversations will be able to mean more, there would be less spam to wade through, and everyone can have a little more fun. I know I'm being a little idealistic here, but that's what ideas are for--being idealistic.
Please post thoughts here, and vote. The poll will be up for two weeks.
THIS IS A MULTIPLE CHOICE POLL!!
As some of you know, while we were booted off Hype for some much-needed maintainance, a good portion of us used our exile time to visit our sister site, Coming Soon!. While there, I kind of got a bit miffed at everyone complaining "Oh, this site sucks compared to Hype!" and, in particular "I miss my avatar and siggy! Now I've gotta spam to get my post count up!" So, I made a thread, and it seems that a decent amount of you guys are somewhat in agreement with me on several ideas. I know most of you aren't even going to bother reading the entire thread once you realize it's over 200 posts, so here's my proposal to limiting some of the more blatant spam and keeping a viable reward system in place.
1--Set up a "Game/Trivia thread" for stuff like "Last thing you ate/drank/wore on your head" or "Three Word Story" that's separate from actual community. Posts in this forum will NOT count towards your post count. This will eliminate all these kind of threads for community so that we can get back to discussing "you know, the important stuff". And by, discuss, I mean pages. Not, at most, 3 posts. There are people who have at least 40-75% of their one-word posts in spammy threads like "Last thing you ate/drank/peed/pooped/wore on your head", or something similar just because they want an avatar/sig/title. I'm all for chat-chat til you're hands fall off. Hell, if you look in Games, I'm in the top 10 in terms of chat thread posters. But there's a difference between chat and crap.
2--User Join Dates will actually contribute to earning an avatar and such, in addition to post count. This way, if you're banned under your regular name, you won't be able to go back to an old name and still have avatars and such. By doing this, I hope it makes a lot of the people who like to "sit on the fence" when it comes to getting in trouble think twice, because they'd lose everything, and it'd be harder to just spam them back. This will would very well with the above idea. To quote a good friend--"The idea behind those things is that they are "privileges" or "rewards" that are meant to be earned by being a contributing member of a community over a period of time." By combining length of membership and post count as prerequisites for benefits, only members who are both active and patient would be rewarded and there would be less benefit from spamming. Also, bans would become a lot more meaningful when you not only lose a few nights worth of spamming, but you can also lose up to 6 months of your life.
Something like this order--
Code:
Signature--1 Week
Custom Title--2 Weeks and 100 posts
Small Avatar--1 Month and 300 posts
Medium Avatar--3 Month and 1000 posts
Large Avatar--6 Months and 2500 postsWith these ideas in mind, hopefully it would help keep Community feeling more like a Community rather than a collection of random people. Conversations will be able to mean more, there would be less spam to wade through, and everyone can have a little more fun. I know I'm being a little idealistic here, but that's what ideas are for--being idealistic.
Please post thoughts here, and vote. The poll will be up for two weeks.
THIS IS A MULTIPLE CHOICE POLL!!
Didn't notice that.
