I apologize in advance, this is going to be big, but I hate my postcount.
RedImperator wrote:Would it be possible to name this reason without revealing who said it or causing too much drama?
It's pretty much what I indicated earlier, the overall hostile nature of the board. The vibe we give off is that we're a bunch of fucking assholes who will kick you in the nuts instead of saying hello. Very few people enjoy the prospect of being berated for any reason on a place that's supposed to be community.
The second one is that there is an overall perception that long time members are more easily forgiven for oversights, poor judgment, and lapses in logic because they are long time members.
I think putting restrictions on image posting from newcomers is the best way to do it. The chan invasion happened like this: a bunch of them signed up within a few hours of each other and started posting as much as they could before they got banned. There may have been one or two who had longer-term accounts, but almost all of them signed up over a period of about six hours on 8 January. If there was a 100 post/1 month requirement before being allowed to post images, all of them would have had to actually make 100 posts without drawing any suspicion they were planning anything, and wait a full 30 days before being allowed to move. That's a lot of work just to post a few pictures before you get banned.
The thing is, internally, as regular members, there's not that much invading trolls can do. Unless they hit really late at night, more likely than not there's going to be a supermod around to ban them, and the report button lets every user on the board, even 0-post lurkers, call the cavalry. If they can't post images (and I would include YouTube videos as well in this), what can they do? Links? WHORES WHORES WHORES?
True, and I'd be willing to accept that as a relaxation of the email restriction (perhaps the most annoying of the board's limitations). Removing images and flash would be a decent security measure.
The worst damage the board ever took from a troll attack was when somebody from Trollkingdom cracked a supermod's password, something restricted registration wouldn't have done a thing to prevent. I think you mentioned a DDOS attack as a possibility--well, restricted registration won't stop that, either.
True. Though Trollkingdom in particular were persistent little shits. They had months of building up for their horseshit. You're right that we have very little defense against those sorts of attacks, and that restricting membership isn't a direct way of combating it.
Bottom line, I don't think the potential risk of a troll invasion warrants restricted membership. There are security measures we can take which are more protective than "LOL OPEN SEASON" and bunkering down like we have for the last year.
Again, a fair point.
How do you address the fact that in the four month window we had open registration late last year, we had nearly as many new contributing members sign up as we have in the ten months since then? Even if there's another explanation (or, more likely, many explanations) for the decline in overall posts, that shouldn't be affecting sign-ups. Conversely, you can't possibly be suggesting that the overall decline isn't being caused in part by a dearth of new members.
It could also be that the demographic the board appeals to is maturing overall. I know that when I was in college and posting to this board, I had a lot more time to waste on posting more. Hell, I think the largest fraction of my postcount is tied to STGOD stuff.
Now, the lack of new people to make up for the people who are leaving may have something to do with it, but I still say that the biggest problem we need to look at is the 2005-2007 drop, which of all the falloffs is the most significant because we lost roughly half our yearly post generation. in that two year period. What changed? Was it then that we applied a new registration restriction, or did something else in the board change?
The board has had four major invasions: the Elite Fitness idiots, the WCOTC, TrollKingdom, and the channers. I admit that's a lot, given that the first three all took place in the first year the board was active. However, we handled EF and WCOTC without any problems, the TrollKingdom saga would never be allowed to drag on as long as it did (and the worst damage was caused by a bad mod password, not by any troll account), and the channers, whose actual attack only lasted six hours (I actually remember going over to their board and seeing a few of them dismayed they'd been shut down and locked out so easily).
Hm, I thought there were more, but I suppose the Trollkingdom's starts and stops over the years stuck in my head, and I may be confusing the cross-pollination with Darkstar's forums as an invasion of sorts.
I feel like we're talking past each other here. My whole point was that posting activity was in decline (a point eventually borne out by Xalev's numbers), and almost every forum feels like a dead zone. That's an argument, in my mind, for fresh blood. I suppose I didn't really make that clear, for which I apologize. When you said, "Well, sci-fi and fantasy are mined out," I took that to mean you were arguing that "those topics are mined out, therefore there's nothing new to say and fresh blood won't help". I brought up the non-scifi forums as examples of other subjects that obviously aren't mined out even if sci-fi/fantasy is, and therefore would obviously benefit from fresh blood.
At this point, I think we're at an impasse of quantity over quality. I would rather stop by a forum that has fewer but more well-crafted responses than a lot of spammy shit. Like I indicated above, a better signal to noise ratio is something I think is more important overall. The one thread I mentioned transplanting from SDN to another forum that was less active, the difference was staggering. On SDN, the thread died at page four or so, after being filled with insipid nonsense over and over again, while the transplanted version is currently reaching about 12 pages and is still having content added, albeit at a slow rate.
Wait a minute. On what grounds are you basing this argument? What, are SDN old-timers just so fuckin' special that only they are qualified to discuss science, history, and sex? Like the fucking discussions now are at such a high standard that there's no possible way a newcomer could contribute an interesting insight or question. Come on. This is an internet board, not the Harvard faculty. Where do you expect to get new experts anyway, if registration is restricted?
We just so happen to have several engineers, scientists, mathematicians, teachers, and mature adults in stable relationships. Trust me when I say that this particular combination is not terribly common on most webforums. Now I'm not saying we won't get more if we open the floodgates of registration, just that the signal to noise ratio is going to get a whole lot worse and the average value of a given post will go down.
Frankly, I don't know. It might not be fixable. I still don't see what that has to do with excluding newcomers. In fact, it pretty much says the opposite: "Well, since we'll never fix the dogpiling and the 'eat-the-newbie' attitude, we'd better keep a steady influx of new people just so we can find enough people to stick around and keep the place interesting."
Frankly, if there's no interest in keeping the quality posters we've been losing due to our attitude, we're not going to keep the new people for long either.
Well, first of all, you didn't address my second point: we got nearly as many members in four months of open registration as we have in ten months of restricted. And second, here's my hypothesis: we got a huge initial influx when the board opened and a steady steam of newcomers until 2003, when we restricted registration. Then we spent six years burning our reserves faster than we added new members. Now the forum feels like...well, not a ghost town. Maybe the old mall on the edge of town, the one where the J.C. Penney's closed last year and half the stores that are still open are thrift marts. The place that feels half-dead even on a Friday night; even the teenagers have better places to be.
Of course, in our case, the other customers are cannibals and the rent-a-cops shoot to kill, but it's a big town, and there's plenty of adventurous people who might like that kind of thing.
I think your tolerance for activity may be influenced by twitter. Regardless, I have my own thoughts about what may have happened, but it's not something we can really do much about. All that said, I'm willing to accept opening the gates a little as long as there is additional security in place.
Uraniun235 wrote:This is the impression I'm getting from you, Hotfoot:
- We're out of things to say
No, we're not out of things to say, it's just that the backlogs of debate when it comes to fiction are pretty much tapped, and new debates, when they happen, are rather short and decisive. Mostly, we're talking about the shows, books, and so on themselves, not having dozens of versus debates constantly. That naturally has a much lower post per day volume than heated debates over who would win, Starship Troopers or Stormtroopers.
- Nobody else will add much for us to say
If we add 30,000 new members, what new insights into the versus debates, or the analysis of various fictions will we actually gain? There may be some, but the signal to noise ratio will get worse. A slow addition of people who are more willing to make meaningful contributions is better than a large influx of dumbasses who spam, necro, and post nonsense.
- Why bother welcoming more people when it just means more headaches
Vast amounts of new people. I don't have anything against new posters, and in fact I think we should be gentler to newbies to help ease them into the community. Moreover, I objected to what was at the time a push to open registration with no intention of adding security safeguards to defend against further invasions, which has been now taken under consideration at least.
Am I missing something?
Only what I've clarified.
It's hard to spot, I grant you that, since there's quite a lot of "straight" letters in the name (i and l and r in its lower case is a pretty straight one, too).
