Post by Angels on Jan 15, 2004 19:30:38 GMT -5
Just wanted to address some of the things *I* thought were problems with this community. I do take into consideration the age of most of the members, the fact that this is a new forum, and that the admin isn't here to straighten things out, but I think that some things have just gotten way too out of hand and wanted to say a few things. Fair warning, I'm going to be blunt, and sarcastic, but it's truthful. I'm saying these things as constructive criticism, to hopefully improve this place.
So now I'll cut straight to the point. (Most) People here are being insanely stupid when posting.
Big Issue 1: Spamming.
The amount of spam in this place is more than the amount of tea China has. In fact it's so huge, I'll break this down into subgroups.
Problem A: One word posting and general 'nothing' post:
This is probably more of an 'age' thing if anything. At least that is the way I see it. Generally speaking the younger members tend to have 'nothing' and one word post while older members have more substance to theirs. First of all, try to take pride in your post. You language and writing skills tell about you as a person quite a bit. It doesn't take that much to put a half a sentence in a post. Posting things like 'Hi.' 'Cool.' 'LOL.' 'LMFAO.' 'YAY!' and other similar things without anything else is slack. Normally I wouldn't be so anal about something like this, but I see it happen a lot. They are useless post ad don't add to a conversation. Further more it's very disrespectful, yes disrespectful to reply to people with those things. Why? Because instead of giving them a worthwhile reply you just slap down a one word 'nothing' posting, showing them that you aren't paying attention to what they say and/or you don't care enough about what their saying to come up with a decent reply.
Problem B: Topics with no points:
If there is no point in a topic, it shouldn't be there. Discussing is good, but when you having nothing to discuss and just starting a topic with no point what so ever is spam. If you want to just talk to someone about anything you want to, take it to messenger instead of cluttering up the General Chatter with useless topics. If you want to speak to a group of people, then make something like a General Members Discussion or something similar, so that people can just go to a thread and post anything on their mind (homework, pets, work, school, social life, movies, etc.) without being off topic. Dedicating an entire thread or two, to the fact that you're bored is stupid and a waste of space in my opinion.
Problem C: Going off topic and staying there:
This is where the main problem is. Members will get off topic and stay off topic. I dare say that not one part of a forum has a thread that hasn't completely lost site of it's original idea and ended up with several pages worth of a tangent discussion. Some threads have more off topic discussion than on topic discussion. Off topicness *isn't* a bad thing, but when you have barely a half of a page of on topic discussion and 6 more pages of off topic discussion, that's a problem. A topic about Cats shouldn't have more post about shoes than cats.
Problem D: Multiple Topics with the same premise:
How many topics about the same thing do we need? There are 7 topics in FOMT for codes, 5 of them being 'transformations'. 3 rom topics, all located in the back of FOMT, and 12 topics about heart events. While information in each thread is different and very useful, having them all spread out defeats the purpose of all the threads in the first place. The only thing it amounts to is a lot of excess posting. Things asked in one thread have probably already been answer in one, two, three, four, or ten other threads. To have all the information in one thread would be far more beneficial that having multiple topics that end up getting buried in the back of the forum. Not only will it be more helpful to people to have all information in one place, but it will also make the forum far less cluttered.
Problem E: Multiple Consecutive post aka "talking to oneself":
This one really irks me. Members will go into a thread (or create a new one) and post several (and when I say several, I don't mean a couple of times, I mean like 5-10) messages with no one else responding to them in between. This could be because no one else is one at the time, or because they post too fast for other people to reply within seconds. Yes, I mean seconds. I've seen post, literally, where people have complained about being bored and nobody talking to them, yet each post was posted not even a minute apart. Members would post say half a minute between post, averaging around 3-5 post while the person they are talking to would only post once. This isn't an aim conversation folks, it's a message board, so wait for people to respond to you instead of just assuming that everyone hates you and nobody wants to speak with you. Chances are, the person o the other side of the internet has something they are which is why it takes them a few minutes to reply.
People will also 'talk to themselves', claiming that they'd wait for someone to come into that thread to talk to them. They keep posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, AND POSTING. Someone either finally talks to them, or not. Either way, they brush off the 'talking to oneself' thing and admit they are weird, but in the mean time have close to 100 plus post then what they previously had because of their 'act of weirdness'.
As you can see, the bulk of my complaints goes to the 'spam' category, but that's only because I believe that's where most of the problems lie. Let's continue.
Big Issue 2: Not reading the entire thread and feigning stupidity (or do they?)
Members will often go into a thread, not read any of it save for the last page of post and then say "I'm lost". This really shouldn't be much of a problem, but it happens very often. A group of members will into a conversation when another member jumps in and ask what the discussion is about without reading the bulk of the thread. Someone will explain and they will still act confused, and will have it explained to them again. Eventually it will boil down to having one, or several people explain the purpose of the conversation/thread to one or more other 'confused' members. The end result, thus far from what I've seen, being that the confused member(s) stay confused and leave, or finally get the idea, make a 'nothing' post and leave. Explaining things to members isn't a problem, but their have been several times where questions asked were previously answered o explained beforehand. Confusion could simply be avoided (the vast majority of the time) by reading the thread from start to finish.
Big Issue 3: Posting in the wrong forum:
This seems to be more of a isolated problem with one or two members, and technically does not count as a 'big issue', but I thought I might address it regardless. It's rather self explanatory really. Member(s) have been making topics in the wrong forum. For instance, having something in General Chat that belongs in FOMT, (or vice versa), or having something about one of the boy versions of Harvest Moon in one of the Girls when it belongs under Other Games' Harvest Moon topic.
I'm not saying this place is horrible - - it's not, but all those things previously listed make it less fun to be here. Of couse, those aren't the rules, they are just my opinions. But I call them as I see them. By all means, leave your own opinion about what I've posted, whether you agree or disagree.
All I'm saying is that because some people are treating this place like an AOL IM chat, the quality of this place is decreasing rapidly. I wanted to call this to the attention of anyone that cares so that we could hopefully make this place better.
One more thing, don't do anything of those things listed previously in this thread. Don't one word post, don't talk to yourself o multiple post several times, don't go insanely off topic and turn this thread into something else, etc. Just Don't.
Edit~ [ot] Nice how this was 200th post...[/ot]
So now I'll cut straight to the point. (Most) People here are being insanely stupid when posting.
Big Issue 1: Spamming.
The amount of spam in this place is more than the amount of tea China has. In fact it's so huge, I'll break this down into subgroups.
Problem A: One word posting and general 'nothing' post:
This is probably more of an 'age' thing if anything. At least that is the way I see it. Generally speaking the younger members tend to have 'nothing' and one word post while older members have more substance to theirs. First of all, try to take pride in your post. You language and writing skills tell about you as a person quite a bit. It doesn't take that much to put a half a sentence in a post. Posting things like 'Hi.' 'Cool.' 'LOL.' 'LMFAO.' 'YAY!' and other similar things without anything else is slack. Normally I wouldn't be so anal about something like this, but I see it happen a lot. They are useless post ad don't add to a conversation. Further more it's very disrespectful, yes disrespectful to reply to people with those things. Why? Because instead of giving them a worthwhile reply you just slap down a one word 'nothing' posting, showing them that you aren't paying attention to what they say and/or you don't care enough about what their saying to come up with a decent reply.
Problem B: Topics with no points:
If there is no point in a topic, it shouldn't be there. Discussing is good, but when you having nothing to discuss and just starting a topic with no point what so ever is spam. If you want to just talk to someone about anything you want to, take it to messenger instead of cluttering up the General Chatter with useless topics. If you want to speak to a group of people, then make something like a General Members Discussion or something similar, so that people can just go to a thread and post anything on their mind (homework, pets, work, school, social life, movies, etc.) without being off topic. Dedicating an entire thread or two, to the fact that you're bored is stupid and a waste of space in my opinion.
Problem C: Going off topic and staying there:
This is where the main problem is. Members will get off topic and stay off topic. I dare say that not one part of a forum has a thread that hasn't completely lost site of it's original idea and ended up with several pages worth of a tangent discussion. Some threads have more off topic discussion than on topic discussion. Off topicness *isn't* a bad thing, but when you have barely a half of a page of on topic discussion and 6 more pages of off topic discussion, that's a problem. A topic about Cats shouldn't have more post about shoes than cats.
Problem D: Multiple Topics with the same premise:
How many topics about the same thing do we need? There are 7 topics in FOMT for codes, 5 of them being 'transformations'. 3 rom topics, all located in the back of FOMT, and 12 topics about heart events. While information in each thread is different and very useful, having them all spread out defeats the purpose of all the threads in the first place. The only thing it amounts to is a lot of excess posting. Things asked in one thread have probably already been answer in one, two, three, four, or ten other threads. To have all the information in one thread would be far more beneficial that having multiple topics that end up getting buried in the back of the forum. Not only will it be more helpful to people to have all information in one place, but it will also make the forum far less cluttered.
Problem E: Multiple Consecutive post aka "talking to oneself":
This one really irks me. Members will go into a thread (or create a new one) and post several (and when I say several, I don't mean a couple of times, I mean like 5-10) messages with no one else responding to them in between. This could be because no one else is one at the time, or because they post too fast for other people to reply within seconds. Yes, I mean seconds. I've seen post, literally, where people have complained about being bored and nobody talking to them, yet each post was posted not even a minute apart. Members would post say half a minute between post, averaging around 3-5 post while the person they are talking to would only post once. This isn't an aim conversation folks, it's a message board, so wait for people to respond to you instead of just assuming that everyone hates you and nobody wants to speak with you. Chances are, the person o the other side of the internet has something they are which is why it takes them a few minutes to reply.
People will also 'talk to themselves', claiming that they'd wait for someone to come into that thread to talk to them. They keep posting, and posting, and posting, and posting, AND POSTING. Someone either finally talks to them, or not. Either way, they brush off the 'talking to oneself' thing and admit they are weird, but in the mean time have close to 100 plus post then what they previously had because of their 'act of weirdness'.
As you can see, the bulk of my complaints goes to the 'spam' category, but that's only because I believe that's where most of the problems lie. Let's continue.
Big Issue 2: Not reading the entire thread and feigning stupidity (or do they?)
Members will often go into a thread, not read any of it save for the last page of post and then say "I'm lost". This really shouldn't be much of a problem, but it happens very often. A group of members will into a conversation when another member jumps in and ask what the discussion is about without reading the bulk of the thread. Someone will explain and they will still act confused, and will have it explained to them again. Eventually it will boil down to having one, or several people explain the purpose of the conversation/thread to one or more other 'confused' members. The end result, thus far from what I've seen, being that the confused member(s) stay confused and leave, or finally get the idea, make a 'nothing' post and leave. Explaining things to members isn't a problem, but their have been several times where questions asked were previously answered o explained beforehand. Confusion could simply be avoided (the vast majority of the time) by reading the thread from start to finish.
Big Issue 3: Posting in the wrong forum:
This seems to be more of a isolated problem with one or two members, and technically does not count as a 'big issue', but I thought I might address it regardless. It's rather self explanatory really. Member(s) have been making topics in the wrong forum. For instance, having something in General Chat that belongs in FOMT, (or vice versa), or having something about one of the boy versions of Harvest Moon in one of the Girls when it belongs under Other Games' Harvest Moon topic.
I'm not saying this place is horrible - - it's not, but all those things previously listed make it less fun to be here. Of couse, those aren't the rules, they are just my opinions. But I call them as I see them. By all means, leave your own opinion about what I've posted, whether you agree or disagree.
All I'm saying is that because some people are treating this place like an AOL IM chat, the quality of this place is decreasing rapidly. I wanted to call this to the attention of anyone that cares so that we could hopefully make this place better.
One more thing, don't do anything of those things listed previously in this thread. Don't one word post, don't talk to yourself o multiple post several times, don't go insanely off topic and turn this thread into something else, etc. Just Don't.
Edit~ [ot] Nice how this was 200th post...[/ot]
Its so long!
