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Doesn't sound arsey at all, Rothkoid - don't worry. Ok - question addressing time...
1) "how to weed out completely shite member posts" what do I mean by that...
What I mean is that when we get an Elmo reappearing, producing COMPLETELY irrelevant board-fluff, there will be better mechanisms in place to deal with it.
One of these mechanisms will be to do with "Proposing" and "Seconding" actions in moderation. I'm proposing to give people slightly more moderation power, make a few more moderators and make everything a PROPOSAL / SECONDED pathway.
Basically, this would involve moderators of a forum being alerted if someone flagged a dubious or spam post. They would then be able to propose an action to it that wouldn't be implemented until another moderator agreed...
2) "Tom; is there going to be a general tightening up of posting post-implementation? ie: minimisation of fluff, or some guidelines, or...?"
Basically, no. But what IS going to be done is that I'm going to make the board easier to post cooler stuff to. At least this is the plan. Expect to see some of the functionality of the current board vanish, particularly around certain sections. There is no need, in my opinion, for people to be able to see 'todays active threads' for Conversation. It's a distraction from the interesting content that the board presents. So, people will be able to post and read in the conversation just as before, but the board will not facilitate viewing this as 'proper' content. It's social lubricant, that's all...
Moderation is going to be completely rethought and hopefully completely streamlined with everything much faster.
I'm also working out a way of improving private messaging, so that it becomes core to the experience of being on the board, and takes some of the strain of asking one person one question out of the public areas, while still faciliatig conversation...
All smileys / graemlins are being ejected as they are pointless. Every piece of functionality is being judged on how difficult it would be to code versus how much benefit it provides. So expect to see the end of much of the UBB code as well - a streamlined (for bandwidth reasons) topic review when posting etc. etc.
Karma points will no longer be a part of the reworked site - at least not initially. However, particularly irritating posters - and again, i'm talking about spammers here, will be marked in some way and people will be able to IF THEY WANT filter those messages out of their reading experience...
"How much of the reworking are you planning on catering for increasing the ease of use for new users, and how much is for the benefit of frequent users? I'm just wondering what - board stability aside - the main goal of your reworkings is?"
That's an interesting question and one that I hadn't really thought of - probably should have done.
The board will certainly have less confusing features - and hopefully this will improve the experience for new users, and make it simpler for them to understand what's going on. Also, many of these reworkings are about making the board a more stable environment, as you suggest.
But I suppose my main agenda is to have something that faciliates conversation and discussion. I'm not too interested in getting new people into the site, but I'm very interested in getting the conversation on the site running at top quality - and I'm going to try various ways of doing that.
With Cal's interest, we've got an amazing opportunity to make this place just work BETTER, and it's an opportunity that I want to take... |
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works pretty well, too.