Thanks for the suggestions so far, and please do keep them coming in. I'll take each in turn briefly with my own initial thoughts..
Member: Mr. Charts
Suggestion: Stricter rules on behaviour
1. One instance of rudeness, hostility, sneering, abuse, harassment etc and a simple private warning.
2. Two strikes and you're out for a minimum of 60 days.
3. Decision to be taken on two out of four moderators agreeing.
Initial Feedback:
Difficult question this one.
I seem to get conflicting opinions about this all the time, some people would prefer a hands off approach, others a more heavy handed one. With the current warning system the advantage is it's fairly transparent, if you get a warning everyone knows about it - I think it helps to see that the mods won't tolerate inappropriate behaviour. I concede the current system is far from perfect, I don't think it's necessarily clear (particularly to new members) how the system works - and I'm still getting an idea of how many points should be assigned for a breach of the rules, and what the threshold is for banning - and once banned is it temporary or forever? Then the actual of points is subjective, particularly difficult is when a thread goes off topic and by the time a mod has a post reported to them, there may be 3 or 4 members all being disrespectful to one another. Do we hand out warnings to all these people, even those that are responding to others jibes? Of course as the number of members grows and the frequency of posting it becomes increasingly important to maintain order. That either means more mods, stricter rules on behaviour, or some form of self policing - where members actually take on some form of moderation themselves, say senior members collectively have the ability to warn or ban other members by awarding points against them (when a threshold of senior members is met then the member gets warned).
The private warning and banning suggested was pretty much the approach we took in the past - but we changed it on the feedback of the members who wanted a more transparent system. The idea being that we could not be accused of banning indiscriminately. I'd like to conduct a future front page poll to determine whether a majority of members would prefer a more aggressive moderation of the boards, it may not be to everyone’s' liking but may become a necessity as the site grows ever larger. The idea of a temporary ban (or cooling off period) is a good one, and one we've informally taken for those who have been banned on the site (but 30 days rather than 60 days) - perhaps rather than a total ban of the site, removing a members ability to post, but allowing them to continue to view posts, would also be a good compromise.
Member: dsmondi
Suggestion: Ability to search for posts from a certain date/time
Initial Feedback:
There is already a facility on the Discussion dropdown menu to "View Most Recent Threads" - this gives list in chronological order of every thread for the last 5 days. In this way it's possible not to miss any posts on a certain day - by just navigating back through the list of threads. Dsmondi, is this helpful at all in what you want to achieve? Or are you looking for a facility to search for the posts themselves from a certain day, say 3 days a go to the present day, or perhaps 2 days a go? The only difference I can see here is that it would list the posts rather than just the threads and you won't have to navigate back through the list like you do at present.
Member: zambuck
Suggestion: Selective viewing of threads/forums
Initial Feedback:
Zambuck are you suggesting the ability to click a button to hide a thread or forum from view, so on the forum homepage you could work your way down to just the forums you're interested in, and likewise if you read a forum and are not interested in a thread - that's possibly gone off topic, then you can hide it - and then in the rest of the site, in searches, list of latest posts etc. you wouldn't hear any mention of it - unless you chose view the hidden forums/threads, possibly through your user control panel. Unfortunately this sounds fairly complicated to implement - I'm not sure how feasible it will be to roll out, I'll need to think through the implications.
Member: ColinRiche
Suggestion: Switch from mIRC trading room to a Paltalk room.
Initial Feedback:
I should really speak to the people who do use to determine what their needs are and whether they would be served any better with paltalk. What would you say are the biggest advantages to paltalk, and why do you think it would get more net exposure? Are there any advantages to paltalk over irc, and is it easily integrated within the website.
Member: ColinRiche
Suggestion: New user titles based on number of posts.
Initial Feedback:
I like this idea a lot and one that I've considered adding in the past. Junior//Senior Member is hardly inspiring. Will have to give some though to names and thresholds but that list you provided is a good start, although like chartman I'm not sure about the last two or what they mean?!!
