Hi all,
Wanted to discuss a bit about the trade forums, its problems and possible solutions. The current state of trade forum is just plain terrible, that should be clear to everyone who has ever visited there. People bumping topics every 2 hours, countless of topics from same person, offering on dead shops, etc..
I just took a screenshot of the front page and it is just ridiculous to look at;
Screenshot here:
- 16 topics of which:
- GREEN 9 are OK (only 1 topic/user - I did not start digging deeper to see if these 9 users had any other active topics)
- RED 5 are all from the same person (this seems to be a common trend nowadays to spam multiple "Selling X poke-"threads)
-CROSS 2 topics are long dead and forgotten (1 was about a year since last post, other about 2 and half months..)
It means that about 44 % of the forum topics are unnecessary, so roughly speaking half of the topics could be deleted or combined under one topic.. At the moment one topic (non-bumped) goes to page 4 or 5 in 24 hours, but if these "useless" topics were to be deleted/ forced away, the topics might have a chance of staying at page 2, which seems already like a huge improvement.
Possible solution:
If there is any way to limit number of topics per user (talking about force-limiting, as in user unable to make more topics than 1) I believe that would massively improve the quality of that part of the forum. As the rules of that forum state, multiple topics are not allowed and should be combined under one topic -> "pokeshops". Of course when shops get lot of comments they might seem bit messy and hard-to-read. Often an easy way to get around this is just to copy-paste the old shop to a new topic which doesn't seem problematic and certainly doesn't cause massive amounts of spam. Problem occurs when someone digs up the old shops and basically start bumping these long dead topics, which leads into people bumping their own topics and thus creating this vicious circle of topic bumping. As you may have noticed limiting topics to 1/user would prevent people from starting new shops to clear up 10 pages of comments. Solution to this could be an option to delete the old topic and then create a new one.
If there is no way to limit topics/user, I sincerely believe that admins should just start deleting multiple topics from same person, just to wake-up people a bit. Just spare the topic that was most recently active.
Any thoughts or ideas are welcome.
/rant, lol >
Wanted to discuss a bit about the trade forums, its problems and possible solutions. The current state of trade forum is just plain terrible, that should be clear to everyone who has ever visited there. People bumping topics every 2 hours, countless of topics from same person, offering on dead shops, etc..
I just took a screenshot of the front page and it is just ridiculous to look at;
Screenshot here:
- 16 topics of which:
- GREEN 9 are OK (only 1 topic/user - I did not start digging deeper to see if these 9 users had any other active topics)
- RED 5 are all from the same person (this seems to be a common trend nowadays to spam multiple "Selling X poke-"threads)
-CROSS 2 topics are long dead and forgotten (1 was about a year since last post, other about 2 and half months..)
It means that about 44 % of the forum topics are unnecessary, so roughly speaking half of the topics could be deleted or combined under one topic.. At the moment one topic (non-bumped) goes to page 4 or 5 in 24 hours, but if these "useless" topics were to be deleted/ forced away, the topics might have a chance of staying at page 2, which seems already like a huge improvement.
Possible solution:
If there is any way to limit number of topics per user (talking about force-limiting, as in user unable to make more topics than 1) I believe that would massively improve the quality of that part of the forum. As the rules of that forum state, multiple topics are not allowed and should be combined under one topic -> "pokeshops". Of course when shops get lot of comments they might seem bit messy and hard-to-read. Often an easy way to get around this is just to copy-paste the old shop to a new topic which doesn't seem problematic and certainly doesn't cause massive amounts of spam. Problem occurs when someone digs up the old shops and basically start bumping these long dead topics, which leads into people bumping their own topics and thus creating this vicious circle of topic bumping. As you may have noticed limiting topics to 1/user would prevent people from starting new shops to clear up 10 pages of comments. Solution to this could be an option to delete the old topic and then create a new one.
If there is no way to limit topics/user, I sincerely believe that admins should just start deleting multiple topics from same person, just to wake-up people a bit. Just spare the topic that was most recently active.
Any thoughts or ideas are welcome.
/rant, lol >
