Closed_doors wrote:This comes as more of an 'observation' than an idea or suggestion. This is my first experience with a moderated forum and I've found my initial enthusiasm for the site has waned a little. I understand why a forum might need be moderated, especially one that touches on a subject that many would find distasteful.
Other forums I am a member of (including one I moderate) work a little differently. Posts appear instantly they are submitted which allows replies to follow as soon as others read it. On the more active forums, this can result in 20 or more responses in a day, or even less time. The interest amongst members of those forums stays high with many folks adding replies to a thread several times in a day, especially if the discussion is lively. Here, I post something, then have to wait 24-36hrs (Time zones play a part) to see the post, then a further 24-36 to see a response, then my reply sees that almost a week has passed and by then, the thought train for that thread has evaporated. It's the sort of forum that I would only check in on about once a week to make the visit worthwhile, having more than just 1 or 2 posts to read. I also find myself less inclined to post because I don't have the patience to follow that thread for weeks and weeks, just to see where 10 replies might lead. I would bet, many, many of the non-active members would get posting too if this was the case.
Yes, the other forums I am on do get the occasional offensive post, but the moderators simply delete it and warn the sender via PM. A 2nd offensive post sees that member locked out. The people here seem far to intelligent and open-minded to let something as trivial as an 'offensive post' spoil their interest or offend. I see the member list here is at least 10 times greater then any of the other forums I belong to but you get less than 10% of members posting. And, of those active 10% of members, their posts over a month would not even add up to the posts my unmoderated forums with far, far less members get in ONE day. In this past 7 days since joining, I've counted precisely 9 posts, 4 of which were mine. I've had 22 posts this morning alone (7 on 1 thread) on the 'AKRON' forum which has only 55 members but is unmoderated. Its the sort of forum that makes you want to check in 3-4 times a day in case the discussion gets too far ahead of you.
I'm a newbie here and am not trying to change anything. This post is intended to be informative, not critical. It's merely an observation. My interest for the site and all it represents is high. My patience when following a thread here is not. I guess it depends on the membership's desires. If this is what they want, so be it.
Thanks for Reading,
Mike.
Hi, Mike -- you've left us a LONG post, so I'm afraid the rather one-sided reply is going to be long as well! (I'd love to discuss this with the other mods and write up a group reply, but the others all have "real life" things going on and can't necessarily log on every day right now.)
In more or less the order you mention various points:
Almost all of the other members here are reading your post and thinking "huh? 'Have to wait?' What's this guy talking about?"
MOST people's posts appear the very second they hit "Submit." Posts from new members need to be approved by a moderator to make sure it's an actual person posting on topic, and not a "spam bot" advertising fake Viagra in Ukranian. I wish I were kidding on this one, but a few months ago this site was under siege from multiple spammers, spambots, and who knows what all else, shilling products in Chinese, some Cyrillic language, and some sort of horrific, apparently Google-translated English. They also posted (or tried to post) a thousand .jpgs, .pngs, and anything else they thought they might slip past the anti-spam filters!
The joke turned out to be on them...and on us, I suppose, since HUMANS had to look at dozens of posts per day, disapprove them in bulk (five at a time, and we were wishing that we could do more at once) and ban five to ten new "members" every day for about three months. It was a royal pain in OUR nether regions, but the forum members weren't annoyed and distracted by a dozen "new posts" per day that had nothing to do with bondage!
Anyhow...once a new member makes a certain number of moderator-approved posts and gets past that "probationary period," their posts then appear the instant they hit "Submit" as well. I'm pretty sure that number is "three" and the fourth post (and all subsequent posts) show up instantly and automatically.
I know that nobody had to approve YOUR fourth post!
(Also, as noted above, this has been a relatively weird time for moderators -- instead of three or four of us logging on several times a day, the past couple of weeks have been one or two of us logging on once or twice a day.)
So -- that pretty well sums up your perceived issue of "every post needs approval," which isn't really the case, and "this forum is pretty well behaved," which it really IS, if you don't count the spammers!
As far as "forum activity" goes...wow. I really don't know where to start on THAT one but here goes:
From the time I first discovered this forum, through the time I signed up in 2005, and until about two years ago, this forum was VERY active, with dozens of posts per day! For what it's worth, though, and as I'm sure you'll see if you start reading back through some of the archived topics that interest you, at any given time there have ALWAYS been a lot of inactive members, and only a small percentage of the total membership actually participating.
If you go to the blue bar towards the top of the screen, click "Members" and then click on "Posts," that will "sort by" that column. You'll see that we have 601 PAGES of members (at 25 per page), and if you start painstakingly clicking forward three pages at a time, you'll eventually see that we have 360 PAGES of members with ZERO posts! That's more than HALF the members, and there are another 65 pages of members with exactly ONE post!
Why? We often wondered and occasionally discussed it -- the best guesses were that "kinky people like us signed up so that they could send and receive PM's" or "kinky people like us signed up so they would feel less like 'lurkers'" and then neither group ever posted anything besides occasionally an "introduction thread."
So -- one has to go all the way to page 426 of 601 to find members with TWO posts, which means that more than 2/3 of the members here are anything BUT active!
Now for the really depressing news: as I mentioned in another thread today, nobody is really quite sure what happened, but about two years ago the site administrator had to make some changes with the forum itself -- forum software and (as I recall) a new forum hosting site. That caused a few minor hiccups for a large part of ONE DAY while the "old" forum posts were migrated to the new website, and apparently (I'm REALLY guessing here)it also caused bigger hiccups with people who didn't read the "CAN'T LOGIN? READ HERE" thread at the top of each forum.
As I recall, since it's been two years, before the migration, all members were warned that they'd need to update their member records and make sure they had a valid e-mail address on file so that they could do a "password reset" on the brand-new forum. If they didn't, they'd have to contact the site admin to get their password reset.
The big day came, the new forum was up and running, a few people posted things like "hooray, it works!" and "hey, I still have all my PM's -- and got a bigger in-box -- YAY!" and then...then....
I don't get it. It's like the internet equivalent of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. All we're missing is sound effects of crickets, wind, and/or a lone crow cawing in the distance.
As mentioned, I used to check this site a few times a day and see a dozen new posts EACH TIME! Now, it's kind of spooky, eerie, and creepy to log on and see NO new posts in the previous 24 hours. As I said above, nobody is really sure exactly WHAT happened to cause it, nor how to fix it, but the forum really IS a ghost of its former self.
But it's NOT because every post needs to be "approved."