Forum suggestions

I hope this is the correct place for feedback about the Official Forums. Please excuse me if it is not.

There are a couple of changes I would like to offer as suggestions.

We already have different tiers of ability on the forum with regard to the number of posts allowed. I'd like to see an additional tier added to reflect the length of time a forum poster has been contributing and allowing more posts per day than the current maximum. I've been on the same number of posts per day for a long time now and frequently run out of posts when discussing a range of different topis, it would be great to have a few more posts available so I don't suddenly fall silent in the course of a discussion because of "no more posts".

Also, with regard to forum discipline. I want to stress that I am not criticizing forum moderation or admin, I am merely suggesting a possible change to the way forum discipline is applied. I think it would be very useful to have an additional middle ground tier of suspension. At the moment it seems as though posters can be given a permanent ban for mildly abrasive language which is the same level of discipline as someone being permanently band for using outrageous and obscene language, or harassing others on the forum.

The punishment does not always fit the crime making permanent bans a very blunt tool. I know of several occasions where posters have been permanently banned for what appears to have been a minor offense, while others continually get away with the most rowdy, aggressive and often offensive conduct with seeming immunity to consequence.

That kind of contrast raises questions in people's mind about the fairness of the policy in place. I think adding an additional tier short of a permanent ban would allow forum moderation to hand out stiff penalties without resorting to a permanent ban, and that would ultimately improve the feeling of fairness within the system.

Get rid of the god damn character limit.

-Have a better way to show when posts we are subscribed to get new posts, like a message in the upper, right corner.
-Add a "Polls" option. If not for the our use, at least for the Dev's, like with the Hairstyle contest.

I don't know if the staff is willing to abide by any of those, given that all of those suggestions probably don't fall in line with what the forums are intended to be. The fact that a character limit even exists, for instance, demonstrates that extended discussions between a handful of people are not intended to happen.

Regardless, I feel like they can adapt a little? A middle tier for posting limits sounds fine, and yeah ditch the char count limit because people have fond loopholes to bypass it anyway, making it completely worthless.

As far as forum discipline is concerned, I don't know. Again, they're imposing this forum to be used in a specific way, not to mention that there is a reputation that needs to be upheld since this is the official boards of the game and its company, so being strict about punishment is kind of a necessity.

Still, I'd appreciate it if context was considered a lot more than mere word choices (I myself got a temp ban for use of coarse language and "disrupting the community", the former is true but in the post that was linked, the word was not used as a direct attack towards someone and the latter is so vague I was like "...huh?") so that moderation involves actual fair delegation rather than simply going off a checklist of what's bad and what isn't.

It's not obvious, but the reason the character limit was imposed was because the nonsense that the ARR Beta Test forum degenerated into between Phases 2 and 3 in 2013 when there was a massive influx of new testers who were a little too eager and zealous in posting, which led to the Beta forum being spammed with troll posts to hell and back. SE quickly brought order to it by implementing these same character restrictions there (in fact, the restrictions on the Beta forum were even more harsher - you could only make one post every ten minutes for instance).

And when ARR launched and the old 1.0 forum became the ARR forum (and the Beta forum was finally put out of it's misery), similar posting restrictions were implemented here too, probably to head off any chance of such nonsense happening again. So that meme 'this is why we can't have nice things' applies here.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

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Well that sucks. I still think there could be a better solution to handling that than just imposing character limits (which again, people have bypassed) and just taking away the privilege of posting as much as you want. Not all of us are dumb kids, here.