phpBB Ignore list

[Angela Christine]

Speaking of bestiality links, AC hasn't given her opinion yet.

Well, since you asked.   :twisted:  I think most of the offensive/pointless/offensive/silly posts occur in the OOC Chatter forum.  If you only want hardcore Armageddon posts, avoid the OOC chatter forum, it is easy.  I usually ignore threads on music and sports, it is dead easy even without a coded ignore feature.  Having people download posts they aren't interested in doesn't waste much resource-wise, on a small board like this an extra layer of code and calculations to give everyone a customized view would probably "waste" as much system resources as the excess posts.

Personally, I have http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/search.php?search_id=newposts bookmarked, that way when I visit the board only the threads with new posts appear in the list.  This gives me the title of the thread, the board it was posted to, the name of the member who started the thread, and the name of the most recent poster.  If I don't like the topic or the poster, I don't click on it.  That seems simple enough to me.

If I had to choose, I'd rather go back to the old GDB where subthreads were obvious and easy to avoid then go to a bloated moderation system.  It is slow enough as it is, I don't need more pointless features sucking resources.  

But I'm one of the worthless 500+ posters, so pay no attention to me.  :evil:

AC

[creeper386]

I have now decided to found the 500+ Post Count Posters, FPPCP for short. And I place AC as president... The red dot told me too.

Okay, I TRIED really hard not to touch this post any more... Or the other one... But I couldn't help it after ACs post. I think I've done enough to post my opinion, and I'm going to have to stick with the people who got offended because of our uninformed opinion.

I disliked the idea before I read anything about slashdots info, I read alittle bit of it, decided it didn't have anything new that gfair didn't already say, and I still don't like the idea. Saying myself or anyone else is misinformed because they don't like your idea, isn't a way to win an arguement. It does get a few things done, but doesn't help the arguement any, except maybe against your favor.

Creeper who feels if you don't like someones posts don't read them, but if you want to only read what your interested in, how does completely ignoring people help any, for the most part even people who's posts I find "difficult" to read sometimes do come up with good ideas/points or just something interesting.

[Brixius]

I'm going to post the same message in both these threads mostly because the same arguements work for both discussions.

First off, I am against both of these ideas. While I agree that being able to filter out posts based on author is tempting, and being able to rate posts Slashdot style is inviting, I don't think we have the userbase that requires either of those features. Plus we have a set-up that tends to focus fluff, nonsense posts into one area where it can be ignored by me, heh.

I'll adress a few items point by point:

This may have some value if whoever owns www.zalanthas.org pays for their bandwidth.

This isn't really much of an issue. The hosting plan we're on allows 25 gigs of bandwidth a month and we use around 3. I wouldn't mind trying to find ways to make more use of Zalanthas and get more bandwidth off of Ginka allowing what Ginka has to be used for sweet-sweet text flow.

Slashdot's system is much more complex than the ignore list I would like to see here, but the result is the same: you read only those messages deemed to be of the high, or low quality you are looking for.

I disagree. With the Slashdot style moderation, you get the content people think is worth reading. With the ignore list, you get to read brilliant ideas and mindless drivel from people you personally deem worthy of hearing it from and miss all the brilliant ideas and midless drivel from people you don't deem worthy of hearing from. The ignore list has nothing to do with weeding out poor quality posts but more of ignoring individuals regardless of whether their post contained quality information or not.

but with it in place, and with active participation, they have the option of never needing to delete anything, unlike in the current system where they delete IC information and flame wars.

IC posts would still need deleting, I believe. As would most flame wars. If I remember Slashdot right (And it has been a while since I visited) anyone could still view any posts if they set their threashhold low enough, meaning even if a post were declared "too IC" people with a threshhold set to -1 could still read it. Flamewars would need deleting for the same reason. Those involved would just set their threshhold to -1 and keep flaming away. While this is nice because those with a higher threshhold would avoid it, I personally think most people would keep the threshhold set to -1 to keep from missing anything. Really, we get like 1/10,000 of the traffic Slashdot does and I doubt if we get as many posts in a year as they get in a day so while moderation is necessary to filter out the static there, we have a relatively captive audience. People here are part of a community that is still small enough to be under most spammers radar so we have a much lesser need for filtering posts. Plus, Sanvean has made great strides to expand and bring this community together and I think splintering it apart by creating ignore lists or ways for newer voices to be filtered out through moderation is doing a disservice to that community.

In short, I don't believe this board is large enough to provide the reader resources to properly moderate nor provide the amount of static needed to be moderated. The forum based system seems to also work as a way to 'hide' pointless conversations that have no real bearing on anything.

Brix.

[Callisto]

Two quick points:

1: I'm with Malifaxis - his post said things a little more politely then I would have, though.

2: Can someone tell me how to create colored text like DrunkenSalarr did? Imagine, being able to flame someone in bold red text! Oooh, I'm giddy already!

Thanks.

[John]

When you click reply and write your message you'll notice two drop down boxes, one with "colour". You select the color and this pops up:

Code Select Expand

[color=red][/color]To write your message you go

Code Select Expand

[color=red]WRITE YOUR MESSAGE HERE[/color]

[Callisto]

W....TF?

... that is so embaressing. I can't believe I missed that.

I am a newbie, I know in my heart it is true.

[Bardex]

We got Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice, Bozo, and me. I can't stand reading Bozo's posts, so I have him set to ignore. But I generally like reading the posts of the other four, because they usually have interesting and/or informative and/or amusing things to say.

So Bob starts a thread on a certain mechanic that interests me. Great post, Bob!

Carol adds her two 'sids, then Bozo puts in his drivel. My browser skips over Bozo's and goes on to Ted, Alice, Carol, and Bob all responding to Bozo's post. And as I read each one, I ask myself HUH?

So I go BACK to the config, turn Bozo's ignore set off, BACK to the thread, just to find out what the fuck everyone is talking about.

Seems like a ridiculous waste of time to me, and further if I didn't go back and unignore Bozo and responded to Ted's response that I didn't know was a response because I had Bozo ignored, then I would be contributing to the derailing of the thread, thus placing myself at risk of being ignored, all because I ignored someone else.

I like the boards the way they are. If you see someone's name in a post, you can easily scroll over it. If you see a post from someone you like reading, and they refer to a post you ignored, it's a quick flip of the finger to scroll back up and find out what they're referencing.

What I'd rather see people do, is to make use of the UBB code and include quotes in their posts whenever they respond to a specific post. But that would take individual responsibility, rather than some arbitrary (or not arbitrary) moderating/filtering system.

I much prefer giving people credit for intelligence, and let the unintelligent fall where they may.

[Angela Christine]

Implement ignore list?
Yes      27%  [ 8 ]
No      72%  [ 21 ]

Total Votes : 29

What I find funny is that in the first 24 hours of this topic, only 29 accounts (out of more than 400 possible) bothered to vote at all.  Ironically, it seems that people are already very good at ignoring things.

AC

[Lazloth]

Ironically, it seems that people are already very good at ignoring things.

*snicker* Though the voting majority has pulled its collective weight in the direction of veto, I still think there's some merit here.  Collapsing ignored replies (ie., the XML-style

• next to the poster)..?  Certainly different ways to approach the functionality, but it's a lost battle, I fear, gfair and friends.

[gfair]

*snicker* Though the voting majority has pulled its collective weight in the direction of veto, I still think there's some merit here.  Collapsing ignored replies (ie., the XML-style

• next to the poster)..?  Certainly different ways to approach the functionality, but it's a lost battle, I fear, gfair and friends.

It's too bad we didn't have, say, 100 people vote on this to see a more accurate sampling of the Arm community.  While the Slashdot system may not work as a copy & paste job, what you suggest here might be alright.  Clearly, in light of Brix's response, there doesn't appear to be any support by the IMMs for any sort of change to the present system.

Guess we just have to stock up on extra eye glaze.  Or perhaps similar to email, being able to hide posts and threads you have already read, so as not to have to sort through what you have seen already.  Whatever the case, taking just the vote results and assuming they are representative, over 25% of GDB readers want some form of system to ignore or moderate.  Naturally, this board isn't a democracy, so it's up to the admins, and it seems their opinion is perhaps bolstered by the No results of the poll, but there is a sizeable group that want it (all under the above assumption, of course).

It's too bad we didn't have, say, 100 people vote on this to see a more accurate sampling of the Arm community.

Well, as I see it, more of the active GDB browsers have voted, and those are the people it will affect. So I think it's a decent representation. Personally, I didn't vote for a while, because I wasn't sure which was I wanted to, even though I was leaning towards no to begin with.

I'll add my bit to the discussion though. I don't think ignore lists would be that great for the board, because you wouldn't have people just ignoring people who don't use the boards well. They will likely ignore too, people with differing opinions, people who may be great discussion members, but got on the ignorer's bad side, or even people who have an argumentative flair to their discussions.

Overall, ignore will filter out more "I don't like you"s than it will "You are a waste of board space by posting things in l33t and posting goatse.cs links"

[gfair]

Well, as I see it, more of the active GDB browsers have voted, and those are the people it will affect. So I think it's a decent representation. Personally, I didn't vote for a while, because I wasn't sure which was I wanted to, even though I was leaning towards no to begin with.

Your explanation is the very reason why the results are not representative of the whole board - frequent GDB surfers may be affected, but if what you say is true, and most have voted, then there are maybe 35 "frequent surfers", even less actually.  And as was recently pointed out, there is something like 600 or 1000 active GDB accounts.  Is 35 people representative of 600 or 1000?  Not at all - specifically because of the evidence you present, hinting that most are from one group of GDB readers, and not from all segments of readers.  Market research, in its basic statistical form, would rule out this result as an inadequate sample size.

It also doesn't take into account those people that don't read the GDB at all.  I asked several people I know if they knew about Slashdot, mentioning a post about it on the GDB.  They all said they rarely go to the GDB, hinting that there may be a lot of Arm players that would never come across this post on the GDB, perhaps due to what the GDB is right now.

[Carnage]

Your explanation is the very reason why the results are not representative of the whole board - frequent GDB surfers may be affected, but if what you say is true, and most have voted, then there are maybe 35 "frequent surfers", even less actually.  And as was recently pointed out, there is something like 600 or 1000 active GDB accounts.  Is 35 people representative of 600 or 1000?  Not at all - specifically because of the evidence you present, hinting that most are from one group of GDB readers, and not from all segments of readers.  Market research, in its basic statistical form, would rule out this result as an inadequate sample size.

It also doesn't take into account those people that don't read the GDB at all.  I asked several people I know if they knew about Slashdot, mentioning a post about it on the GDB.  They all said they rarely go to the GDB, hinting that there may be a lot of Arm players that would never come across this post on the GDB, perhaps due to what the GDB is right now.

448, actually. 35 people is basically one person voting out of every thirteen. This isn't market research, but if you want to play that game, getting the opinion out of one of every thirteen people is pretty good for market research. However, this is a poll on a forum that isn't mandatory for people to vote in. Expect some people not to vote, especially considering some of those 448 votes are double accounts. And just out of curiousity, would you be preaching this same argument about how not everybody voted if the argument was leaning in your favor?

Yes, some people don't go to the GDB. I didn't go to the old GDB for over six or seven months when I played. When I actually did actively visit it, I was pleasantly surprised. So your 'perhaps' is pretty much just that: something based on no evidence whatsoever and your own biased opinion.

Why don't you just accept that your idea is something that not many people want and move on?

[Angela Christine]

Why don't you just accept that your idea is something that not many people want and move on?

If he needs to tell himself that the people who voted didn't understand the question and aren't an accurate sample anyway to get through the day, let him.  There are no doubt at least 600-1000 people out there who agree with him completely and the fact that they didn't vote obviously shows how screwed up the current incarnation of the board is.  "The lurkers support me in Email" is a tried and true tactic for when your point of view doesn't seem to catch on.  There's worse lies to tell yourself, at least it's not an appocolypse cult.

AC

[krelin]

*lowering the hand with the knife from his chest* Wait...  it's -not- an apocalypse cult?  Why is it called "armageddon.org", then???

[gfair]

448, actually. 35 people is basically one person voting out of every thirteen. This isn't market research, but if you want to play that game, getting the opinion out of one of every thirteen people is pretty good for market research.

It is good, and I didn't know there were less accounts than I thought.  But your conclusion of what I am saying is entirely wrong - I don't need a greater group to vote, Brix has put the foot down, and I'm trying to move on.  The reason I responded to the point about "frequent GDB readers" having mostly responded is that with just 35 of 448 accounts voting, I would have liked to have seen more people vote.

And just out of curiousity, would you be preaching this same argument about how not everybody voted if the argument was leaning in your favor?

If I did, it was extremely idiotic.  No, if I said that, please accept this correction - I would have liked to see more people vote, perhaps over the remaining 19 or 18 days more people will.  More voters are always preferable to fewer, in any vote.

So your 'perhaps' is pretty much just that: something based on no evidence whatsoever and your own biased opinion.

Actually, the 'perhaps' was really just a wish to have seen a greater turnout, to see if the current results would hold true on a larger set of voters.  Since most elections typically see only a 10% turnout, all people who respect the voting process should like to see a larger turnout, as opposed to a smaller one.

Why don't you just accept that your idea is something that not many people want and move on?

I have - I'm not trying to keep the original thread going, my response was strictly a side issue on the results.

[spawnloser]

Two quick things:

• Mali has the right idea.  When you stop listening, you stop learning.
  
• If you don't like what's on, change the channel.

[Bestatte]

You might consider the 12 out of 13 people who didn't vote a "I really don't care enough to bother voting" vote - since "I really don't care" wasn't an option.

If you do that, then the vast majority really doesn't care. You can count me in as one of them, since even if the ignore option was available, I wouldn't use it - because - I really don't care.