I would be very surprised if it's over 1%. Especially given the repetition. If the devs have to read 100 new threads to find an idea worth implementing, is the forum any use at all?
I suppose the good ones ought to see more response, so they'll be easier to spot, but the bad ones get trolled so much they tend to hang around longer than the good ones!
I really don't want to argue with you about the origin of ideas - I've spent all night reading documents about AI language parsing methodologies and I'm finding establishing any truths about the workings of the human brain to be rather problematic!
Well, I mean since the beginning of LFS it is probably somewhere in the range of 10%, it may be something more like 5%.
But keep in mind, the devs were much closer to the RSC community back before S1.
As for the second quote, ever heard the song One Thing Leads to Another?
There you go.
And as far as moderation goes in this section, I don't think I could care any less, once someone posts links to other threads, then that new thread is just done, and disappears quickly, so there isn't much to worry about.
its a waste of time. People will abuse this feature. The best solution is to have each suggestiong APPROVED by a moderator/moderators. The way it works is someone creates a new thread, it goes into a pool that the moderators read over, if they feel the suggestion has potential or was well thought out, THEN they approve it and it appears in the forum for people to view.
But what it does do is let the community discuss an idea and the devs can prioritise differently or implement an idea in a different way from the off without having to ask the community for inputs directly, which would just end up in chaos with them being pressurised to implement stuff quickly. Whilst the devs probably decided to add forced cockpits and false starts themselves I'd be very surprised if they hadn't looked through the improvement suggestions threads to see what ideas the community was likely to prefer and try and gauge the reaction, in fact it may well have been the (rather surprising IMO) opposition to the forced cockpits from the IS threads that led the devs to quietly adding it in a minor update with an excuse to cover it (need for AX) rather than making a big thing about it in the next patch
I can almost agree with Bob that the IS section could be closed, even for just a while. But I immediately thought that the consequences of that would be a re-channeling of IS stuff into the main discussion section, which would definitely be worse. Some people also like to have a crack at running an IS in the test patch threads, and I can see that being abused more too, this way.
Instead of requiring a search everytime someone would like to post in IS, it would be much easier to just have a message (like in the test patch thread) with a decent sized list of the more discussed to death things- tracks/cars/weather/nurburgring?/ricey tuning/ etc, advising people to stay away from these topics. If something does get posted along those lines, it would probably be better for the long term guys to just ignore it...
I think if a sub-forum is made for car/track and S3 feature suggestions and another sub-forum made for smaller S2 relevant suggestions then those that just want to go and suggest the same things over and over again that will never be implemented can post somewhere they will be ignored and not cause offence whilst intelligent discussion can happen in the other subforum.
I've colour coded the current IS threads into where I think they should go, green to the S2/intelligent discussion, yellow potentially worthy of it but discussed far too many times before and red for S3/silly subforum (preferably with an autoban for the poster)
Genius! I just adore the pallette you've used there, it's just fabulous. Love those muted spring shades (they're bordering on being pastel actually - which is brilliant, the '80s are so hot right now - you're so cheeky!). They're just what this forum needs to shake off this endlessly depressing two-tone blue. Nothing wrong with two blues together, of course, (very RAF y'know, and we all love a man in uniform) but enough's enough, darling ...
Easy way to deal with this is to put the search terms automatically into the first post. That way moderators (and everyone else) could see whether the poster has exploited the system or not.
1. Look at the number of members and posts. What makes someone think that they can play LFS for a few days then come here and think they're suggesting something nobody else has thought of?
2. Not searching before you post anything is absolute muppetry.
Could be solved with a little bit of Nazi-moderation though. Is there a sticky saying "all suggestion ideas should be in this format"? I can't remember.
But if there is, all posts made in the IS section should be immediately deleted without recourse if the OP doesn't match the requirements, the first one being "use an informative thread title".
[CENTER][B]Thread Views:[/B][/CENTER] Cars we wanna see in S3 76,722 Mountian Drift Course 10,501 Nos 10,041 Drift Max. Lock 8,934 HARDCORE MODE 6,123 Nos 6,062 Diesel car 5,879 Tracks we wanna see in S3 5,268 "Push to pass" 5,176 Project Nurburgring 4,547
^^ which just shows the 'type' of user that comes into the IS forum.
The way I see it is; it may just turn people off the forum, nobody likes to be bullied around by popups telling them what to do even if what they are doing is wrong in the first place. IS forums are a part of every company and buisiness around the world as its an excellent medium between the people who manage the company and the end-line customer. Closing this forum is not a good idea imo- giving new users a chance to voice their oppinions/suggestions makes them feel more involved and stimulates more activity on the forum....which is what you do want...right?
Imo a simple fix is needed, even though the fix it may seem abit OTT it is the way every other forum in here is run...when a section of a forum gets too big it branches into sub-forums and sub-sections.
I don't see the need for annoying popups, and asking users label threads with informative titles is not entirely the answer as any given thread can have the same topic/title and can have different result/conclusion for a search result. The plainly boring topics could be merged.
More sub-sections gives newuser a chance to browse through if he/she is'nt going to search first.
Edit:
...and just a question to the moderators here. When newuser creates a thread in tech assistance forum eg. 'Help Please!!!'...and then a mod comes along and puts in a [descriptive note] at the end eg 'Help Please!!![network connections]
is it not more efficient to place the descriptive note before the origional title, eg. '[Network connections]Help Please!!!'?
...so a search result will conclude in the same time regardless of what format the words in the thread title are...?
...it just does'nt make sense to me to have these notes after the title. If I do a search in eg. tech assistance forum for "ATI" the result will be nine pages of posts sorted by time...having descriptive notes after the origional crap title that makes it very hard to quickley scan down the page to find what I want.
Pre-moderation is not feasible, sub forums would be unnecessary clutter and wouldn't stop newcomers from posting in the main area anyway, and any warning pop-ups suggesting to use the search feature would be heeded by perhaps one in a hundred visitors.
I think if the section is left as it is the problem won't get any better or worse and any changes that people are suggesting here won't make the problem any better or worse.
I don't dig the idea of sub-forums either and pre-moderation just sounds like way too much toil for our volunteer mods.
If it was my forum and I was going to add anything at all, I'd do something very simple, like throw up a couple of sticky threads with titles like "Car Suggestions", "Track Suggestions" etc. which would each start with a little spiel about searching (or just stickify and re-name existing threads on the relevant topics) ... sure, noone reads stickies either, but it wouldn't hurt Then, members & mods would have somewhere specific to refer re-run posters to instead of the somewhat vague "Log" thread or just saying "search n00b". It'd be similar to the "I got banned, what to do?" sticky - lock the rerun thread and refer the OP to the relevant sticky. Might end up being slightly more work for mods but it would keep stuff tidy. Perhaps
XCNuses origional suggestion was easyest fix anyway...except i think you've misunderstood what the OP suggested
As soon as newuser clicks 'create thread' he/she is taken to a search result page based on the new thread title. From there he/she will confirm or cancel new thread and go browsing.
:twocents:
different instances of the same topic bracnhing out into other new topics...tis what forums are made of and stuff.
