quote:

Originally posted by Kysora This is an amazing idea that will never happen. We can't even get proper report buttons because of how outdated this forum is.

Yeah, I think one reason this forum has had problems is because of its outdatedness... It works fine as a tiny little nook for a handful of people, but as a site for distributing information and having discussions with masses... It fails.

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Originally posted by cryophonik Why did I know that my name was going to come up here? I do like to spread the word when I see good deals that EDM guys might be interested in, but to say that I post them "a lot" is a gross overstatement. I posted a total of 3 no-brainer alerts last year, and the last one was over a year ago. All were positively received by several TA members. But, after seeing a few snide remarks on other threads from people who don't like them, I pretty much stopped. February 10, 2010 February 23, 2010 March 9, 2010 Also, to all the comments claiming that this forum is "cluttered", you obviously have a different definition of that word than most people do, or haven't spent much time on a more popular forum. On any given day (e.g., today) you can see posts from 2-3 days ago on the first page of this forum. Compare that to any of the more popular production forums where threads drop to page 2 within hours if they don't get a response. So, personally, I don't see this being an issue that even needs addressing and I'd rather see the Search function fixed - that's a huge PITA that leads to cluttering up this forum with repeat threads. How many "which headphones/monitors should I buy for production?", "which synth is teh best for EDM?", and "how do I make this [generic supersaw in this youtube vid] sound?" threads do we see every month? Unlike new deals/products thread that can each lead to a unique discussion of the merits/uses of that product, the headphones/monitors and synth/supersaws threads all end up with the same answer and would probably be minimized if the search function worked properly and consistently.

I wasn't meaning to target you or say that you shouldn't post those no-brainers or anything. Personally, I never found them interesting, but you're a long time contributing member who's clearly doing it out of altruism and not to make money or something so I can't see a problem. I really only have a problem with advertisers with 1 post coming along and using the forum to spam their wares.

I only mentioned it at all because it seemed like a good example of the behaviour that I DON'T have a problem with! Although I think maybe you could think about putting them in the random thread perhaps.

I agree that search needs fixing, and the stickies and everything else. The problem, like I said above, is that the forum is very outmoded, and as a result we need really good moderation, lots of thread merging and some good stickies to make it work IMO. Most forums these days could almost self moderate IMO, but this one is so old that its just impossible for that to happen.

My issue isn't that the forum is cluttered, just that there is as much spammy shit as there is good content. I know its a relatively slow forum, but I'm not feeling that the content/crap ratio is really great atm.

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Originally posted by Beatflux It's up to the regulars to only respond to people who have contributed. Also, bumping should not be allowed. It's fucking annoying to see shitheads bump their fucking crappy tracks continuously.

Yeah, but I don't go to the promotion forum any more, because I can't work out who's a regular and you have to scroll through 5 pages of crap before finding anything decent.

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Originally posted by kitphillips I think most stuff about good deals (eg, audio midi no brainers, which cryo posts a lot) should probably go in the production-related random thread

Err, I rarely look at the random thread because from what I've seen it's mainly a handful of regulars talking bollocks to each other, so I'd rather anything of potential interest/value not to be thrown in there.

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yeah the random thread is not suited lol

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Originally posted by MSZ had a good idea, but again i dont think it could be implemented considering the framework of the board. for the uberthread, there could be a third option over the reply section of the post which would be a variable to substitute in the thread title open for all users. this would override the last deal when submitted with a new one. : Deals and Promotions Thread [ Deal: mad4brad's used panties ] : where the Deal: would be latest user submitted deal.

I like this idea, if it could be implemented.

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Originally posted by BECK Everything is ok by me as long as its not stickied. there already enough stickies!

The problem, though, is that it would have to be a sticky in order for people to see it and (hopefully) post to it. Although, I'm doubtful that most people (esp. the drive-by spammers) would utilize it and, therefore, Digi would probably have to move their posts there manually. Even for the regulars, finding an un-stickied thread is a PITA because, as mentioned earlier, this forum's search function barely works.

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Originally posted by Zombie0729 i still think there needs to be a feedback system in the audio promotion forum, like you can't post one of your tracks until you've appropriately left feedback for 3 others. That would solve this issue because the only reason people are dropping their tracks in this sections is it's way more likely to get a response then in the other area.

This is not nearly as good an idea as it sounds on paper. In practice, it's trivial to game the system by posting useless comments. Unless you have a complete voting system with karma-based privileges (which is still often gamed), this would only result in more unconstructive comments being added. "Great track, plz listen to mine thx."

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Originally posted by J.L. I mean.. occasionally someone will have something legitimate to post... I mean... sometimes when something decent goes on sale, and a member posts, I'd might want to know

I don't see how this would change that. The thread would still be bumped, so you would know that there is a new deal. The only difference is that you wouldn't know what the deal is from the title alone - you'd have to open the thread. I'm totally impartial as to whether or not we actually do it this way but that seems completely reasonable for people who are actually interested in deals.

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Originally posted by kitphillips If its a member who's never contributed, then I think the thread should be locked/deleted.

No, sorry, not interested, not going to happen.

Policies have to be the same across the board, otherwise every single moderator action is subjective and invites meta-discussion. Different rules for different people invariably ends up being practically identical to no rules at all, because the decisions are so totally subjective and plagued with endless arguments that everybody is too exhausted to even bother.

It doesn't work. It never works. It's been tried a thousand times on a thousand forums. Everybody thinks to themselves, "well, only contributing members should be able to do that", except everybody has a different mental model of exactly what that means. What is the metric - post count? Useless. Account age? Meaningless. Some totally subjective and indefinable combination of quantity and perceived quality? Exactly.

Even modern karma systems never bother with this type of privilege because the privilege itself is subjective. Does a totally innocent post from somebody who's just really excited about a cool new product count as advertising, even if they have no affiliation? What if the content is exactly the same, but there is a known/discovered affiliation? Is there any difference?

You can lobby Swamper if you want for a policy like this, but as long as it's up to me, the forum will never be moderated in this manner. I find it overly subjective to the point of being untenable, not to mention overtly hostile to newbies who will not understand the nuances and whom we honestly need to keep the site alive and fresh.

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Originally posted by Richard Butler Anyone notice the growth of these remix competitions lately? Those are all about label promotion as you generaly end up signing up to thier alerts as part of the whole process. No shit sherlock someone will say to me.

I tend to consider those equivalent to advertising if they're for Mickey Mouse tracks/labels (which most are). In fact, that was partly the inspiration for this suggestion; we used to have a dedicated thread for that, but never a rule saying that people had to post their comps in there. Personally, I found it less annoying when people used that thread instead of posting their own (lame) threads, but that is just my opinion.

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Originally posted by Beatflux Also, bumping should not be allowed. It's fucking annoying to see shitheads bump their fucking crappy tracks continuously.

I already close self-promotional threads if I see them being bumped and suspend repeat offenders (rarely happens). If I've failed to notice an incident, please post a complaint.

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Originally posted by BECK the problem is all these smalltimers trying to sell their samplepacks or masteringservices, or tutorials. the true deals which cryo posts are great imo and id miss it if it where all in one thread.

Sadly, there is no sorting algorithm for determining the quality, and even the small-time ones may be useful to someone.

One solution on more modern boards is topic votes, whereby heavily-downmodded topics are automatically obscured or simply disappear from the topic list. But this is another case where we have to work with what we've got, and topic voting is something we ain't got. What we have are topics, replies, and moderator actions (including merging and locking). That's about it. If we can find a solution that works with those, awesome; if we can't, well, that's unfortunate but the world isn't going to end.

Some general remarks: Right now the votes are tied. It seems that a non-trivial number of people genuinely get value out of these and don't mind just ignoring the ones that aren't relevant to them.

I'd like to see a clear majority before trying to enforce this kind of policy, so if you have an opinion and haven't voted, please do so. Otherwise, at this rate this is probably headed for the "interesting but impractical" pile.

Thanks very much to everyone who voted and/or replied. I really do appreciate all the feedback, even the feedback that I violently disagree with.

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To be fair, I recently saw a bumped thread closed.

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quote:

Originally posted by dj_alfi change your avatar for fucks sake.