Notice: New member registrations to be disabled 10/21/2016

Baptism by "hello, who are you?" and "can you deal with jokes and criticism about the things you might care about?"

That has often been my experience with forums. Nothing wrong with that.

 

Any old Changstar folks or even someone good from HF that can be recruited?

 

Anyone from Changstar that wants to be here is here already. Funny, I did notice one person who left SBAF voluntarily to go back to HF for his own reasons. So obviously, this place isn't for everyone.

 

Dude, you helped me discover new music. For that I am eternally grateful.

 

I think there's an easier way of auto-moderating this kind of approach. Only give new users access to posting in the new-member introductions thread. Since there's only one place that they can post, their first post will sorta have to be in the intro thread. (EDIT: I want to emphasize that their posting access would be restricted, viewing access would be as-is unless the staff have something different in mind for SBAF). After their post count hits 1, their posting access becomes unrestricted.

Hopefully, they can put 1 and 1 together and piece together a coherent introduction post at the very least (and if they can't, well....). Even that very, VERY slight barrier would probably be more helpful than just having open-run of the place.

Relatively little effort required on the moderation/administration team other than tweaking permissions, potentially frees them up from dealing with bots crapping all over the place as well.

 

I forgot about that. Like you said, probably quite a burden on the Mods.

I was thinking that it was the first 5 posts that were checked out before appearing. I just took a look to refresh my memory. I didn't find that but I saw "Over 55,000 members" and upon further looking saw "Registration is closed".

 

I probably should have explained my thoughts a bit better there, my fault. It'd be entirely automated, no input from staff would be needed other than setting up custom rank/titles/permissions for brand new users without any posts.

1) New user creates account, forum settings has their posting privileges locked to only being able to post in the introductions thread (since post count = 0).
2) User posts in introduction thread, their post count goes up to 1
3) Forum automatically unlocks their posting access to the rest of the forums (since post count > 0)

 

I hope I didn't just hear the sound of a lightbulb going on over Jude's head.

 

So let's stay closed for a bit and focus on existing members and improving the knowledge base here. I would love to see some outstanding review posts pasted into a thread that can serve as a readily accessible source of what we want to see.

 

Here's a low effort idea to implement that. Can the forum software automatically create a list of "Most liked posts". Either forum wide or per thread (for long threads). That should correlate strongly with our perception of "good content", no?

 

If that script were run on individual threads, we could get the best of some long threads like the HD650 threads

 

^^^ Yep, that's exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of.

 

Thinking of how we want to present ourselves to newcomers and lurkers ... a section of the forum with essential knowledge threads, free of all noise. Think of the first Leader Board post...

 

Is there a way for a person to petition to be let in (say, a member of the trade who didn't suck, or a unicorn with thoughtfully entertaining audio opinions or something)?

I don't have anybody in mind (wait! EtyDave), but just asking.