Some people were concerned that members were not aware of an important discussion happening in a thread. I am addressing that issue.

As i muted that thread as soon as i saw the headline i appreciate it.

what about a feature where everyone can vote to "ban" someone from forums such that they cant post. For arguments sake maybe it takes 20 votes to get "banned" and you remain banned for let's say.... 10 days... each day votes tick down by 1. After that the offender can chat again but with still 10 votes against him/her. and people can vote to ban again if that person continues to say things that offends the forum.

I'm very interested in threads about Diplomacy, but not interested in threads about politics, trolling (or Krellin). I know this has been suggested before, but I do think it would be excellent if there were a way to separate the two.

I think the wild west nature of the forum drives some new users away. Having a diplomacy-only section of the forum (and having that be the default view on the front page) might go some way towards addressing that, while still allowing the people who enjoy antagonising each other on the forum to continue doing so.

I do not think mob rule is the best approach. We've tried that before and it doesn't work well.

@shield, how would we prevent an abuser from creating 20 accounts just to get someone banned?

We can already perma-mute whoever offends us personally.

@Tin_can i has been discussed, and i'm torn on the issue.

The forum was setup this way following the kiss principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) and it does just that. Very simple, easy to follow.

Diplomacy threads are few and far between, advertising games is almost a separate category in itself, but i rather prefer advertising here, on the active forum....

It bears discussing, but there are merits to the current system.

@ orathaic

Wouldn't they be caught as multis? If mods can see who voted against offender presumably its a short list to do a multi check on-- but that's work for Mods so meh. But if Abge says its not worked well before I'll trust that's true.

Of course we could catch them, but that would greatly increase our work for no gain.

I think it's possible there would be more Dip threads if they weren't buried by the other content.

I do agree that it's good to keep the forum simple where possible. The topic of what to do about forum trolling etc comes up often enough that it makes me think the current implementation may be *too* simple, though.

You can't solve people problems with technology. But, you can augment a social solution with technology. I think that we might be able to clearly separate users who do and who don't want to see the trolling threads, which could make this debate go away - those who want to see/participate in an argument can go to the "anything goes" forum area, and those who don't can just keep it hidden. I think everyone might be happy in that scenario. What do others think?

How about some sort of option where you could report someone for abuse/harassment? You could highlight a particular message and ask the mods to look into it. And, like with other offenses of webdip rules, whoever was the perpetrator could get a warning. If they repeat this multiple times they could get banned or something to that effect.

There could also be an option where you can choose whether or not you are open to people "joking" about things concerning you, which could be able for others to see, so that trolls know who is OK with being trolled. I know there is the mute option but a few people in the Krellin thread were complaining as to how they wouldn't want to mute something because if they do they might miss out on something important/insightful. I like the idea of seperate areas for talking about dimplomacy and then just random banter.

"so that trolls know who is OK with being trolled."

I'm not sure you fully understand what "troll" means.

I more meant that they would know who wouldn't report them, although it does kind of undermine the idea of trolling.

Don't make any drastic changes, if any at all. This is one of the only forums without random excessive intervention on the part of the moderators. Keep it that way. You're doing exactly what you should as is.

@Tin

You make some good points. The Two-Forum solution has been proposed for a long time. It may eventually be what we turn to. That, however, would require quite a bit of work on Kestas' part. What I'm looking for here is what the community and I can do to better the forum without major coding changes.

I am 100% in favor of breaking the forum up into two sections :
Diplomacy Related and General Discussion
Diplomacy can have some moderation to keep it clean and organized and General can be the wild west anything goes shit that some of you are obsessed with.

As it is now, the forum is overrun by non diplomacy related stuff....and the point of this site is diplomacy

I am not a coder, but wouldnt a second forum be rather simple to do?

You say "overrun" and yet 50% of the threads on the front page are about Diplomacy or webDip.

I would really like a forum redesign.

Diplomacy forum (for game threads, advertising, strategy talk)
Social forum (for bs)
Political forum (for politics stuff)

i don't think the sub-forum idea is actually a good solution. Even to the point where you have to choose which is the default view.

It could be possible to implement a tagging system, and allow filtering via tags. still a single unified active forum, but very simple to click the top few favourite tags, like 'diplomacy', 'game adverts', 'best trolling', 'politics', 'religion', 'school of war', etc

Something user created and defined. Perhaps with a reddit like system where +1s actually mean something ('hottest topic of the moment', where a +1 effectively means an hour is added to the threads effective post time for sorting by time, so the most +1'd of recent threads comes to the top...)

This was something which was discussed prior to implement +1s and it was decided that we could use look at how the +1 system works and see if it can be used to filter by popularity...

I would really like to see a 'school of war' tag which i could click on to get access to all the school of war threads... But also keeping the forum in one place, one default, one front page, is important. IMHO.

'I think it's possible there would be more Dip threads if they weren't buried by the other content.' - other, more popular, content. FYI I do keep a track of any diplomacy threads i find and link to them here: https://sites.google.com/site/webdiplomacylinks/

Feel free to create article and i'll post them, its not a very active site, as you can see.

I don't think we have enough information to fix the problem. If people are being scared away by the forum, as abgemacht says, then I think we should know what exactly in the forum is turning people away. Until we know that how do we know what will fix the issue?

@putin, why don't we ask them? Please, anyone who has been turned off by the forum, create your own thread to avoid derailing this one and detail your experiences.
(and if there is a god, please send me a sign...)

I would have hoped that since abgemacht knows people left because of the forum, they might have let him know what about it turned them away. If not, that's unfortunate, but maybe if such things are said to the moderators in the future, they politely ask the people in question what about the forum made them leave.

@Putin

The main complaints have been in regards to too much non-Diplomacy content and too many toxic threads.

@ora

A tag system would be wonderful. Do you know php? : )

Regarding coding effort, I would be happy to contribute - but I'd want to make sure that we were working on something that the mods/Kestas/the community were interested in before we started.

It sounds like a separate default dip-only forum would fit the complaints that abgemacht is hearing.

Orathaic, remember that the other content isn't necessarily more popular, just that the threads are posted in more frequently. That's not the same.

I'm not convinced 2 Forums would really solve the issue, though. My fear is that you'd just have one dead Diplomacy Forum and an out-of-control Politics Forum. What will that have accomplished?

If that's the case then Chaqa's solution seems the simplest. Short of that, then rules on the content of forum posts and personal conduct in the forum. Diplomacy-only and insult-free.

I don't think the Dip forum would be dead - judging by the number of actual Dip threads there are on the front page right now.

The accomplishments of such a system would be:

1) the out-of-control politics forum would be hidden from new users - which would reduce the number who are driven away
2) The users who never want to see the politics threads wouldn't have to mute each one individually

It seemed to me that the users who actually contribute to the out-of-control politics forums are happy with the discussion there. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, though?