Gooood Morning America,
Here are some thoughtful, out-of-the-box, suggestions from A Friend of FADG. If adopted, they certainly would change the fundamental nature of the thread.
Do you have any reactions to these ideas? Please post publicly or PM me with your thoughts, cat-calls, or alternative ideas. Think carefully before drawing your weapon.
--ken/fl
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Here are some things that came to mind on how the FADG thread might be improved. Note that these are not suggestions. Instead I am simply providing you with a complete brain dump, in the hopes that something will click for you.
(1) Ban all posts having to do with news that is less than 1 week old. A hell of a lot of posts are just reportings of the daily news. I admit to guilt here. The question is this: Are you running a news information service like Yahoo, or are you running a forum for intellectual discussion of foreign policy?
(2) Ban posts that are less than a few paragraphs long. It is impossible for sound bites to possess any real intellectual discussion.
(3) Weed out your posters. Obtain a list of everyone who's posted in the past month. Look at their most recent 2 dozen posts. If there was nothing in there that was fit for publication in Foreign Affairs, ban them. The idea here is to change the banning criteria from one of civility to one of utility.
(4) Ban posts discussing the relative morality of different ethnic groups. I mean really.
(5) When you find people flaming, go ahead and ban them both for 24 hours, without any public notice, though a PM would be polite to the offenders and offendee. What I'm saying is that rather than make a big production out of it, just take the chalk away from them for just long enough for them to forget what it is that they were arguing about.
(6) Most of the time, it takes two to tango. So when you ban someone, you should also ban the people who goaded him into stepping over the line. Make banning a WMD rather than a directed weapon. One result is that both parties will perceive you as being fair, to some extent, so those banned will probably be less inclined to leave in a huff. As evidence for this, note how much the thread (briefly) improved after you called for a week halt to all posting last October/November. When you ban them, I don't know what kind of message you send, but I'd send one expressing my deepest regrets, and giving the date at which they'd be automatically reinstated.
(7) Ban the people whose arguments are so weak as to be laughable. The purpose of the thread is not to provide a recreational outlet for sufferers of senile dementia. The first time someone brings in the black helicopters, ban them, even if they're being polite. What their actions do is to get other people in trouble for replying to them. And it's not like they're going to get any better with time. Time is what made them senile in the first place.
(8) Silicon Investor has a spell checker. Why should I have to read posts that are not only ungrammatical and badly reasoned, but also don't even use real words? What magazine in the planet would publish something like that?
But it is a fact that those who wish to have anything published anywhere usually suffer the umbrages of an editor, and the more attractive the venue, the more heavy is the hand of authority. Maybe you should make this more clear, that publishing on your thread is a privilege that few deserve and even fewer receive. What must really gall some people, when they are reprimanded, is that they see people who are clearly argumentative fruitcakes still happily posting on. |
