Dan

I wanted to throw this out there and see what others think. Most importantly, think about how this affects mods/admins. Can/should they be taking action on this kind of thing? Is it OK for users to play mod-police and call it out when it happens? etc.

In the politics forum, there are times when a member or two or three will post a ton of messages, all in a row, filling up the "page" and bumping it to the next page, causing a bit of a disconnect in normal conversation.

Sometimes, they're spamming their articles.
Sometimes, they're just replying to a bunch of other posts.
Sometimes, they're bumping an otherwise inactive thread.

I think, in two of these three scenarios, there should maybe be a posting limit, only if others/mods/admins agree.

If people have been using this forum for 10+ years, I would expect them to know how to use the multi-quote and edit functions by now.

So here's my idea, and feel free to tell me it's terrible. It's up to the mods/admins anyway:

Users should not have more than two posts directly in a row, in any given political forum thread, unless more than 24 hours has passed since the most recent post in that thread.

Now, I don't know if this should also apply to the cartoons/memes threads, since their purpose is different than typical discourse. Personally, I think the rule should apply to those threads too, but I'm not as concerned about them as other threads where actual discussion is happening (for better or worse, amirite! )

How this is implemented is the hard part though:
Soft rule - users can call out other users who spam the thread with more than 2 posts at a time. Mods can take action as they see fit, or
Hard rule - some sort of change to the forum software that literally doesn't allow more than 2 posts in a row until 24 hours passes. I doubt that this is even possible, though.

I'm not including a typical non-participatory/jokey option this time around because I don't feel like it. You can all go twikoff yourselves!

VinVega

I'm not against having this discussion, but consider the possibility that some people don't have a chance to post all day long, but do read threads and respond to a number of points as they have time to post.

Adam Tyner

There are vBulletin plugins to deal with consecutive posts in a thread by the same person (like this one!). There's no error message or anything; they just merge the new post into the previous one, with a configurable time interval (and I believe a little grayed out message indicating the merge).

If we were to implemented a plugin like that, it should minimize the flood of eight posts in a row by the same person who doesn't understand how multi-quote works, but it would still allow for actual news/updates after an appropriate period of time, even if no one else has replied since.

Dan

Adam, that’s cool! I imagine it still bumps the thread as if there’s a new post, even if the last post was just merged with the previous one?

Vin, that’s obviously a good point too.

Anyway, y’all do what you want If it can really be addressed by a plug-in that doesn’t make users do anything different than what they already do, then it’s probably worth doing, I would hope.

Adam Tyner

The 'last post' timestamp would reflect the last post in the thread. So, if I posted twice in a row -- say, once 15 minutes ago and once right now -- the last post timestamp would be 15 minutes ago once those posts were merged.

TheBigDave

Personally, when 1 person is responding to multiple people, I'd rather see an individual post for each response. Otherwise, with a bunch of different responses in one post, it turns into a giant wall of text that makes the numerous discussions difficult to follow. At least, that's how I feel if this spreads to the whole forum.

But as far as the political forum goes, I don't really care. That place has turned into Lord Of The Flies. I say burn it down and salt the earth.

Sonic

What's the point in putting ordinance in politics when you can't tame politics. Politics is like religion, bickering, foolishness, constant drama, basically all the negativity filth resides in politics and religion.

Dan

While I don't totally disagree, I think changes can be made to make it... marginally better. Grouping posts from a single user, all in a row, could be a small but effective change, IMO. Thread-spamming is a problem that other places have addressed. Looks like I'm alone on this, though.

Just spitballing to see if there's ways to improve the discourse, y'know?

Josh-da-man

Just put the posters on your ignore list. If you think they're spamming, shitposting, and otherwise cluttering up the board, then that will go a long way to improving your experience.

I don't know if the board software can do it, but it would be great if quoted posts by ignored users could be blocked, too.

Norm de Plume

That's a valid point.

Dan, I understand your frustration, but I'm not sure restricting posting frequency is a felicitous solution. If anything, perhaps it could be discretionarily enforced by mods/admins on a case-by-case basis. There could be a friendly, "OK, let's move on", or "Maybe you should take a posting break and let others get a word in".

Dan

This would be nice for those that use their ignore list, for sure. Other places I've seen have implemented this, but I think they run on different software entirely. Actually, one place hides the existence of the post (unlike here were you can still see that a post exists between two posts and unblock them one-by-one), but with a link at the bottom of the page that says something like "You have blocked posts on this page. Click here to view them."

I think that's fair. Honestly, my issue stemmed from seeing 14 posts in a row by a single user. A handful of posts isn't nearly as bad, but when the post padding extends like that, it's clearly overkill and likely a deliberate attempt to derail from ongoing discussion.

Norm de Plume

Ah, you mean the "But they actually are shitholes!" and "Obama was a racist" digressions. Yes, those were annoying. Maybe I'm being incredibly naïve, but I don't believe the member in question is a troll, however loathsome is much of what he posts.

Breakfast with Girls

Agreed.

hdnmickey

This. The current feature doesn't prevent the full page blog entries from making the threads harder to follow when somebody goes and quotes the whole thing.

Maybe that's the solution. If a post is just going to be a cut and paste job from another site, just force the poster to link to it so the issue brought up by Dan doesn't result in a thread instantly growing by 2 or more pages with with blog entries very few, if any, ever fully read.

creekdipper

If ignoring posters isn't enough due to someone else quoting the ignored poster, PM the person doing the quoting and warn them that if they continue to quote people you are ignoring, you will add them to your ignore list.

That will solve the problem, One way or the other.