I agree with the idea of this. Of course, I have to bring up the old forum to really mention why I side with such aggression.
Now one thing to mention is that I was a member of the old Post Approval team. The reason we nuked it was because 99% of posts were people at least trying to be legit, maybe 40% were good to go right away and 60% needed a redirect to follow forum standards, a good chunk of those relatively minor. That time spent on the 60% is what made the thing nigh inoperable. Trolls were a minority group, and most troubles were from violations of standards such as the format for feature requests and bug reports. The consensus was that “Oh, so long as people are trying, we can let the community trim out the fat tied to poorly written threads”. Very little mind was paid to trolls due to their rarity. Perhaps this was because they knew there was an approval process and knew they were gonna get declined. I don’t know. But basically, my point here is to highlight that trolls are rare, stick out like a sore thumb, and should be treated like tumors on the forum rather than members if you had to ask me.
I won’t start a rant about how the old forum was better since that’s off topic to this thread, but the basic gist is that yes, if some knucklehead decides to come to these forums about game development and post “haha amogus sus (make amogus game)” in dev discussion, he oughta get clobbered for it, and moderation should hit hard. I have neither the time nor the patience to read shitposts because some fool thinks it’d be funny.
This whole jargon about the forum being professional is more time-oriented than anything. When the forums were private, it was a place for the top dogs of the platform. When it needed to be, it was professional no matter how you cut the cake, even with the occasional gag.
Personally, every post I write has a level of quality that is the highest I can muster because it’s the right thing to do in my eyes. If people are going to read my thread or reply, then it better damn well be something useful, insightful, or meaningful if I can manage it.
Now here’s the thing – I’m not saying people should be punished for low quality posts that they can’t help. If little Joey needs help scripting and doesn’t know how to write out what he needs clearly, so long as he put his effort into trying to make sure other people understand it, then I won’t object even if the writing quality is terrible, and I’m willing to cut slack if its a duplicate thread even. However, if little Joey looks at one of the serious subforums and decides it’d be funny to treat it like off-topic of the old public forums, then he oughta get pushed out of the place.
I think the image of these forums being a privelege should be preserved. That’s what matters. The only difference from old to new is that getting into the forums is now a given rather than something you earned through hard work. If you can’t use the forums properly and show a deliberate lack of care for its purpose, then you lose that privelege. Simple as that.
