Ever since #discussion was opened to Members, the quality of the posts has gone downhill. The same happens in other public categories. We have lots of new users who don’t know the rules, and end up getting their posts flagged, and those flags make moderation slower to respond to more serious flags.
Why can’t reading the rules be a requirement for becoming a Member? It would help the quality of public sections.
The reason is you can never know if someone actually read the guidelines. The only way to do it is manually, which isn’t scalable.
But then how does it award the badge for reading the rules?
When you visit the topic it awards the badge, someone could just skip through the document
A solution to this could potentially be a survey of a kind, however I don’t know what the questions could be. One thing is for sure: The players should prove it in a place where others can’t see it. Like how the tutorial works.
It’s like the privacy policies; people never bother to read them and would just click the “accept” button to move on. Even if they were forced to read through the privacy policies, people would most likely just skim through or quickly scroll down to the bottom just to get past it. There just isn’t a reliable way to get people to read the guidelines.
Well, the main reasons for the member requirements be like that is because it shows the “level of interest” members have.
But members can still bypass these requirements easily, there are even videos about how to become a member fast (Which is a thing that shouldn’t be allowed).
Reading rules would still be a thing that they would be able to bypass, they would probs scroll down the whole page or simply follow a video to know.
The question’s would have to be randomized for players since people could just put the answers of the surveys on youtube videos
That is a very good point. Although, “randomize” sounds wrong. Maybe they could get updated regularly? It should be dodgeable somehow.
I agree, it should be mandatory or a requirement to read the whole rules as I also see the quality of topics decrease. Having something like this would actually be beneficial for the forum and helpful for new or current members who haven’t read the rules before becoming a member.
The only way to see which members have read the rules is by checking if they have the badge which is Read Guidelines which is from reading this page but as sneaky/lazy people can be, they can read through each section and or just be AFK and scroll and not read the whole thing.
This is a big issue on the forums and I would love for this to be a mandatory thing for all new members.
There would have a limit of questions randomized, they cant just do infinite questions.
Logically people would still find a way to bypass it and show others how to do so.
Exactly, that’s my point. It’s impossible to detect if a person reads the guidelines. Unless if you do it inperson which is a overkill and not scalable at all. But people can try there best, and make it harder to cheat.
The only real solution here is just to pray for them to be civilized or just believe in the moderation.
I politely and firmly disagree with your solution.
We all as a human species should be aware of the fact that mankind cannot be put in few categories.
There is no real hope in hoping for a good society
What Instead must be done, is a strict test. It shall be very hard for those that don’t read the rules, dont abide by the TOS, etc.
And if we have people that want to put out solutions for these tests, all we can do is update those tests. We have to keep moving to keep this, though.
It would be a more realistic reality, in my honest opinion.
You can always go harder and stricter. People may not like it, but it certainly is a way to enforce it.
As I said, people will always find a way to bypass it. Youtubers can do videos explaining it, its just a time needing thing.
Yes it would be good to have more strict rules but the main topic is talking about it needs to be harder to become a member, not to be harder to continue being.
You cant really do much when non-members cant reply.
This is pretty much all we can do about youtubers. However with your point on
may be true, and I do realize that I could’ve done a whole new topic on this, however I will be stating shortly that people can just join the Devforum as the most nicest folk ever, and then mess everything up.
Although we DO have to make entering harder, we also need to make sure that people keep this “behavior”.
Thats illegal tho, it shouldn’t use the webcam unless allowed and it would be a really bad thing since people (like me) doesn’t like using webcam.
Also checking scroll speed isn’t really a thing that will make ppl read guidelines, the person can just keep on scrolling without reading and spamming it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong with anything I say, but that isn’t allowed under any circumstances. And there a ton of <13 users on the DevForum, collecting information on them would violate COPPA, would it not? And some people don’t have a webcam.
The protection against just quickly scrolling to the end would be this:
To get Member, you need to have at least 10 minutes read time on the “official rules” topic.
As “read time” counts any time on the page that is spent, and the timer would pause every 30 seconds and resume with every scroll of the page to avoid just having the rules open and doing something else.
Mmm, wouldn’t that require discourse to add that? Besides, I’m sure its easy for people to make autoscrollers. What if you are a fast reader, and you finish before 10 minutes is up?
What I’m saying is that you had a good idea, but it’s not super practical.