As I’m sure everyone has noticed. New Members are now able to create topics here in the #inception-forum. This however, wasn’t always the case until the Entry Process was updated. Before that we could not create topics in the Inception Forum category, this right was restricted to Members+ only. However in two other areas of the Dev-Forum, specifically #learning-resources:community-tutorials-resources and #platform-feedback:documentation-requests. It has been changed, to were New Members can no longer create topics in those categories, and must go through the Post Approval Process in order to prevent some Low Quality Posts from squeezing their way into those sections.
However with the recent post of a “Thats how Mafia works” meme in the Inception Forum by a New Member. While the post was quickly flagged by the community, I thought about how many times this could potentially happen in the future. Plus this wasn’t the first and likely won’t be the last time the Inception Forum has been misused by some New Members. Unless of course, things change. While a lot of the New Members do read the rules and guidelines for posting in each category. There will always be the odd one who does not, and will proceed to create a topic that will break the guidelines.
So I want to propose that the Inception Forum have it’s Topic Creation restricted to Members+ once again. With New Members requiring to go through the same process they need to follow in order to post Bug Reports, Feature Requests.
Where do new members have left to post directly if this is changed? There’s not much point in being a member if all you can do is ask for posts to be moved from #bulletin-board.
This is arguably better. By submitting their posts through the lead top contributors, it would filter out any meme posts and also allow them to get direct feedback on their posts from very knowledgeable members of the forum.
Edit: Also worth noting I probably would have taken much longer to become a full member if it wasn’t for this process. It really helps get new members into the forum.
The #inception-forum category is made for “inception”, the starting point. The whole meaning of this section is to welcome the new members (note that I’m not referring to New Members, but rather as anyone new to the forum in general - when basic_user was a thing this would have made more sense).
The Inception Forum is destined to present our rules and to answer their questions, but also to be the point where they start. I doubt anyone’s first post was considered a “top quality” post, worthy of being in the Forum. At least mine was not. Removing this chance of them to get used to the Forum is, in my personal view, something which might degrade other sections of the Forum.
It’s true that giving them the permission to solely reply to a topic as a first experience already gives new members a chance to “taste” the Forum system. However, there is no other mean to ask questions about the Forum other than creating a new topic, with the exception of forwarding a message to Top Contributors.
As you mentioned, whoever saw it rapidly responded flagging the post which lead to it being removed. That said, I don’t believe this is recurring enough, to “punish” all of the New Members.
Agree some new members just play around with the forum like yesterday a roblox player posted some weird thing, about how many hours do i get for sleep. Like new members don’t even read the rules on how new member works glad you made this.
Because that’s less inviting and under the impression we expect new members to be perfect from the get-go. This is why arguably the biggest factor for promotion is your usage of the post approval system, we want to mold you into a well posting user, not kick out people who aren’t (Note: deliberate trolls are not relevant to what I’m talking about).
You’re wrong. There’s a lot of new members that wanted to be here in the first place and went through every single rule on this forum. Those who are doing this are people who couldn’t care less about being here.
You would not get removed from the Dev-forum, you’d just lose access to creating Topics in Inception Forum. But also remember this is a merely a proposal and is not guaranteed to happen.
Inception - the establishment or starting point of an institution or activity.
In my opinion it would be pointless to not allow New Members to post in a section that was meant to be the starting point for them in this very forum just because the new entry process isn’t perfect and lets in people who don’t really want to contribute here.
The Inception Forum is not publicly visible unlike most of the other categories New Members can’t directly post in. Bad posts have a lower impact here and it’s less work to filter out bad threads than it is to review and approve threads. Most of the time it’ll have been flagged / reported to Community Sage within a few minutes anyway.
Eventually we want to allow new members to discuss there too since they currently do not have a generic “game design”/discussion category (development support isn’t really for generic discussion) but we’re figuring out how to best do that without reducing post quality there too much.