Announcement

**TheCotMan** · May 14, 2006, 17:31

Originally posted by shrdlu

If this restriction is newish, I'd give it a while, without making the concession, and see how it goes.

This has been enforced for about 4 or 5 months. I think we started this late December last year or early January of this year. (We don't even have a year of data to examine, and it has not been tried through an actual con.)

Yeah, I thought about asking for dispensation, but I couldn't justify it to myself, so I didn't. I joined in plenty of time to sit out the two weeks, and have already satisfied my primary purpose in putting info out over on the contest/event forum. Anything else is just gravy.

Manual promotion and exceptions for people that organize contests and events and are trusted to not be asshats is critical to having this "forced lurking" policy work. Organizers, Goons, and DCG leaders are *exactly* the kinds of people we want on the forums.

One thing that came up was an idea of an "Insta-Ban" for users violating rules as lurkers in the Contest/Event space. I don't think we decided to go with this, but we will likely be even more strict with users that violate rules as "lurkers".

Community is good, and encouraging it is the right thing. I just don't think waiting a week is that big a deal.

It is not a big deal for me, and is something I have patience to do for Defcon, but not something that I would do for, say a wiki. If I see a mistake that I want to fix, and sign-up to fix it, and have to wait, I decide the fix is not worth my time.

I can't believe that it drives anyone off, at least not anyone that isn't headed for /dev/null in any case.

Yes, this is one of the reasons we looked to add this forced lurking period.
It lets users read the rules, lurk to see "how things work", acts as impedence to users looking for "tech support" or question on "h0w 2 haxxx0rz teh gibson" (how to hack the Gibson.) It also adds value to accounts that have permission to post, as a lost account means delays to rejoining. This increases desire to maintain an e-mail address on the forums (for password reset) and users may see an increased risk in being asshats if it means they may lose their account through being banned. There are more advantages to forced lurking than I've listed here, too.

However, with all of these advantages, event/contest organizers often *want* to make it easy for people to sign up for their contests, discuss their contest, and ask questions. (Everyone shares in the asking and answering of questions in a public space.)
Everyone benefits when organizers are able to use the forums as a tool to promote their events/contest. If an enforced lurking period substantially decreases the forums as a tool to aid with event/contest organization, the enforced lurking period benefits must be weighed against the cost of event planning/organization.

My original motivation for joining was that I was seeing a whole bunch of hits on the coffeewars site, and a lot of them were initiated from the forum. When I logged in, and saw zero posts there, I felt a certain responsibility to communicate with those users looking *there* for information, so I joined. It all worked out.

This is great! You seek to promote your contest, and took the time to join the forums so you could contribute. What is better? You are also contrubiting here (in this thread) in a discussion on how to help the forums work. I like to read/hear new ideas. I like it when ideas are backed up by experience and reasons. It really does benefit the forums when people like you, klepto, and Deviant Ollam state your ideas and opinions about how the forums work. It is also helpful to everyone when new ideas are discussed like this.

I bet many contest organizers have a similar view of the forum. I too joined the forums many years ago, and found it a flame-fest. It took a long time before I would come back. The improvements to the forums you see now can be attributed to ideas proposed by other mods and admins from years before I came back. I think every mod has proposed one or more ideas to make the forums work better. Nearly every new policy/feature we've tried recently are actually not my ideas, but that of another mod from years back. Several ideas, now in place were proposed by ordinary users. Its the other mods and Admins and constructive users that deserve the prasie for helping the forums become what they are now and where they are going.

Converge sorted through all of the /dev/null posts to classify them into kinds of rule violations to help us understand where users were failing to to follow the rules, and allowed us to re-write the rules and take these statistics into consideration. He also has been taking the time to label topics of relocated events, so as to help us and other users understand the rule violation. (Constructive criticism is a good thing-- especiallyu when you consider how many people lurk in /dev/null and fucktard hall.)

Th addition of the "search" form to the top of the forum page makes forum search conveinient. It seems to have helped. Its addition was suggested by one user, and the location changed with feedback from several other users.

The addition of the "rules are enforced" added above the search may be also helped as an extra reminder about rule enforcement. (If we dedicate a prime area with such a message, it also converys how important it is.)

The "bolding" of "advanced search" draws attention to it.

Many ideas included through suggestion from many sources.

Addition of RSS feed, ical (rfc2445) export of events, and use of "Forum Leaders/Oragnizers" over subforums are all plusses to draw and keep more of the skilled players, organizers and leaders at Defcon. (All of these ideas were proposed by many people.)

Oh, I bet you'll be pleasantly surprised. As long as people don't get sent to /dev/null or worse for frivilous reasons, and as long as the moderators maintain their cool, then it'll be a relatively worthwhile place to be.

This is something that I have been "charting." I look at the number of real users being added to the forums after pruning of inactive, or unconfirmed addresses. Klepto (above) has posted some concerns with enforced limits imposed on new users. I understand and agree with the risks, but disagree on the the value. However, with enough data collection, we can (hopefully) determine the result of this policy, at the cost of 1 year of potential losses in new members.
Converge brings up a good point on this issue too:
"Moderators are people too." (They have good days and bad days, and levels of intollerance.)
When a mod "/dev/nulls" a thread, they may be mildly annoyed. When they /dev/null several threads in a short time, they may become frustrated and this frustration maps into a lower threshold for what is viewed as "passable." An increase in /dev/null content, increases the level of complaining from users, many of which flame mods, which does not help things, as mods flame back, ban users, and may flame other users for what may seem to casual observers to be "small" things. Regular users observe mods flamig other users and people will learn by example. Flamed users often respond by flaming back.
Burn forums, burn.

I don't like the idea of asking mods to "keep their cool." That is just lame. Is it their fault that users are being asshats? No. So why should they pay the price for users acting like asshats?
So, why not place the burden of decreasing these problems and rule violations thruogh policies to limit new users? This makes sense. A majority of people are lurkers anyway, and many of the rule violators are "one time posters" anyway.

This forced lurking will hopefully help with user education, and for cases where users are not self-educated through lurking and knowing the rules, banning would be justified, because they were forewarned many times.

I think that this is an excellent idea. There are probably contests where the ability to ask questions is significant (although I still maintain that "lurkers" can send private messages to the organizer, or in fact to any poster).

Actually according to the permission, "Lurkers," are denied access to PM other users. This was selected to proactively deal with spammers who might PM members. Like other ideas, this can be changed in the future too.

It's been interesting; rather like dc-stuff in its earlier days (which is where Coffee Wars got its start in any case).

I joined dc-stuff for a while, and found much of the content to be like the forums were, with lots of flaming. What is the difference? The same difference from when the forums were like the 9th plane of Dante's Inferno: Politics and Religion.
It seems these topics tend to transmute some of the brightest people into blathering idiots unable to differentiate fallacy from logic.
At one time, 2600 magazine had many loyal followers and readers, but when they shifted from primarily tech to Political discussion, they lost readership. The decision on the Defcon forums to drop P&R and classify these as "Off Topic" is probably the single most powerful decision in mitigation of asshatery on the forums.

(Lately, we have had some "grey area" discussions that border on Politics, but they are quickly closed and relocated if they get too close to flaming/trolling, or are "too" political. Politics is mostly a big no-no, while Religion is still a big no-no here.)

**shrdlu** · May 14, 2006, 22:41