The "New" Forum - Character/Actor Discussion

[Dean]

Due to a lot of friction and other problems in this section, we have decided to give the Character/Actor forum a little "makeover", introducing some new changes.

It's important to emphasize that this change has not been brought on by one or a few single cases of people breaking the rules. BttB is a message board with more than 12 000 members, and lately this section has become a lot more active. The system we have had has worked great, but with the increased popularity of this section it's not time for a change, to make it easier to maintain, and to make this section more member-friendly for everyone. The decision to make these changes have been made after a lot of discussion in the Staff Room, especially after we have heard a lot of members (including staff) say they no longer feel welcome in this section of the board.

The main difference from before is that the anti- and appreciation threads are now history (for nostalgic reasons the old threads are still there, but you can no longer post in them) and from now on there's one thread per character/pairing. With the anti- and appreciation threads, a lot of people seemed to think the threads were meant for competition, which was not the intention. Everyone should be allowed to post in the threads they want to post. We're hoping that this will invite more members that want to discuss the characters, and that is also will help us get rid of a lot of spamming.

The mention of spamming brings us to the next change. The entire Character/Actor dicussion forum is now set to Mod Preview, meaning that a staff member has to approve all posts. For now this is a temporary trial system, and we'll keep it for as long as it makes sense, in order to filter out a lot of spam and get the forum started as fairly and balanced as possibly.

For those still unsure about what spam is, this is a short definition: Spam is repetetive, meaningless, short posts that bring nothing to the discussion. Spam isn't necessarily one post, but when many posts by the same member seem to all be the same.

As you've probably noticed we have already created some new discussion threads. These are just to get the forum started again, and you are of course welcome to make topics for the characters/pairings you wish to discuss that we haven't already made topics for. Like all other posts, these topics will have to be approved my a member of staff, but with the whole staff now working and focusing on this section, it shouldn't take too long.

In order to keep the forum tidy, we're going to try to make the thread names as simple as possible. For a single character, just put the character's name in the title, and the actor's name in the sub title. For pairings, simply put "name1/name2" in the title and "Discussion" in the sub title. If you're unsure, just take a look at the threads we've already posted for you, and don't worry; if you make a mistake we'll fix it before the thread is posted

The regular board and section rules (including the SPAG-rule...) do still apply, and hopefully you are familiar with them by now.

We hope you understand why we are making these changes, and we hope that you will help us make the new system work

If you have any questions or general comments, please contact a member of staff my PM, or use this thread.

Happy posting!

The BttB staff

[Skykat]

We have been monitoring the situation and reviewing all of your comments and feedback and we have decided that whist home and away is off the air and the boards are quieter generally, we will trial taking this forum off moderator preview. This means you will no longer have to wait for your posts to appear.

However, this is not a decision we have taken lightly and this section of the board will be very heavily moderated. Any spam or innappropriate posts will be deleted. If we have to delete more than three of a member's posts that member will be put on moderator preview an this will apply to the whole board and not just the discussion section. If the situation reverts back to being out of hand then we will have to have a rethink and put the section back on mod preview, something I really don't want to do.

The hope is that this will stop the feeling that we're punishing everyone for the mistakes of a few, which was never our intention and we're hopeful that the past few weeks of having posts unapproved will mean that members now know what is or isn't acceptable. If you're not sure you can always PM a staff member to ask them to check your post for you.

I'm confident that the majority of our members are mature enough and by the large have enough respect for us to abide by our rules but I would please encourage any of our members who see posts that they feel are breaking our rules, whether that be spag, spam etc, to use the report post button and let us know.

I just want to thank our members for being so good over recent changes, whilst every change we make is with the best of intentions for the whole board, we're never going to please everybody and I want to thank everybody for giving the changes a go and feeding back to us. We do listen and take on what you guys have to say and hopefully you can appreciate where we're coming from.

The combined threads will be staying for the time being, the general consensus of the staff is that they are better suited to encouraging discussion rather than arguments but like as before, its not set in stone. I hope this will encourage more of our members back into that forum and I look forward to reading all your posts.

Please use this thread to feed back on the trial lifting of the moderatr preview and let us know what you think.