Something I may try to do in the future is set up a message board, so I'll include some of my thoughts here on how to make a good board, a better board, over time so I have a place where I've tabulated my thoughts. I will be editing this post many times as more ideas come across, including shameless exporpriation of anything from the comments.
- The best moderating I've seen is in the habs board at canadiens'nhl.com... they prevent thread proliferation which is a strength, you get good topics that way.
- No more than three quote boxes per post.
- Automatic merging of posts like in ksite.
- The 60 second flooding rule.
- Very high threshhold before getting banned
- A vote for "good post" and "bad post".
- Invitation-only membership at least for a time, just like on whedonesque I think.
- A 30 minute allowance to edit posts, or until the next post, whichever comes first.
And now for the new ideas:
- A citation rate, total number of quote boxes divided by total number of posts.
- A minimum average word count. As in, a poster has to average 200 words per post with a median above 100 words per post, with the bottom 10% of posts removed from the calculation. This will reduce the number of people who post silly comments, one-line responses, etc. Have the average word count show up on the user box.
- A post can be posted in multiple forum topics... this might be a good idea when people make comparisons and contrasts... or perhaps have a note placed in the other forum topic as a request.
- A featured posts thing on the front page, perhaps dont by member voting, or member responses.
- For the beginning, one topic per franchise. Might eventually become one sub-forum.
- A shortened version of the opening post is at the top of every page.
Ultimately, it comes down to members. I could probably poach people off ksite, babble, FD, syfy forums, mfo... maybe a few of the habs boards, and if I'm lucky some real-life friends. It wouldn't be as embarassing to invite them if I set up the board. Content is the most important thing, management follows.
This looks good.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a big fan of minimum text size though.
Trust me when I say that it could cause trouble.
Howa bout a 50 letter/character minimum, it would stop bots, most of them, or you could set up something that makes it so until you have a certain amount of posts, say 5, you can't post fewer than a certain amount of words/letters.
I don't know the first thing about running a forum, to be honest, but I could see this happening.
I believe it could work out. Especially with all the help you can get. As for me, I don't know that many people.
A vote for Good post/bad post, it can be annoying. Plus, like a Report feature, it could be abused by trolls.