Introduction:
There has been a generally acknowledged decline in forum quality for what it seems has been a fair while. Many bright people, Aubery among many others, have stopped posting here; that all happened well before my time, and to be completely honest, it can be largely attributed to non-professionals (like myself) joining the forum and generally decreasing the post quality from near journal quality to where it is today. Since my joining about a year ago I have witnessed further decline in post quality. Largely attributable to new users filling forums with low quality posts, and weaker standards in proper citation to which members are being held.
Moderation:
As to post quality. The community should be able to expect propper citations from members and a certain minimal level of quality in analysis of sources. In order to achieve this Moderators (with the help of alerts from the community) could remove low qualtiy posts and threads. People hate being censored, but I think that if certain quality standards are well outlined, then the community will be behind it.
Mid-Quality/ Questions Subforums:
Within popular forums like the supplement and lifestyle forums and their various subforums, there is a real problem in poor thread quality. Reading the supplement forum now, it seems that (unfortunately) the majority of threads are of a lower 'clutter' quality. (Approximately 6 of the 10 most recent threads) This is unfortunate where as I would like to have the supplement forum as a resource for reviews of various clinical trials for any given supplement as well as a source for new supplement news and discussion of such news. The clutter of question threads or otherwise low-quality threads wastes the valuable time of people who don't have much personal time to spend on the forum and makes it very easy to understand why individuals such as Aubery are no longer present.
Creating a Question/Mid-Quality subforum within each of the popular forums and subforums would provide a place for members to post questions and otherwise mid-low quality content and would additionally provide moderators a place to move mid/low quality content so as to improve the quality of the parent forum.
Conclusion:
The increasing growth and popularity of ImmInst is undoubtedly a great and wonderful thing for the forum as well as the Immortalist movement. However, such growth must be managed so as to maintain and improve quality. Doing so will require moderation increases proportional to the forum growth in size.
Cheers mates.
Edited by lucid, 06 March 2008 - 10:24 AM.
