Originally Posted by LLuke
... I would welcome a specialist pilot forum, but I am not sure it would solve the nuissance postings, unless we would restrict posting rights of 90% of the people. But how about a style like
http://slashdot.org where points and catagories are given to posts? It would be great that I as a reader can select the minimum scores per category to filter out the garbage.
I'm not qualified to comment about the necessity of a specialist pilot forum, but I
am qualified to comment on a moderation style like the one used by Slashdot. Yes, it works, and I also browse Slashdot with a high enough minimum score to filter out the most obvious garbage. But you get what you're asking for, and with a moderation style like Slashdot what you get is not necessarily a measure of
quality but a measure of
popularity instead - thus be careful what you're asking for.
Overall I believe there's only one thing that can guarantee a high quality message board - and that is high quality moderation.
1) If you guys want a specialist forum - go ahead, let everybody post and read the forum but announce from the get-go that this will be a sharply moderated forum and that every post that is removed from that forum will get the poster an immediate 6 month ban on his IP number for the whole of PPRuNe.
That will make many people think twice about posting in that forum I hope.
2) And if you guys want a forum that's closed to the rest of the world (for posting and reading) then there's no better way than an invite-only forum.
Sadly both of these methods increase the workload of our dear hosts and moderators ... perhaps time to announce a few more moderators out of the pool of high quality posters here on this board?