Thank you, thank you, everyone!!!

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I came, I play, I lost, I return for revenge.

Whoa,sounds vengeful.

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Better than a face lift, to stay young we need to be permanantly in a state of intellectual curiousity. - Salvadore Paniker
BOARDGAMING GALS
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=652128939

c mun:

Whoa,sounds vengeful.

How so?

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I came, I play, I lost, I return for revenge.

rhyen:

c mun:

Whoa,sounds vengeful.

How so?

apology for misleading.was refering to your signature.

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Better than a face lift, to stay young we need to be permanantly in a state of intellectual curiousity. - Salvadore Paniker
BOARDGAMING GALS
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=652128939

jack208:

The Council has already decided to reward the first two Jedi Knights with a BGC t-shirt (with the rank Jedi Knight printed on the front-left) and there'll be another reward for the 1st Jedi Master.

Due to the recent increase of spam posts, the Council has decided to revoke this reward. There shall be no reward for becoming the 1st Jedi Master. However the "reward" shall instead be given to the poster who has made the most contributions to this forums for 2007. Contributions can be measured in terms of session reports, informative threads, useful contents etc.

Council is also deliberating on whether to change the qualifying mark for Jedi Master to discourage further spamming.

May the Force remain with you.

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CK Au (jack208)
Boardgame Meetup photos at Flickr
Angkor Wat blog

jack208:

Due to the recent increase of spam posts, the Council has decided to revoke this reward. There shall be no reward for becoming the 1st Jedi Master. However the "reward" shall instead be given to the poster who has made the most contributions to this forums for 2007. Contributions can be measured in terms of session reports, informative threads, useful contents etc.

Council is also deliberating on whether to change the qualifying mark for Jedi Master to discourage further spamming.

May the Force remain with you.

oh man, you just dashed the hopes of jedi master wannabes, master yoda.

rewarding the poster making the most "contribution" can be quite subjective, unless you have a word calculator that calculates how many words a poster made in a year.

now, raising the mark for jedi master? that's really mean! no one has reached that mark yet and it getting further from our grasp! evil evil evil we demand jedi mastahs!

Well done, Jack208!!!

There had been spammers on BGC at all levels-from Padawan until Jedi Knight, some obvious, and some not so obvious.

During our discussion abt this a few posts back, there were views on both sides of the quality vs quantity debate. I am all for quality posts. The point of a discussion board will be missed if there are no quality posts. This resulted in lots of irrelevant one - liners which increased the spammer's post count and would eventually lead to the next rank. The detrimental effect to the content of each OP was obvious: thread hijacking, non-helpful mumbling, etc.

For some time since our discussion until this past week or so, nothing was said to discourage spammers, so the system was abused. Forgive me for being direct, but admin did not do anything to annoying one-liners. The result was that some joined in. What made spamming worse was the free t-shirt aspect (which I totally forgot about).

Now, hopefully, with the criteria for the free t-shirt changed, made more subjective, members will think before posting. Traffic might diminish, but what the heck, at least the contents are relevant to the OPs.

Can admin also clamp down on thread hijacking? Thanks.

Today is a good day.

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Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something. ~ Plato

Blog: http://ofgamesandotherfings.blogspot.com/

hear hear CE.

My intention is still the same; not to keep this forum so info-heavy that it stops being a fun place to gather albeit virtually. There has to be a balance. Which is why I'll be designating some forums as content-only forum... in those, there'll strictly be no thread hijacking or spamming/trolling. I'll keep others as free-for-all eg. OTK, Mage, Non-gaming forums etc for members to do their bantering but to an acceptable level...

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CK Au (jack208)
Boardgame Meetup photos at Flickr
Angkor Wat blog

Frankly just do away with the ranking system and you'll see more quality post overall. Threads WILL tend to stray away from the main topic from time to time. That is also true when we chit chat in kopitams, so why penalise people that way? Most forums have moderators that helps to lead people back to the topic at hand if the thread strays way too far. They can even lock it if the thread has nothing useful to say anymore.

I was really BAD when I wanted to reach Jedi Knight, I spammed everywhere just to hit the post level I wanted. After reaching that, I stopped all together. I post ONLY when I wanted to say something, whether its a ONE-liner or a more coherent and thoughtful post. So, I believe the ranking system is making us lean towards the DARK FORCE rather than LIGHT FORCES RANKINGS that will be bestowed to us when we post more.

So I propose we do away with the ranking system titles, if you do want a ranking system, put in some rather bland ranking like "senior member" and when they reach a certain number of post in a forum category, you can promote them to moderate that portion of the forum. That way, you'll see a more mature forum in the future.

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LoStBoYz:

I was really BAD when I wanted to reach Jedi Knight, I spammed everywhere just to hit the post level I wanted. After reaching that, I stopped all together. I post ONLY when I wanted to say something, whether its a ONE-liner or a more coherent and thoughtful post. So, I believe the ranking system is making us lean towards the DARK FORCE rather than LIGHT FORCES RANKINGS that will be bestowed to us when we post more.

Sounds very much like a Bioshock thing you're going on there. Whoops, thread hijack. :P

Maybe it takes a non Star Wars junkie to not heed the rankings? But at least the spam quote-postings seem to have died down a good bit already.

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"I suppose, at the end of the day, we're all someone's dog." - Sir Samuel Vimes (Jingo).

It's not the ranking system that corrupts us but our "love" for the ranking system that's making us turn to the Dark Side. Removing the "apple" does not turn Adam into a man without desire. You merely suppressed that desire. Just as Luke has to do, enter the dark cave we must....

Some spam becoz of the ranking but in truth most do not post quality posts becoz either they are shy or they dun have much to say. Removing the ranking (or the reward which is probably a bigger evil) does stop the spam but my question, will it increase the quality posts?

The number of spammers actually is relatively small but it's their number of spam posts that's high thus causing a mis-perception that there are spammers everywhere. On the other hand, there is also a good number of posters here who do not spam or troll but post good quality posts. The ranking system is still known and available to them.. why then did they not spam?

Enlightenment thus comes from understanding these people.... and not from removing a temptation.

Let me just mentioned some names here to motivate them. The posters imho who usually contribute the quality posts are (in no particular order) ayheng, wolfx, wonglc, CE (when he's not spamming those one-liners), macedwin (for his insight into old/oop games), aycee, lostboyz (can write good things one when he's not preoccupied with XBox), shinobi (with his non-boardgame updates and sessreps), friedrice (when he's in writing mode), c_mun (with her ASH non-male perspective), dave (for offering to smell the trolls), arthoz (for starting the Books thread), shrapnel (for some interesting new threads).... and all the others that I may have forgotten to mention.

As an example - wonglc is just a newbie with only 23 posts at the time of writing but he has contributed far more meaningful posts in that 23 that many with more than 300 posts!

If you really want to know, I say there are only 2 full-time spammers and a couple more part-time spammers who may have already retired, hehe. The rest of the posters are good..... so let's not knee-jerk anything here.

As a karate sifu once said, the biggest enemy is within us.

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CK Au (jack208)
Boardgame Meetup photos at Flickr
Angkor Wat blog

I think the rankings help to encourage people to post. Spamming is an unfortunate side effect of those who wanted the 'name' but forgot that the 'name' is supposed to mean something. Just like the debacle recently with the Malaysian BAR Council's membership sticker, it's available 'under' the table such that it doesn't mean anything anymore. Perhaps this is what lostboyz meant by doing away entirely with the rankings.

But I take the viewpoint that the rankings should be retained to encourage postings. I say this because of my personal experience of posting to 'get' the 'carrot' of rankings. It is a thrill and an honor to be recognised for my contributions. (of course, it is also a thrill and honor to have my musings acknowledged and discussed upon)

So doing away with the ranking is not something I prefer. Raising the 'bar' for the rankings is also something that i don't prefer. It is already so difficult to attain the rank of jedi master, why make it harder? And we do not have yet any jedi masters so there's no reason to raise the bar just to control the population. If the bar was raised to control spamming, then I feel that it's not necessary as a word and a warning from the admin was quite enough to put everyone into perspective.

So, I sort of agree with the warnings and that a touch of moderation was needed to put everything back on topic, there's no need to take it further yet.