You know how each subforum in the Review Room is full of threads that are locked because someone posted a story without doing the two reviews? I thought of an idea on how to solve it, and I have no idea whether this would technically work, but here's what I was thinking... There could be a filter that can detect 1) how long a person's been registered 2) post count 3) how many posts they have in the forum that they're trying to post in If the person doesn't meet the requirements, they could be met with brief explanation of why they can't post work, what the requirements are, and a sticky to the thread with the rules. Again, I don't know enough about forum setup to know if this is logistically possible, and I imagine it might take some skill to set up, but it'd make the mods' jobs easier than having to sort through each review subforum manually. Just throwing it out there.
The answer to the problem is not coding it into the forum. Really, the only sort of thing like this that I support is a) needing a mod to accept new applicants to the forum, and, the so far unproposed, b) requiring a post in New Member Introductions before allowing posts in other forums. Your solution is unnecessary and doesn't solve the problem of idiots who don't understand how to use the forum.
There is some of that coded into the forums. But no automation can distinguish a constructive critique and one which only meets meaningless criteria like word count or keywords.
And I realize that - I'm not saying the mods wouldn't have to do any screening at all. But it might help with people who just register and post in the review room asap. People who have been here long enough, with the minimum post count, and who've posted reviews before are far less likely to be unqualified, even though there is the chance their review posts might not have been enough.
As I said - we do have automation to prevent new members from posting immediately. It even pops up an informative message that apparently fewer than half of them bother to read, judging by the "Why cant eye post?" messages I delete from my inbox and from the forum. I have little sympathy for those who cannot or will not read what is displayed right before their noses.
Mallory - we do basically have a system like that in place. We had it custom coded for this site ages ago. The problem is the software doesn't detect the quality of the review, as Cogito mentioned, which is why some threads end up locked. This is solvable on a software level, we'd just need to higher a coder to create it (unfortunately the fundraiser isn't quite ambitious enough for that sort of thing). If the code detected word count, excluding quotes, that might increase the quality of the reviews. Additionally, if there was a different template for reviewing instead of regular posting, perhaps one that gave specific criteria to respond to, the software add-on could check to ensure such requirements were met. These requirements could be certain fields (plot, characters, grammar, etc.) and the most important ones could have word count requirements. These sort of upgrades were always planned but never implemented fully because of lack of capital. Anyone know a good vBulletin/php programmer?
I disagree that additional software criteria can do a better job of distinguishing good critique from meaningless babble. Likewise, templates for critiques are simply a guide on how to BS your way through it. Please, Daniel, put any progvramming resoources to better use, like inproved spam filters that the moderators can parameterize as the spammers adapt.
Honestly I don't see much of a difference - mod job wise - in whether you're checking for spammers or locking posts for not meeting requirements. Having been a mod on multiple sites I would think it would be more helpful for there to be help distinguishing whether or not requirements have been met (as this takes more time and energy to search out and verify). Spammers are pretty easy to spot and simple to get rid of. Maybe that's just me though. Further, guidelines and templates are actually helpful to some people and looking down on them and suggesting their input is BS simply because a template reminded them what they should be commenting on is, quite frankly, offensive to me. I don't see how something suggesting they comment on characters suddenly equals input/BS.
I agree with what you have said Trish. From experience I have to agree with you and say from a Mod's perspective, deleting spam would be much simpler to do even if there are high volumes compared to analysing people's responses.
