1 new of 133 responses total.
Re #81: I don't know of an alternative that will prevent the "cesspool effect", but really, I don't see how disallowing conference posting for newusers will prevent it either. Are we going to require people to submit certificates of mental health before being allowed to post? Short of something like that, I don't see how we can predict someone's behavior in the conferences at the stage where they'd be asking for posting access. Re #82: Yes, ignoring would help, if everybody did it. But based on 20+ years of computer conferencing experience I've observed that there are always enough people around who refuse to take that route that it never helps in practice. I'm wondering, though, if the "ignore" concept could be made to work with a bit of software assistance. "Social" sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, etc. all have a concept of a "network of friends" - basically, your "friends" are people whose judgement you trust, or with whom you share interests or some sort of relationship (although you might not even know them personally). The software then shows you what your "friends" are up to - their latest posts, webpages that they find interesting, etc. Now, suppose that on Grex I could specify a "trust network", i.e. a set of users whose judgement I trusted, such that if one of those users marks an item as "junk" or a particular user as a "junk poster", then the software will automatically forget that item or ignore that user on my behalf, perhaps logging that action somewhere so that I could override it if I wished to. That is, instead of some conference administrator or set of users making those decisions on *everybody's* behalf, I get to specify who gets to make those decisions on *my* behalf. In other words, make "junk filtering" a social activity rather than the responsibility of each user. Would that approach provide sufficient synergy to make the conferencing experience more pleasant for folks? I don't know, but I find it more palatable philosophically than erecting barriers to participation. Adding software-supported "social networking" to Grex could have other benefits as well, e.g. helping people find discussions of interest to them. I use the "my network" facilities on YouTube and Del.icio.us to point me to interesting videos and websites, respectively. It's a dynamic facility that I can tune to my own preferences; by contrast, the current conferencing structure doesn't do much beyond providing a small number of static topic-oriented containers. Implementing these ideas would require writing some non-trivial software, of course, so it's a pretty long-term thing. Mary's approach in #84 would be much easier to implement in the short term. And as it's automated, fast, and something that's pretty common practice on other websites, I'd support trying it as a first step.
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