Cliff this would be hard and probably would involve the makers of Ultimate Bulliten Board script, well unless your CGI skills also extend to extensive rewriting of the script anyway.

The idea is why not incorporate an ignore feature like Mirc has. If people don't want to see posts by certain people they could put them on their ignore list and the threads those people post will not appear to them.

If possible even extend it a bit further to include anything they post, including replies in other threads to be blocked on the ignorees (a new word I think) screen. The latter would be hard though I think from a scripting point of view.

Just an idea anyway.

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My Fiero
Need a Subwoofer Console or Speaker Door Pods?

And if I had refreshed my screen I woulda read your closed threads topic before posting this ignore idea. Oh well.

[This message has been edited by AusFiero (edited 07-03-2001).]

Yes, that would be a good idea and it's something I could code myself. Another thing I was thinking about was to implement something to make it easy for people to ask my attention for an offending thread. Just one click on a button and I would be notified. Or something like a voting system. If a thread offends you, you can vote to have it closed. If a certain amount of votes has been reached the system could automatically notify me and I could close it. Plenty of ideas. Hopfully I can find the time to implement some of them.

i was just about to post suggesting a voting system.

great minds think alike

good idea

Yeah the voting idea has some merit too. But I think it would need a for and against ratio to make it fair. Otherwise we might end up with people voting Cliff off the air at some stage...LOL J/K

The people that are up in arms need to stop responding to the posts (just like I am??!). There will always be people flaming, people mis-understanding, people calling a spade a spade and on and on. There's no way it can be stopped but we can certainly stop encouraging the behavour by IGNORING it.
What goes on outside the forum can't be controlled. What goes on inside can.

I will be lucky to meet 1 out of the 1000+ people that have floated through here. What people say in the end is irrelevant to my life and those that feel flamed should come to grips with the same.

And now back to the Rubbermaid cup holder thread already in progress.......

Sorry Aus, I thought this post was in "General" before I posted my thread "Discussion: How to bring back out beloved haunt"
I posted it to organize our constructive thoughts, and figured it was best placed in OT for now...
Nevertheless, I invite all to share thoughts ideas there...

quote Originally posted by mrgone: i was just about to post suggesting a voting system. great minds think alike good idea

I know that the MR2 board has a simple hyperlink that says "Report thread to moderator" in small text... not in the way at all and would probably be really easy to do. Then, intead of a bunch of people responding to an offensive thread, they could just click the link and have it removed.

there is a hack to allow you to report this thread to a moderator.. It will email you the offending thread.

Yeah, but Cliffs idea keeps him from getting flooded with emails by everyone that might take offense to the slightest little thing.
If he makes it go to a vote, then he'd know there would be a group of people that think a certain thread is a problem and.

Some sort of voting or notification system sounds like a really good idea. That way Cliff will know of a problem thread before it becomes 50 posts long and half the forum ends up involved in it.

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John
AOLIM: Fformula88

1988 Fiero Formula
1985 Fiero SE 2M6

A voting system is a good idea.. but one other concern, what would prevent someone from making several different accounts to cast many votes? people have created new usernames on here several times in the last 2 years to cause problems, so it's nothing new. what about a 1 vote per unique IP per registered member? (did that make sense?)

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steve@fieroproject.com
http://www.fieroproject.com

User voting schemes are very very tough to make work. The paradigms that make them useful also make them easily abused, even those that require several users to vote simultaneously and only ban the affected user for a discrete time period. [been there, tried it.]

Cliff, if you feel that the need is there but it's too much for you to handle yourself, about the only things I can see that would work are:

1) reasonably active moderation by a few individuals you trust to a) exhibit good judgement in correctly and fairly enforcing your guidelines, and b) have sufficient technical clue to do so without trashing anything

and/or

2) enhance the registration process to no longer accept new registrations from the web-based email services (hotmail, yahoo, bigfoot, etc.).

I don't much like either scheme, but you'd probably find #1 both easier to implement and to maintain, especially since you'd probably need to use something akin to a private sendmail access list (e.g. spamsite.com REJECT entries) to update on the fly as needed.

Maybe some of you could now have some appreciation why Pete Zurich ran his mailing list with an iron fist. You don't have to agree with the extent of his actions [I sure don't, I thought he was more of an SOB than was necessary] but these guys need to have lives beyond maintaining these resources.

Just my $0.02 worth.

As a rule, I just ignore threads that deteriorate into flames.... They simply aren't worth bothering with. Some threads give them selves away as a waste of time just by their subject.

We have a couple fueds running now that when I see threads started by one of the members involved I simply don't even read the thread. It's just going to end up another squable. Whatever is going on with those is only hurting their own selves and maybe a couple businesses. that's their problem. It's sad really. When these people aren't at each others throats, they usually have valuable info to share.

The ones I watch for are people that may be doing something illegal. Like a certan brake thread some months back. Those I mail Cliff about ASAP. Fortunatly we've not had a huge problem with that.

The ones that "bother" me are threads along the lines of the Fiero Lisa thread. I'm not personally offended by it and mostly everyone seems to be having fun in that thread. Problem is they make the forum a policy violation at many companies. Again, that assumes the forums aren't a violation to begin with. (The people holding our contract ban all chat/forum/bbs/etc... Can't even use Mail2web to check email.) I now have to read a small book every day before I can log in to the work computer. No this, No that, Yes we're watching everything you do. They just canned 30+ people for "violations" of computer use policy many can hardly understand to begin with. At least it's not MBNA, that place is run by refugee soviets or something.... Slogans over the doors and all. Those people can hardly pi_s w/o someone checking up on them.

Sorry, I have to go off-topic here:
I ****ING *****HATE***** MBNA.
I am currently stuck with one of their credit cards, a folly of my freshman year. Every couple of days I get a ****ING phone call from these clowns trying to sell me insurance. I carry almost NO balance! LEAVE ME ALONE!!! Nothing I can say makes them go away! AAAAArrrrrrggg! [/rant]

I got another call today, and asked them not to contact me again unless it was account specific (fraud etc) Hope this works