I really don't understand your obsession with the dead accounts. What will removing them accomplish? Many members eventually return to us and it wouldn't be fair to them to remove their accounts. I was gone for quite some time, had my account disappeared during that time I would have been rather upset.
Nothing will be accomplished by removing them, and I don't think I've ever stated how it will.
Removing old accounts doesn't solve anything, it won't affect the so-called noob problem in the least (I don't consider that to be a problem at all, as we were all noobs once). It would be as useless as cleaning out my filing cabinet. All it would do is open more names for those noobs you seem to despise so very much.
as above, I don't care if removing accounts are necessary or not. I know it won't help, and basically it's useless. That's why I've never said that "deleting old accounts" was a solution.
We're not "proud of having dead members", what we're proud of is the fact that so many people would choose to register with us to begin with. Just as site is proud of how many hits it gets, a petition and how many signatures, a company and how many products its sold, or how a file creator is of all of those that have downloaded it.
And newsflash, by the way, you're still a newbie yourself, psycoblaster. You've been here less than a year. The post count doesn't matter, I could get that many posts in three weeks if I chose to reply to every available topic. I've been here for nearly 6 years and I can safely say those "newbs" you're so predisposed to hate?
You are one of them.
I've never cared about post counts, nor the date when I joined. But one fact I know for sure, when I first joined the forums, it sure didn't have this type of feeling. And what if I really am a noob? I'm not helping this community in any way. Most of my posts are flames to annoying requests. And once I leave, I'll be part of the dead members that helps this site become "stable".
To those that think the staff are beyond mistakes, or that we don't get punished, that's not true. You think there's sometimes a lack of professionalism? That may very well be true, because we're not professionals. We don't get paid, there's no moderator training school, etc. We're volunteers who were asked to devote our time and energy despite having lives of our own on the side.
I know that being a moderator is a hard job, and one person can't be on multiple threads looking at every single new post that is made. But what I have seen in this forum is that once a user is hated, they will be always hated, and if a user is loved, there is no way they will be hated even if they get banned. It's true how not every single member in the forum is treated equally. But look, you guys volunteered to be the heads of the forums, and that's what we expect from you. Hatred isn't something that arises from nothing. When users hate a mod, there is always a special reason or an event that should have taken place, and changes in rules and punishment needs to be made to make sure you guys are not hated by other users.
It's true how sometimes you guys get treated unfairly by members, sometimes because you did something that is right, but mostly because you guys did something that "seems" to be right.
On the punishment side, going back to Gai's issues a few days ago, all of his outbursts were removed as flaming, just as anyone else' would be. And he was lectured for it, just as any member would be. Heck, how do you know he wasn't warned to boot? You can't see warnings even if there was something to see. The members get 10 chances, in some cases even more, so we should be entitled to a few ourselves. Gai's been here for
years he's entitled to a mistake once or twice every half decade.
To reply to some of the other comments made in this topic...
More for psycoblaster: "People spamming to purposely get themselves banned. People that join just to post another request. People that asks a question that has been answered about a hundred times." We can't do anything about those people. They will always come, and
we will always deal with them. That is the nature of a forum and it really doesn't have anything to do with anything. That's always been a fact. The only way that will stop is if this forum no longer exists. And even then it will just take place at another forum.
and this is where most of the flaming and arguments occur. That's why some type of change is required. Once again, sinkhead was really doing a great job for a short period of time about dealing this, but I don't know where he went
"Ace has mentioned how GBAtemp lives because of the noobs and dead members, not mostly by us active members." You took that comment completely out of context. As I reiterated later on, and in this post as well, it's not dead members that we're proud of. It's that people like us enough to come to us to begin with. However new members ARE the lifeblood of this forum. People will get old, get jobs and leave us. This is a sad fact of the internet. Old members leave, much to my dismay, but there are always new ones coming in to become the next great members of their time.
This is the problem itself, and I know it's something that you cannot work around.
As time passes on, many great members join, staffs leave, and other respected members leave, too.
Urza suggested many solutions, which I think you guys tended to ignore.
Even though you guys might think Urza on the negative side, just re think about what he has mentioned. I believe he was trying to come up with a solution to keep the forums running so many more users can appreciate GBAtemp.
Stopping registration for an x amount of time - if you guys said "NO" to this, what kind of other solutions are you looking for, that you want from us?
"lol you guys are the one coming up with the new ideas. And you guys determine what's necessary and what's not. But that's the problem." First of all, that's our job and second, you've completely ignored my comments about us building the features and changes we make around the members. We take your suggestions all very seriously; we really do. Sometimes we spend ages trying to get an idea put into action. I go to sleep thinking of ways to improve GBAtemp, and I wake up doing the same. So yes, we do listen to you. Almost every new feature this forum has is because of member requests.
To Mewgia: The quality of the testing area and the general off-topic forum went downhill with the help of many of the vets that made it popular to begin with. I don't know if they stopped caring or what, but slowly one by one they stopped posting interesting things. They started doing nothing but ranting about noobs and about how much they hate this forum, posting heaps of pornography, and trolling and flaming new members for doing nothing but being new. They started pushing the rules just to see if they could; ScuberSteve is the perfect example of that. So if you're looking to place the blame for that, it's certainly not on us.
We say "if you don't like it leave" because what else can we do? All you're doing by constantly saying "This place sucks, it's no longer fun" is making it that way. You're own comments perpetuate that idea. So it's not us telling you to get the heck out (generally), it's us saying "we're sorry this place no longer interests you, but if you hate it so much, why stick around only to complain that you hate it?" That's just masochism. We welcome
helpful suggestions, but the constant "This place sucks" and nothing but comments
don't contribute a thing.
If I had a website running and somebody said "this place sucks," I'll try to improve it trying to put some of his standards on it. That's just what I think.
Also, topics aren't closed from being radically minded. They're closed for getting out of hand. Every single one of them turns into a flame war. When we try and intervene we get flamed, when people agree that it should be closed we get flamed, when we leave it open you flame each other and then someone comes running to us about the situation. It's lose/lose/lose. You know what's tearing this forum apart? The constant flaming and then flaming us for ending it.
p1ngpong: Gai's a wonderful moderator, and has been for ages. One bad day doesn't suddenly make you a bad staffer. Do YOU really want to go to a GBAtemp where one mistake gets you canned and cannot be forgiven? Because if so you're about 7 or 8 warns over that line.
That post took forever.
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