[squiggs96]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

100% disagree. A forum's best contributors can be those who randomly join and jump into a conversation, and settle in as a regular contributor over time. If you're actively discouraging them from joining in, then you're segregating yourselves from the potential base of interested people. 99% of the time, the more restrictions you place, the more likely you'll kill your community.

You will occasionally get those who jump right in and should probably have held back a bit, but we all know that witch hunts on the internet usually end up framing the wrong person. The ones that happen on CP for returning users usually get out of hand too quickly and don't help anyone, as we're derailing the thread as much as the original posts that got things started do.

The moderators have been doing fine here. There's an extremely fine line between being too easy going and being heavy handed when it comes to forum moderation, and you can't expect them to ride that line perfectly all the time. If some people feel there aren't enough moderators here, then I think they're actually doing their job really well, because we don't notice them often, and that should be how it is. There's rarely stuff that shouldn't be on here sticking around for long, and that's because the moderators are on top of things. If we saw these messy arguments and the resulting infractions in plain sight every time, it would only make things worse as everyone would want to argue over those too.

If there's a way to force the User Guidelines sticky in every new user's face and force them to read it, it would probably go a long way to getting new users to chill out a bit and slowly work their way into things...but this is the internet, and people will be stupid sometimes. If we don't laser focus on every new user and analyse their first posts like it's a court case, I don't think things would get out of hand so often.

I love how Trumbull thanked this post.