Insane Difficulty: Forum Insane Difficulty - Insane Difficulty

I want to give a special thanks to Arch for hosting and building this website. I really enjoy it here and want to see it get better. By posting this I'm not issuing demands or an ultimatum. I just want to stimulate constructive discussion.

I've been thinking about this lately, and I know I'm not alone in this. Perhaps I'm overstepping myself a little, so feel free to bop me if I am. But let me ask this: what is going on here?

We host a number of fantastic mods and we have a great community of people, yet the forum we love has 3 major issues:

1) Chat server is very unstable
Those of us who use it know it best. The random "chat has reached the limit" issue is the worst.

2) Forum Moderation on a global scale is virtually non existent. Both Kaffe and FFTA do pop on now and then, but we need more active moderation. I'm not pointing fingers but the responsibility shouldn't fall squarely on them (or Arch). This is evidenced by those spam posts that linger for a long time. The active sub forums are well moderated but not the rest of the forum.

3) Posting on the forums can often be risky business. I've lost whole posts (always copy it) to random "page not found" errors as well as getting those when just navigating the forum.

So how can we fix this?

1) Is it possible to add 2-3 more active global forum moderators? That would help immensely I think.

2) Also what actually causes the chat server woes? Does it have to do with the server the website is hosted on? Is this the same thing that causes the page not found errors?

Something done on another forum I'm involved in, first-post approval could be a thing. That'd pretty much flat-stop spam, period.

The downside to that approach, is that a moderator has to review every new users first post, and approve them. We aren't the highest trafficked site, so this should be manageable, but it'd be something that the moderators would have to agree to, and commit to checking frequently enough that new users aren't left hanging for days or weeks.

Well, on that note, the registration issues that crop up from time to time often have left new users hanging.

Yeah, chat seems a bit unsteady. I can't access it at the mo due to it being full or something.

Was super fun not being in ID Chat yesterday, I probably missed some badass chat shenanigans

Sega, don't forget the backup chat. It's where we're all huddled together at the moment.

Stann and Advent will be new Admins as of tonight.

I have been starting to come around more, but I do get pretty busy during busier weeks (obviously). I have been thinking about bringing it up to Archael, and I felt like it was a good idea to appoint Stann and Advent, 2 very respected members in the ID community, to be global moderators. Archael will be updating their positions later tonight.

As for chat... It limits the amount of people that can even be in the chat room. We will for sure have to address this issue.

And lastly, the posting errors and such really bother me as well. I'll relay that to Archael to see if we can find a solution.

Thanks for the post ^

I think tonight is literally the first time I've ever seen the chat limit reached message.

I'll comment on the rest of the stuff later on tonight when I get home.

vote for me to be mod plz cmon....

Advent, on 02 November 2015 - 02:58 PM, said:

I've seen it before, I don't think it was caused by too many people in the chatroom, either.

BTB, on 02 November 2015 - 03:10 PM, said:

It's not. There were fewer people in there when 'too many people' then are in there on normal days. By quite an amount.

Was that a sentence?

Our new mods, ladies and gentlemen.

I never meant for this to happen, I was only trying to help!

Mishrak, on 02 November 2015 - 04:03 PM, said:

This place is resembling the United States government more and more every day.

Clouderz, on 02 November 2015 - 02:59 PM, said:

You have seven votes so far. Perhaps not in the right direction, but it's a start.

I'd say more, but the forum ate the rest of my post.

Advent, on 02 November 2015 - 02:58 PM, said:

I've seen it happen before. Arch said the chat limit is ridiculously high, but that chat fucks up sometimes. I guess it gets confused.

I am truly the best candidate. I think I've proven to have absolutely no life. Enough to be on here every day, at least.

MFW suddenly a mod

Kjata, on 02 November 2015 - 05:23 PM, said:

I think it has something to do with the chat not restarting often enough. It used to restart every night, but I've noticed a correlation between it not doing so and the limit being reached more often.