Spam Rules (and Quality Discussion Guide)

Okay, so…there’s no more dancing around the issue. We’ve got a spam problem here, plain and simple. I wish I could kind of put it a little more lightly, but there’s a bunch of people here who just don’t know how to have some good discussion. And granted, that’s kind of our fault. We didn’t have huge rules about spam because we weren’t quite sure how to draw those lines. Also, a lot of you guys came here from our YouTube comments, which isn’t really known as the greatest environment to foster discussion in.

Well, here at TTV, we’re all about discussion. Seriously, that’s just about 90% of the stuff we do. So we want our forums to be centered around discussion. Naturally, that means some more ground rules.

So, let’s reiterate some common sense stuff that you all should know:

Stay On Topic

It should be self-explanatory, so much so that I shouldn’t have to write it…but I guess the fact that this topic exists at all means that I do. All topics are created generally with a topic to talk about. What you talk about should be about this topic. There’s literally a button to create a new topic off of any post you want to. We’ve made it extremely easy to make a new topic that references the old one. Please use this.

Chatrooms are for Chatrooms

We at TTV are no strangers to the chatroom culture. Heck, most of the original guys met in a Bionicle-themed chatroom. We know the draw to them, we know the advantages to them. And our forums try to bridge the gap between forums and chatrooms, what with no pages and posts being updated live.

That being said, what we are aiming for is chatroom accessibility with forum-worthy discussion. We have been a part of many great forums, and we thoroughly enjoyed the discussion we’ve had with members therein. That isn’t evident here. I really hate to say it, but there’s not as great of a discussion going on here in many of our topics. That’s a fact. So we’re changing that.

Add to the Discussion

Obviously enough, it’s hard to draw the line between what goes into a chatroom and what goes into a forum. I mean, it’s all well and good to just say “add to the discussion”, but what adds to the discussion and what doesn’t? There’s no hard rules, but generally speaking, you should always take a step back and see 1. How informal what you’re saying is and 2. If this reply is only going to benefit the person you’re replying to.

Our software makes it quick and easy for you to streamline this! If no one else reading your post will benefit from it, chances are it belongs in a PM. If you’re saying “cool!” or “agreed!”, you can just click the like button. There’s no need to take up a post with it.

Making good discussion is basically how we will solve this problem. We can delete all the spam we want, but unless intelligent discussion takes the place of it, we can’t fix the problem at hand. In that line of work, we can only depend on you guys.

Please Flag Stuff For Us

We have a button that looks like a flag at the end of every post. You seriously help us out by using it. If enough users flag a post as spam, the post will get deleted. Obviously, we the staff can look through it and see if it actually is spam, but what this means is that you the community act as our curators. Doing this kind of thing is the fastest way to become a permanent part of the Mod Squad; it’s how @Chronicler got on and it’s how we’ll be judging people like that in the future.

We’ve completely simplified the flagging process: you just click the button, select what kind of error you think it is and hit send. It’s two clicks, but it means the world to us. It’s hard for us to be everywhere. If you see anything that could be considered spam, please flag it and either the forum software or the staff can and will deal with it. We would definitely appreciate it.

I Hate These Word Crimes

I realize that there is some overlap with the YouTube community…but some of you really do not know how to properly use English! There’s a bunch of spelling errors, capitalization errors, punctuation errors, grammar errors…I see way too many errors for people who I assume go or have gone to school. Please realize that not paying proper attention to spelling and grammar is one of the easiest ways for your post to get flagged and/or deleted. Nothing shows that you actually have a worthwhile opinion like proper spelling and grammar.

Memes Get Old

I’m excited for Bionicle 2015. You’re excited for Bionicle 2015. That’s really, really great.

Memes get old really quickly.

I get that we do a lot of jokes on the podcast that have become regulars. Mardi Gra, the Hype Train, Omega Tahu, etc. That’s fine. We get that you guys want to be in on the joke. That’s part of being a community. But it is just getting way, way too overdone.

Please pull back on this. If your post on the latest Bionicle news is how much the Hype Train can’t be stopped…please don’t post it. And if you see such a post in a topic…please flag it. It’s just getting so far out of hand.

Now, if you have something to add to the joke, like @MaximumWarp’s drawings of Omega Tahu or whatnot, that’s great! We love seeing that kind of thing! Just don’t quote the joke in your post. That’s the quickest way to kill it.

In Closing

A lot of you guys are here because you enjoy our videos, and we seriously appreciate that! We always will. We’re very lucky to be where we’re at in the Bionicle fandom. But we also made this forum with the idea to foster the same kind of discussion with our fans that we would want to see ourselves. It was a more personable place to be than the YouTube comments.

Unfortunately, this place has basically turned into the YouTube comments, with some very select jewels in between. For those that contribute well to the discussion, we seriously thank you. And to those who realize that they might have done some stuff listed here, don’t worry!

Especially if you’re a younger member and have only really been on YouTube, it is a step up to participate in actual, well thought out discussion. We’re outlining this not to point fingers at you guys, but so that you have a better idea of what should and shouldn’t be a part of this forum and how to improve. It takes time to grow, but if you earnestly want to do it, you’ll pick it up in no time.

This is also a learning process for us as admins too! We literally just started up this place just a month or two ago. So we’re in the same boat as far as growing as a forum goes. If you guys do your part, we’ll try our best to do ours.

Feel free to discuss in the comments below, and add or talk about anything you see here.

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Ugh, thanks Kahi for bringing this up :slight_smile: This should be a fantastic place to discuss the podcast, Lego, BIONICLE, and many other things, but in their OWN topics. As a community, we should think of this as a fresh start, and a place to (hopefully) have a lot of insightful discussion about the upcoming years of BIONICLE.

There are PM’s for a reason, keep the longwinded side conversations to yourself, and out of topics :smiley:

And yup, the jokes can be fine to an extent, but they are milked so much they aren’t funny anymore.

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Kahi you spelled Mardi Gras wrong! FLAGGED FOR BAD GRAMMAR

But in all seriousness, I like how you are stepping up and giving some guidelines. However, some sections still seem a little unclear to me.

What do you mean by this exactly? Are you saying that we shouldn’t reply to comments directed at us? For example,

Political_Nuju: Hey Chronicler, is there any way I could pay to be a mod?

Chronicler: No.

Is this the sort of scenario you are referring to? If so, is Chronicler wrong in this instance for providing a short answer? I’m not saying I’m opposed to this, I just want it to be clarified.

Now, are you talking about people (like myself) who use the terms like, ‘m8’, ‘wut’, or ‘guis’? Or are you referring to people who do not spell correctly? If you talking about the former, I would say that 90% of people who use it do so in a mocking manner. As you can see by this post, I can be quite literate when I want to be.

If you are referring to those who simply misuse grammar, then you are somewhat justified. However, I have not seen very many people on these forums who have bad grammar. I won’t say that I haven’t seen ANY, but I feel that you may be blowing this problem out of proportion. Do all the users here post like they are writing essays? No, and that’s due to the age of your fanbase. You have to cut them some slack. I’m not disagreeing with you that there should be a standard, but maybe that bar needs to be lowered a little bit from your standard.

You started this train, now you can’t stop it. :wink: Irony aside, I’m a little confused by what you define as a ‘meme’. Do you use this term exclusively to define TTV’s running jokes? Or do you refer to all jokes across the internet, such as “u w0t m8” or “ain’t nobody got time for dat” or any of the anime references @LelouchViBritannia makes? You say ‘meme’, but I believe you need to define what you mean more extensively.

Also, I’d like to ask you a question: Do you believe that ‘random’ topics are unnecessary, and should be marked for deletion? For clarification, I define ‘random topics’ as those that are extremely loosely tied to TTV, if at all, such as the Ask the Politician topic, the Illumakuta topic, and the Aloha Bebop Star Knights of Cydonia topic. Do these sort of topics annoy you? Would you prefer that these topics be removed?

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Political_Nuju, a loyal TTV fan

(P.S. I have been writing this post for almost an hour…I feel badly that Indigogeek has commented before me…)

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In my defense…yeah, I have no defense. I don’t know why I didn’t catch that =P

Oh, good question! Okay, in the example you gave, Chronicler’s response is beneficial because it is something that someone else could get some information on. If you’re asking something kind on behalf on someone else, or a question that someone else could ask, then that answer is totally okay. It saves that person the trouble of answering multiple PMs.

I wish I could grab an actual exchange, but I can’t find one at the moment. I will admit that most of the stuff we see as spam is stuff that’s clearly a joke…but it’s not a really funny joke, it’s just two people thinking they are funny. You kind of get what I mean? Not that jokes aren’t allowed, it’s just when it becomes a back and forth exchange that it gets kind of meh.

Definitely the latter. I do stuff mockingly all the time.

You have a good point there, but my counterpoint is that we have our YouTube comments for that demographic. We created these forums specifically for discussion we couldn’t have on our comments. The idea wasn’t necessarily to bring our comments here, but to provide a place for people that wanted to talk about stuff beyond the comments to come together.

Now, that’s not to say that I want to dissuade the younger members from joining - quite the opposite, actually! I want them to be encouraged to engage in the kind of discussion you’d expect from a forum. But if they’re not wanting to change the way they interact, well, they’re more than welcome to continue going on our channel. This just isn’t the place for it.

Ooooh, another great question. It’s not even TTV running jokes, because we made those and we like seeing them going back a bit. It’s really the jokes that get overused without a lot of creativity to them. The hype train one is the worst offender, mostly because in a lot of the announcement topics there’s a bunch of posts that are variations of “The hype train can’t be stopped!”

It’s the lack of creativity and the density of the memes that really make it to the point where it’s something that just has to be deleted. Of course, if you include that as the first line in your post and then go forward with more opinions, that’s not a problem. It’s just the posts that are exclusively a tired meme that should get weeded out.

To be frank, I’m still figuring out how to balance keeping the forums relatively spam-free while still preserving the community culture. Those kinds of posts do kind of tend to turn into spam-fests…but at the same time, they are contained and they are in a specific forum, and they are fun for the community. I’m not quite sure where to go from here with this. Maybe if they get too out of hand? Maybe if enough people complain about them? Maybe if we get too many flags? I’m not sure. I kind of have to play it by ear from this point.

Thanks for the post - you brought up a lot of good points here. I’m looking forward to the response.

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Thank you, Kahi, this was much appreciated! I kinda stopped commenting here for the same reason I do not comment on videos. I hope that these changes will help “beautify” this forum for the up coming year. Although, I do have a concern about the Word crimes (Weird Al, right?).

You cannot really blame them for not using grammar since the age demographic is lower than some others. It is also the internet. It’s not an excuse for not using it, but I don’t want to start seeing posts like : “Sorry of my English, its my second language :P”. So instead of deleting the post, maybe correct them with their mistakes through a PM. This would be a win, win scenario for people who are not really great at English (I’m not good myself :P), helping them create good habits and be an overall good influence.

I should also mention that I don’t really like the running jokes when fans start saying them all the time. It is almost like telling your friend the same joke everyday. A good example would be the Guru Laghima on the /r/thelastairbender subreddit. Done to death with no originality. Thanks for making the rules and… yeah, great job!

~Awesomenessborn

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Admittedly, I’m kind of biased; I was homeschooled, so writing with proper spelling and punctuation was kind of hammered into me at a young age =P. I find it a lot harder to sympathize with the excuse of age than I should, I guess.

That being said, sending PMs is a great idea. It’s also a very time-consuming one. In a perfect world, I would be able to coach all of our fans in the use of proper literacy and discourse. I unfortunately do not have that luxury. We have quite a few members on this board and not enough members to help other members out. If only it were so…

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I guess it would become time consuming and the fact that I think nobody here is an English professor, there would be some errors. Maybe for some occasions, but I still don’t want “English is not my main language” to be an excuse on every post

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Oh, sure. We’re not going to be going over these posts like we’re grading English 101 papers. There’s a wide range of acceptability and I’m okay with being lenient…just not too lenient. Honestly? Punctuation is the biggest thing I see that point towards clean reading.

That being said, I’d gladly take “English is not my main language” posts over “the hype is real guys the hype is REAL!!”

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Haha. I guess I would too. Does that also mean that the hype train joke is over when bionicle released? What I mean is will all the hype train comments get deleted if seen past the date of release? (please say yes)

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If this has any relation about the ‘President Eljay’ incident I am sorry about that. (I’m not mad or upset, just saying this in case I need to clear things up.)

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eh, it’s a lot of things.Baked potato is one. Admittedly, it’s pretty amazing how messy the forums have already gotten :stuck_out_tongue:

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Unfortunately, I don’t have time right now to go over all that you said (gotta go to that community college), but hopefully I’ll be able to reply later. I just wanted to address something that you said:

(#HOMESCHOOLERSUNITE) (Because I’m one too…get the joke…no? Well I’ll just show myself out…)

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Amen brother! Preach on!! :stuck_out_tongue:

But yeah, sometimes it’s easier to post a random comment with terribad spleling and a cheesy message than to actually think about what you’re saying.

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Homeschool is boss.

But in all seriousness, I’m glad you wrote this post, Kahi. It’s something that definitely needed to be addressed early on, and because you did so, I hope the spam will at least shrink down to a manageable size.

As I’ve tended to stay away from forums in favor of blog-style BIONICLE websites with an older fan base until very recently, I’m more used to using proper grammar than I would have been had I not used said sites. It’s nice to see that some ground rules are being set.

I don’t really have much else to contribute to this topic, so ciao until later.

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OK, I’m back from school and READY TO RUMBLLLLLLLLLLLE (and by rumble I mean reply to posts).

I think I understand. It’s kind of like if two people started having a conversation right in front of you, and you’re not involved in that conversation. Even if it’s funny, it’s kinda awkward.

OK, I can understand this. I think one of the draws of this forum is how different this is from the comments. I haven’t seen one full-out fight break out here, where on YouTube about 50 would have happened, not to mention the difference in grammar.

This is what I assumed you meant, but I wanted to be sure. Thank you for clarification.

OK, I can understand that. When you giving your description of ‘spam’, these topics were what I immediately thought of. I’d really hope that you keep them, because they’re quite fun and they do contribute to the culture. However, I’d also agree that if too many people complain, the topic should be taken down.

Out of curiosity, have you had many people complain about topics previously? (other than the Last to Post game, I know Potao was really annoyed by that).

Anyway, I’m glad that you have been active on this topic, and not ignoring your fans. I think it’s really cool how much you guys are involved with us, and not just acting like we’re dirt on the ground.

Thanks again!

Sincerely,
Political_Nuju

(P.S. Happy Unity Day!)

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On the topic of spam, I want to get people’s opinions on the games. Do you think there should be an approval process to posting new games in the future? (Please, no more “never-ending” topics…)

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Personally, I believe the games are starting to get out of hand. I was fine with them earlier on, but now they’re just getting annoying. I can’t check the latest posts without seeing that there are now 30+ new posts in a “Game” thread. Just my brief opinion, though. Carry on.

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Approval would def be nice. I do like seeing games that take thought, like RPGs, etc, but the “never ending” are getting out of hand.

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As someone who devotes most of their time and effort on this forum to leading one of the [actual] RPGs here, I must agree that the “joke” RPGs (eg mystical midget, never ending, etc) just detracts from the experience.

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