Posting Guidelines

[ktm5124]

I am a little disappointed by the "thread pollution" I notice on this site.

There are many intelligent users who make various intelligent posts, but there are also the high school students with zero-post-counts who register in order to ask a homework question and then never return to the forum again. These posts often appear under author pages, and they detract from the quality of these subforums.

There are also the people who create threads with nondescriptive names. For instance, take this thread: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52463. The author here created a thread called "Tolstoy," which could imply discussion on any topic ranging from War and Peace to Tolstoy's biography to his stance on politics... you get the point. And then the user reading the board is left in the dark what the thread will be about, and has to check it to see what it is about, and when it is irrelevant to the reader's interests the reader has just wasted time discerning the topic of a thread that could have been clearly stated in the title.

I think it would be a good idea if there were a more aggressive moderation policy. A thread for posting guidelines could be stickied, and in it users could be warned that thread titles will be revised if they are found unsatisfactory. If you want, you could take it one step further and say that all posts judged to be "high school homework questions" will be moved to some junk-collection forum.

I say this because I would really like there to be an intelligent forum online for literature, but this forum, like all other forums, seems to suffer from the pollution of uninspired high school students and unthinking forum posters.

[Logos]

First of all, ok, thanks for taking the time to suggest ways to improve the forums :) It's an idea we can look into.

However, the issue of "student homework help" type of threads has been discussed ad-nauseum, here is the latest:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51670

The majority of users on the site are "student" age -- 10 -- 29 years..

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=1062

so, basically, pleas for homework help will continue to happen. Apart from the Forum Rules, trying to tell people how to post, or control how they should present their ideas is problematic due to a number of things (Native language, learning/physical limitations, computer issues, etc.) and I'm not here to judge how "intelligent" a post is based on spelling or grammar. People already don't read the forum rules, or ignore them anyway :D I don't know if posting guidelines would help in matters such as you suggest, 1-2 post members who never respond, or are just desperate for freebie answers.

Hovering your mouse over the thread title should give you the text to read of the 1st post and then you can decide whether to click on it or not.

[ktm5124]

Okay, thanks for the prompt rely.

Your thoughtful post has made me realize that my suggestions are impractical. The "hovering your mouse over the thread title" trick is nice to know.

I wrote my post in a state of frustration over the homework-help threads in the author subforums... but since then I have found so many remarkable threads in General Literature and General Discussion that I have quite gotten over my frustration :)