This forum needs a makeover

[Homer]

[ QUOTE ]
Homer,

Quick question: Would you take a large stake handicapping challenge v ImBen?

[/ QUOTE ]

Complete non-sequitor. No, I wouldn't. I'm a poor capper. Now, feel free to address my point.

[Thremp]

Homer,

No. I feel my question is more pertinent than your question of civility. If he has knowledge that get filtered to people its far more important than if he is nice about it.

[NajdorfDefense]

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[ QUOTE ]
instead of all this can we just get rid of the trolls and idiots?

anyone behind me on this?

[/ QUOTE ]
Yes, please.

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[NajdorfDefense]

b00t, I think each game should have it's own thread. I don't feel strongly about baseball however. I don't want to read a 300-post thread looking for insight on Eagles v Cowboys however, if 90% of it is on Colts v Pats, for example.

Poker Strat forums work that way as well.

We just need to start locking and deleting useless posts.
Posts about sports but not betting go to that forum.
Donk parlays go to that thread, as does chatter.
Arbs go in arb thread.

Problem solved.

[Homer]

[ QUOTE ]
Homer,

No. I feel my question is more pertinent than your question of civility. If he has knowledge that get filtered to people its far more important than if he is nice about it.

[/ QUOTE ]

You said ImaScammer was a [censored] to people because this place has a "groupthink" mentality. I said that is not the case, he's a jerk, period. Don't use that as an excuse for his attitude.

BTW, I could live with his arrogant attitude if he provided useful information more frequently.

[Thremp]

Homer,

No, he's kinda a jerk normally I'd assume. I'm sure its encouraged by the whole attitude some people hold and a lack of basic knowledge. Some people wanna hold hands and some people wanna be rude and hateful. Many are much more helpful in PM/IM/away from this forum.

[Homer]

[ QUOTE ]
Homer,

No, he's kinda a jerk normally I'd assume. I'm sure its encouraged by the whole attitude some people hold and a lack of basic knowledge. Some people wanna hold hands and some people wanna be rude and hateful. Many are much more helpful in PM/IM/away from this forum.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, I'm sure some are more readily available and willing to help on IM (maybe even ImBen). I can accept that some people might not want to share info with a massive audience. What I have a hard time accepting is the desire to lurk and pounce on misinformation with no more than "haha, I know the answer and you don't."

[Lori]

[ QUOTE ]
b00t, I think each game should have it's own thread. I don't feel strongly about baseball however. I don't want to read a 300-post thread looking for insight on Eagles v Cowboys however, if 90% of it is on Colts v Pats, for example.

Poker Strat forums work that way as well.

We just need to start locking and deleting useless posts.
Posts about sports but not betting go to that forum.
Donk parlays go to that thread, as does chatter.
Arbs go in arb thread.

Problem solved.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm with Naj here. It's not like the threads are huge clutter because all but one or two of them will fade 2 hours after the game anyway.

Lori

[Performify]

couple quick comments. most everything expressed here is my opinion, not meant to be an authoritative statement on anything. I'm very interested in discussing all of this.

1) i love the discussion on how to best improve the forum and will weigh in more with my own thoughts tomorrow. I will be 100% on board with enabling a changeover to whatever improvements the forum collectively can decide.

2) There is a 100% effective way of dealing with trolls and idiots - the button to notify moderator. Looks like this: . 100% of posts you notify are looked at by the moderator(s) and a high percentage of them are also looked at by the administration team (the admins in red). The best answer for policing the forum is for the entire forum to take an active role in dealing with the trash. Report posts to the mod(s). PM the mod(s) when there are problems, or contact the mod(s) via email / IM / whatever.

3) forum software does not allow for the merging of threads. We can take a tree inside a thread and move it to a new thread. However merging is not possible. So when we do have redundant threads or threads out of place, sadly the only option is to post/PM a warning and lock the thread.

4) I really don't think clutter is the problem with this forum. Its a rare day when we exceed one full index page of active posts (with "Total parent posts to show per page:" in Display Preferences set to 30) and very rarely does a post go beyond a single page (with display set to flat mode and 99 posts showing on one page, the only effective way to read this forum). We've moved up quite a bit in traffic rating since i took over (in terms of our rank in the forums on 2p2) but we're still not even in the top ten. I think the issue is quality of posts, not quantity of posts, not organization of posts. As always, content is king.

5) I do think more regimented posts are a good idea. We have picks posting requirements listed in the forum FAQ but they're not being strictly enforced. We can easily have regimented threads like an active donk parlay thread, an active chatter thread, an active arbitrage thread, etc etc. We can lock any threads which should go in these, with a link to the appropriate active thread (per #3, can't merge them sadly).

6) My gut reaction off the top of my head, I'm not really too keen on one thread per sport, for a specific reason. I think more people follow individual posters than wanting to hear everything from everyone on a specific sport. As a reader (not as a moderator) i could care less what 80% of the people posting picks think on a game - I follow people who post quality picks (quality analysis or a quality system) or demonstrate an impressive set of picks with a reasonable sample size. For a quick example - I'm interested in reading picks from (just some examples) Waterproof or Mr. Baseball or crockpot or trixtrix (if he were to post them). I don't want to look through threads or watch each of these guy's post histories - I want to see a "Waterproof's Picks thread for XXX - YYY" because thats how I consume them. I don't want to see all the forum's NBA picks, i just want to see if a capper I respect posts a pick. Oh, and no disrespect intended to anyone here whose picks I do read and consume and I didn't mention - i'm just dropping some names off the top of my head.

7) I do see the value of combined discussion threads for specific sports where there's not an issue of selection size (i.e. the UFC, there's only one event. Baseball or NFL you're dealing with 10 games per day so I don't want to see all those crammed in to one thread). One post per game would solve that but then you've got 10x the threads we've got in a single day. Again, per #4 i don't think the problem is clutter or organization.

[Performify]

/bump