That is a possibilty. Also some of the posters who only come to debate an issue would not join. The current hot thread is the Woodies one with over 20,000 hits in the last few days. Several posters only joined for this thread; I doubt they would have if they had to pay. Unless it was some token amount like $5.00. That would at least prove identity and stop multiple alias. Then once someone is banned they are GONE> for good.
Converting into a paysite has it's pros and cons, obviously. A paysite requires more investment to ensure quality of content. My view is that it's better to invest a little in more active administration and comments/warnings from administrators when people get out of line and totally off topic. But actually it's the responsibilty of the ET community to ensure that everyone adheres to a democratic use of the forums, and stays informed of this. Letting things pass through all the time ourselves, doesn't acutally help if you want to keep the quality high. Live chat is in my experience the worst form of wasted time during trading. Just try http://www.financialchat.com - the largest financial live chat forum. Go ahead and expose your trading platform (i.e your PC) to kiddies with nuke scripts and supremacist moderators/operators. There is acutally a great benefit to a time-detached forum: you can do trades, and read the forum whenever you want without missing out. It also heightens the quality of messages, which are just appalling 99% of the time on live chats.
I think you should approach the bad posts as being spam. And so you should address it that way i.e. delete or ignore them. There appear to be too many posts for the moderators to properly manage, so you need to deputize the readers. On each post there should be an ignore button which can be used by the readers to flag irrelevant posts. Once a post has enough negative marks against it by "trustworthy" readers it is either deleted or put on ignore for everybody who chooses to have irrelevant posts ignored automatically. You need to assign a rating of trustworthiness to each reader, to decide if their vote is useful. Readers gain a more or less trustworthy level based on their choices for posts to ignore. If their choices concur with enough other trustworthy readers their level goes up. Each user could set a level of ignoring that they are interested in. So the people who want the current experience could just select the ignore no posts option, while leaving a cleaner site for others.
Good idea! one thing.. i dont think integers are sufficient. we should rate to at least three decimal places.. for instance... poster X we might assign 6.119 but poster Y - 6.121 !! see the diff!!!
I would be all for it. Also, one user per credit card, or check. No credit card or checking account? No registration. There goes the maladjusted 15 year olds... nitro
Good idea... Going through some of the other forums which are much more informative than ET... What about a more stricter moderator. It's ironic it's coming from me but, I'm starting to think that the mods are starting to be nice and worried about their reputation than the content. Also, just constant banning of accounts and IP address. It seems like people have a relief of getting away with anything, using a childish, "Hey it's a free country, I'm entitled to express what ever" Also, getting rid of Chit Chat. Making this forum only Trading oriented. If they want to debate on some topic that goes off from trading, then they should just pick up the phone or go into realtime chat. When some thread moves to some non-trading topics, erase the posts. Useless Forums: 1. Journals ( It's worthless, who cares about how others trade or other's calls... just goto Barclays or watch other CTAs or Hedge Fund performances ) 2. Career Trader ( Brokerage and Hook Up section usually takes care of it ) 3. Announcement and Feedback. ( Talk to Baron or Aaron through PM. It's not worth making a big deal about the whole site. ) 4. Chit Chat - They take the No Holds Bar attitude into other forums. Cuase of all evil. 5. Trading - Finally, get rid of this to scatter the threads into their own specific topic. I can see that all of the threads are able to fit in some other Forums. -------------------------------------------- New categories and those that need clarification and having mods, move it around. 1. Style specific. Daytraders stick with daytraders. Discretion stick with discretion. Systematic sticks with systematic. Or have a whole section for system traders. With 7-8 sub-categories. In a sense, splitting all the Trading Forum's thread. 2. Newbie section. 3. Employment Section. And moving threads to Resources, Hookups and Classified. I see a lot people trying to sell Computer Hardware and software, asking for a job, looking for things, etc. Just have the mods move them.