deadbeat wrote:
5: People should always read the rules. I've already changed the guidelines thread to Skinning Rules. Once the stickied and announcement threads get thinned out, it'll be a lot more visible. I see no reason to throw information in peoples face because they're too lazy to read.
But, you see, that's the whole conundrum. The kind of person who posts mixed skins is someone who will never go look for the rules because they don't care. They have no investment in the community whatsoever, which is why they don't know the rules in the first place, and also makes it futile to punish them afterwards because they have nothing to lose. They stumble onto the forum, vomit up their low effort garbage, and leave forever when everyone yells at them. The forum is ultimately what suffers, and not the poster, and we can only do something about it after the damage is already done. Expecting responsibility from the irresponsible inevitably leads to an unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.
There are really only two ways to solve the problem as far as I can see.
1. Find some way to force them to read, or at least see the rules before they can post. This won't necessarily stop them from posting their crap anyway, but could help stem the tide. My initial suggestion is essentially a low-resource version of this, because there may not be any available feasible mechanisms to actually make someone prove they read the rules, but we can certainly put them somewhere impossible to miss.
2. Active moderation. Essentially force everyone to post their stuff into a queue for acceptance or denial before it is moved into the forum for everyone else to see.
I also retract my suggestion to separate game modes into subforums because on second thought, it would be really overcomplicated for no benefit, not to mention that game types are often bundled together in a single skin.
