Everybody pounces on this guy. I try to restore order, but it's too late. people yell at the troll, he disappears into the woodwork. The mod edits the troll's post so it isn't offensive, but then the thread turns into a discussion of what it did say. It turns into a dreaded discussion of detail Vs. gameplay. Four or five days worth of communication are lost as me and kirby try in vain to re-rail the topic. The thread might not even recover.
I'm not dissing the mods out there, but they are only two people. How often, might I ask, do Qbasicer or Biohazard check on my ZDCMP2 thread? If they don't care about the projects progress, they might not even check at all. On the other hand, I, as the leader of the project, check it twice a day.
I would like to request a new forum feature called thread ownership. It would work like this: If you have a project or ongoing game, and it has been going for ten pages or so, you could apply to "Own" the thread. If randy approves, you would then "Own" the thread, giving you moderator power on that thread and that thread only. Because I check it twice a day, if anybody tries to break the ZDCMP2 thread, I can delete the imflammitory post before more than a person or two sees it. By comparison, mods may not notice it for a long time, even if I report the post.
These "Thread owners" can't do much more than edit or delete posts. Perhaps they can ban people from their thread and their thread only if out forum software supports it, but basically, all they control is their one thread and are normal everywhere else. This would help protect fragile project threads such as ZDCMP2, and Zhalloween, and would also aid in some games in offtopic, such as the ZDOOM RPG.
I know free speech is a good thing, but if people want to discuss detail Vs. gameplay, I'd really rather they do it in a different thread and leave us to work. Besides, if somebody wants a thread to communicate things about a project, I don't think anybody has the right to de-rail it. They already have their free-speech, and can post in a new topic if they want to discuss it.
Of course, I am assuming that people would not abuse their thread ownership status. I, personally, wouldn't delete a post because some person thinks ZDCMP2 is going in the wrong direction. I would instead try to get him to explain why so we could incorporate it into the final form. Then again, posts like the one in the first paragraph would be deleted, and quickly.
Just a thought. I'm paranoid after the KDiZD issue.
