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I would like to suggest that rules, specified below be discontinued or suspended. The rules mostly pertain to types of posts made by new people to the forums, often on their first attempt to post. They are primarily enforced in the anime forum but do pertain to others. The inappropriate posts are inoffensive in themselves but have been placed into effect for convenience. The usual reason given that they would “clutter” the forum if allowed. That may have made sense when they were instituted, but frankly, the forums currently need clutter.

The anime and other content related forums are currently experiencing minimal traffic. I suspect that some people decide not to post on the idea that no one is looking at these forums. I think we should not be discouraging any thread that is posted politely with appropriate respect. I think that for a lot of new people, having your first post sanctioned and locked or moved is going to have a chilling effect. It would to me
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I realize that people, especially those new to the site should read and obey the rules, however, that seems to be against human nature. You are supposed to follow directions to assemble furniture but no one does that either.

Identifying anime (or manga). Yes, we have a thread for that, but people miss it. I don’t see the benefit of a single thread since prior answers will not help a new search. In addition, when the person comes back for a possible answer he is probably going to be confused as to where his post has gone. Clicking on a moved thread goes to the beginning of the thread, not to the new post in my experience.

Recommendation threads. Other than the risk of currently unlikely clutter, I don’t see why such requests are a problem. Especially if the request is articulately made and the responses obey the prohibition on lists. I think these have the potential for an actual conversation if people responding explain why they liked the recommended shows. I note that we do have genre-based threads already and these should be pointed out. However, often the requester is looking for a mood or approach rather than a specific genre. Regardless those threads are not kept current with new shows which would be the easiest for the requester to find.

Speculation. The typical “when is anime xx being released” Yes, these questions are rather pointless and the usual reply of “when we know it will be posted as news” is still appropriate. However, I don’t see the point of locking the thread. In most cases, no other reply is likely. Even if you do get a couple of clueless types trying to look into a chicken’s innards and determine the future, I don’t see the harm. Who knows, someone might just have some information. It wouldn’t be the first time something posted in the anime forum was picked up as a news report.

We do permit speculation, a lot of it, mostly in the Talkback Forum. For a good example look at the thread about Sony considering buying Crunchyroll. Any thread about the state of the industry will be rife with speculation. Review threads about an original anime will contain speculation about where the plot is going.

My basic point is that since we no longer need to fear “clutter” that otherwise inoffensive threads should be left alone. Over the years it has been rather depressing watching new people start threads that were immediately shot down. It is kinda like watching a bug zapper on a slow summer evening. We should encourage new people as long as they are polite.

Speaking as a mod I wouldn't have any problems if your suggestions were implemented.

As the resident mod lurker on the anime board, I'm the one who's doing most of the clean up there. I acknowledge your sentiment about discouraging new posters and also that clutter isn't the problem it once was.

As always, Alan45, you are a font of wisdom and common sense.

I am of 2 minds on these ideas. On the one hand such threads do clog up the forum and provide clutter. They also are threads that tend to not encourage a lot of actual discussion.

The reason speculation tends to be overlooked in the Talkback section is because it takes place in threads already garnering activity and discussion. It basically is enveloped by the discussion and still serves a purpose for a lack of a better word. An entire thread dedicated to simply, "when is this coming out?" serves no purpose. It bumps other discussion threads that might garner new activity further down the list and off of page 1.

As for recommendations the downside I see is that by allowing a plethora of random recommendations it negates the work done on all of the official ones. The ones people have posted lots of thoughts in already with great suggestions. It becomes a situation of repeating the same things over and over, while also possibly forgetting great suggestions posted previously. I have a compromise I would suggest for these topics.

I think removing both articles from the actual rules is actually a good idea. They aren't the problems they used to be, and it would also serve to shorten the rules. I know Tempest already wanted to trim them down when we updated them last time. This would do it some more. I would also suggest with the rules trimming just remove the part about excessive quoting. It's another issue that is an annoyance, but not the problem it once was or as disruptive as other core rules. Users have gotten better about it and in most cases a gentle mod reminder is enough to curtail it in a thread. This would mean Rule #5 and Rule #10 could go bye bye. I would also suggest merging rule #3 into rule #2 and make it rule 2d. This trim up the rules some more.

The other part of my compromise is while those parts of the rules might be gone, I think we should still steer users towards the Stickied threads. Some have been removed to help with clutter. Steering them to appropriate threads can help maybe garner activity in those older ones still left. I would suggest re-tooling some of them. Turn the "Anime Hunting - No Recommendations" thread into simply, "Anime Recommendations". This way the list at the beginning with the big "official" threads remains, and people can simply post in that thread when looking for a recommendation. This way they can do it, but it is more contained and won't negate all the work in those bigger threads that are linked at the start.

Along the same route I would say allow speculation posts in the "General Questions" thread. We could even rename that to "General Questions / Identifying Anime / Speculation" instead. Again, it's allowing such posts (speculation) but trying to keep them more contained. I think the Identifying part should remain in this one thread as well. In both cases posts can be moved to those threads if users create singular threads on their own. WITHOUT leaving Shadow Topics behind. That personally irks me. I just hate seeing all of the "Moved" shadow threads in sections. That is clutter. If a user has a question as to where their post went they can ask a mod, or check their own post history in their profile. If a post is simply moved to another thread if they check their post history and click on it then it will take them right to their post. Plus a bit of common sense would also apply. If you posted recently then you know you should start at the newest page. I think we can be more accommodating, but they can also put a bit of effort into things as well.

Those are my ideas and suggestions.

@Psycho 101

I agree that someone requesting recommendations should be provided a link to the recommendations thread or to a specific genre thread as appropriate. It is just restricting them to those threads that bothers me. Genre listings are not always clear. Often some shows can fall in two or more genres. There are a lot of other criteria that could be requested as well. I see no recommendations for the trapped in a game or reincarnated in an alternate world stories so popular today. Also the recommendations are by no means up to date. I checked the first several threads and most have not been updated since 2016 and a couple since 2008. I really think there have been some worthy shows since then.

I tend to disagree about moved threads. We are still talking new posters here. I think most will assume that their thread was deleted if they don't see it and being transposed to the beginning of a long thread is just confusing. The presence of a place where you can review your post history is not intuitive. I found it by accident a long time after I started posting.

As to clutter, I simply don't see it. Some of these threads may be bit silly, but recent history shows they will not force anything substantial off the first page. I just checked and the bottom of the first page of the Anime Forum has a most recent post from this May. That is six months ago and still on the same page. We are more in danger of having no new posts at all then of clutter.

It's been ages, but I think the "no speculation" rule was intended to be a ban on posting speculation as fact.

I'm perfectly fine with people speculating, provided they make it clear that they are posting their own speculation, and explain the reasons for that speculation.

If they are repeating other people's speculation, then they should be citing the people they are getting their information from (although often times it's just "internet rumor of unknown origin.")

Definitely agree that as most discussion has sadly moved to social media, we don't have to be as strict as we once did.

I'm fine with the rules being amended to reflect all this.

Thank you again Allen45 (and I apologize for taking so long to answer, the last month and a half were extremely challenging).

@Tempest

Thanks for the response.

Another prime example of a rule we had to crack down on, but have since greatly scaled back, was the rule on over quoting. It was becoming a serious problem, especially for mobile device users. The massive blocks of texts were "breaking" pages and making it impossible for mobile device users to follow discussions. Plus it simply looked horrible having 5-10 nested quotes stretching the page out a country mile. So we had to crack down on it to get people to take those 5 seconds to avoid it when quoting a post to respond to it, and not quoting the previous 5-7 posts in a chain. People started to curb it back and once they did we did as well. Often the rules do or don't get more leeway on some of the more minor things based on the climate of the time.

So if speculation threads and such are being allowed now then that's fine. I do think we should still steer people away from posting 4-5 times in a row in their own thread asking the same question. One and done. Ask and wait for a reply.

Psycho 101 Wrote:

Quote:

One and done. Ask and wait for a reply.

Agreed, they should have to respect all other rules. I wasn't recommending anarchy. I just thought we could be a bit nicer to first time posters. I honestly don't think that they will get any replies except a note to check the encyclopedia. That part shouldn't change.

I'm strongly in favor of Alan45's proposals about relaxing the rules for threads on identifying anime and recommendations. I've been wanted to propose exactly the same things for a long time, but never got around to it. Again and again I see new users post in the Anime forum asking for help identifying anime, and I feel the biggest reason most of those people don't stick around is because their topic got merged into an old thread that is hundreds of pages long. Even if it is done politely, the merging of threads is essentially pointing out that they broke the rules, which is likely intimidating to new users. I would guess that it is also confusing to many of them as to what happened to their post. I think making these changes will go a long way towards getting new users to stick around.

So let's allow questions about licenses, new anime, etc in the appropriate forums.

Recommendations
The opening statement to this thread should be modified: animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=21419

Speculation & Questions
Nothing needs to be done other than no longer lock these threads.
Are there any posted rules that need to be updated?

Identifying Anime
If we allow these, we should probably merge them into the existing mega thread once they are answered.

Big thank you for the creation of a games/tournament forum, woo-hoo!

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