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the simplest solution of all: restore the forumsystem the way it was!

yes, but then you have the problem that the admins seem to worry about. unfortunatly, i've never seen their point in practice.

edit: TYPO!

I am sorry but I think you are all truly overreacting. If you had not noticed yet: MRC costs us a lot of time and a lot of money. I consider the forums as a very valuable archive, as I'm sure most of you do as well, and would like to preserve its contents for everyone who could benefit from it. It hurts when people are trying to break that archive down (which did happen in the past), it hurts when people are accusing MRC of being a website with 'excessive rules'. I would have thought the MRC would have gathered a bit more credit in the past, but apparently this is not the case.

Excessive rules? - I think it is a well known fact that we only moderate severe, personal flames and links to warez. There are quite some people who think our website could do with a little more moderation. Now, for the first time in years, we are experimenting with a new 'rule' which will help preserving the archive we have all been building for the past years and which will drastically decrease the amount of time we have to spend moderating the MRC forums. Since, even though we are not moderating a lot, we are reading it all.

I can (but won't) mention at least 10 occasions of visitors (regulars and newbies) that abused the edit function, luckily without too many people noticing it because we tend to keep backups. However, it did take a lot of time (and frustrations) to find out which posts had been altered and replace them with appropriate backups. It's a problem that did occur in the past and which is bound to happen again in the future and this is one way of preventing it. As I was saying, it is an experiment. We found a potential problem, thought of a workaround and think this might be an appropriate solution.

Try and compare this forum with a mailinglist or a newsgroup. On a mailinglist or newsgroup you don't have the chance to edit your posts - at all - under no circumstances. Do you consider mailinglists and usenet have excessive rules as well? I hope not. Not being able to edit your posts does not limit your freedom of speech at all. There are only two limitations: You can't remove typo's after 30 minutes or once someone else has replied (you can't do so with emails/usenet either, if you want to be sure you could do a spell-check before posting) and you can't add extra information unless you post another message (which is exactly the same case with mailinglists/usenet)

Yes, it is true that it limits a few of the benefits a forum usually has. Yes, it is true that the majority has to adjust because of the actions of a small minority. But I do not think these new rules (which -once again- might be adjusted in the future) restrict any of the freedom there has been, is and always will be on our forums. Nobody is forcing you to post on the MRC forums, nobody is censoring your opinions on the MRC forums. All we are asking of our visitors is: lets give this a try and see how we feel about it after adjusting a bit to it. By instantly screaming 'we need another forum! what a censorship, those MRC bastards!!!' you are not even giving this new system a fair chance.

IMO there are better solutions for this that both reduce the moderators' work AND keep the freedom for the posters..

Your mailinglist example is a good one, but guess why the international mailinglist is as good as dead nowadays?
And as for usenet, it does allow CANCELATION of your messages...

Allowing some more people on the team would reduce the workload too!

"IMO there are better solutions for this that both reduce the moderators' "

Please suggest

Ro, I don't like you patronizing Snout by calling him Snoutje. It's unnecessary.
Anyway, it's mostly Mars2000 who's going out of his head at the moment maybe he should give some suggestions instead of moaning?

For now I don't see any reason to change this 'feature'. We'll discuss the options further and in the meantime I request all of you who have obligations against this feature to be positive and give input and suggestions instead of being negative and only moan about this.

We're not bastards, we do listen to suggestions and will even implement it if they're better then our ideas. But with just moaning and complaining it won't get any better.

Mmmmkay?

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"IMO there are better solutions for this that both reduce the moderators' " Please suggest

I've already suggested several options to snout...

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We're not bastards

You sure about that?

Well.. at least we are not complete bastards

We had a talk about it between admins and decided to remove the lock on posts to which already have been replied. So, from now on, no matter if there already are replies or not you have 30 minutes after posting your initial message to edit typo's, add a bit of extra text etc. etc. etc.

Ah, If you suggested that in PM or something like that, I couldn't possibly know

Anyway, short discussion about it at admin HQ results in modification of this feature.
This feature's purpose is to preserve forum threads and prevent the information to be lost or become useless after editing. It's not meant to irritate the users

*edit*

Already done I see

It's a good compromise I think...

That's also my opinion ... Good decision !

Thanks guys!

good thing snout. well, now this is settled: you can work on the poll

it's all we ask..

What about a preview option, so that you can check the post one last time before sending it? (but also still allowing to send posts at once)