(02-11-2012 11:28 AM)mark-in-dallas Wrote:  That's kind of what's been done with the Post Of The Month nominations, except it's the members who get to decide what posts are the best.

That's a nice feature, but it does something different from what I had in mind. What happens if a tacitus posts 5 times in a day about different topics?

There is also the problem as readership grows that the number of discerning users tends over time to become quite small in relationship to the total number of users. So popularity is not a good proxy for quality, as we see in the posts nominated for post of the week in certain other forums.

I appreciate that we live in a world where perfection is not achievable, that there is a fair amount of work in setting this up and maintaining it, and that it is not clear what the process should be for selecting best posts. However some other forums on different topics do seem to manage to do this. Editorial review often seems to be better than peer review in science in certain respects. Maybe the same may be true of forums.

While I agree that editorial review in science and any other field with established guidleines of accepable testing or reference methods is practical and can be seneficial, I can't see how it could be implemented here, without damaging our commitment to remianing unbiased.

Additionally, I believe it would conflict with the Post of the Month contests and both would be devalued.

Lastly, as the forum grows and more posts were added a section containg what the editors (admin) considered to be the best posts, I could see the rest of the forum getting a lot less attention and many members threads going unread for days/weeks or forever.

On the other hand, it would give new members a starting point.

Another thought that just came to mnd thogh, is that different people are here for different reasons, and how would it be determined what type of posts should be incorporated?

Well - this is indeed a challenge of modernity. It is very difficult to achieve excellence without it being the unique expression of a particular perspective.

There need be no conflict with Post of the Month, since you could only make posts that are X (2? 12?) months old eligible for selection.

People seem to like to interact with other people, even if there is a handbook of posts to hand. Knowledge can never be completed, and there is room even for an average person to build on the insights of giants who came previously. Pheromone use in particular seems to be something that will never fully be 'cracked' because the right mix is so dependent on particular questions of personality, social context, and the spirit of the time. And mone use naturally leads on to other topics that are also always developing and never complete.

Did the poster archives at masf lead to more or less posts of a reasonable quality? I would say, without a doubt, more. And on the other hand, at another pheromone forum, the absence of being able to refer easily to older, high quality posts (it actually seems impossible to retrieve some of the older ones, at least after trying for a while) has not facilitated the development of the forum at the level of quality it began with. That forum has in some ways become detached from its roots, swamped by an influx of new posters over time with whoever has the flashiest response gaining influence rather than those with genuine expertise. There is in addition a phenomenon of Chinese whispers, whereby what starts out as an intuitive, rooted insight becomes repeated over time, ending up as an empty formulaic fragment thath has lost all vitality and real meaning. Objectivity often means to strip something of context, but stripping something of context over time degrades meaning.

This is just my opinion. It fits with some general philosophical questions I have been pondering of late.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't think its a good idea, just that I can't see how it could be effectively incorporated here, without compromising another area of the forum.

Additionally, as you've already noted, trying to maintain such an area would place a rather large burden on the admins, and wouldn't really be fair to ask of them. However Pago and Terry are welcome to weigh in with their thoughts, as they would be the ones handling it.

I completely agree that the other forum you're refering to became detached from its roots and is not what it once was. I believer that was about the time the dropped the uncensored and research from their tagline, which was also about the time that quality members started leaving in droves and the MX's seemed to become unreliable fro 1 order to the next.

Ok i can see where it would be a great tool in having a thread devoted to explaining the meanings of initials like my initials for instance TAB ( Take Away Bin ) .

Possably a thread could be started and it could be managed by anyone wishing to contribute to posting up the information they choose, ie keeping it neat without meandering into lengthy explanations ect, and it could be edited only by the mods just to make sure there was no bull shit being posted, i dont know if this is a good idea or not anyway its just a thought

Anyone could contrbute, but it would then require the admins take those contrinutions and incroporate them into the opening post and delete the contributing post, to keep it nice and tidy.

Regardless of whether that was the understanding and everyone knew so or not, it is censorship, and something we promised would not happen here when we started PheroTruth. And, compromises on commtiments and/or values usually becomes a slippery slope that feeds upon itself and eventually spirals out of control.

Even though I have already stepped back to let Pago and Terry run the forum, I absolutely will not allow the foundations and commitments the forum was built on to be chisled away in any fashion, for any reason.

If Visionary were around... (Renny sighs wistfully)

(02-12-2012 11:00 AM)renny Wrote:  If Visionary were around... (Renny sighs wistfully)

What happened to him? Does he know about this forum?

I thought he was here but I just did a post search on his username and turned up no posts, however since his name is in the user database he must have joined. Curious.

Visionary did join, and I was glad to see that he did, but he never posted, didn't spend much time here and hasn't been back in around 6 months or so. No clue why?