Creating a New Topic

[T0X1C]

In the V section, especially, we can see that when a new member creates a topic it's rarely anything of any value. Often it's simply a troll who created a new account after his/her old one was banned. Other times it's a poor, misguided newbie posting 5 month old news or creating a topic that has already been created, leading to a barrage of abuse from the unforgiving, soul-destroying, sarcastic gremlin that is GTA Forums.

 

To cut down on this, I suggest that all new members should not be able to create a new topic until their account is 1 or 2 weeks old. They can still post in existing topics and do everything any normal member can do, except create new topics. Once their account is sufficiently "mature", the 'create new topic' and 'create new poll' buttons magically appear.

 

For one, this will reduce the number of troll topics created. Not many trolls will have the patience to wait 2 weeks to begin trolling. Even if they create an account with the intention of possibly trolling in future, they may lose interest and forget about it completely by the time that they are allowed to troll.

For new members it will help them get settled in and many will learn that half of their ideas have been discussed before and their "Headline News" is actually from November's Game Informer article. If they really want to get their ideas out there they'll use existing topics and, we can only hope, the pinned wishlist thread.

 

What do you guys think?

 

 

[Kirsty]

While I understand your reasoning, these kind of ideas have come along before and they just wouldn't work, especially in the V forum.

 

The main reason is because we'd lose out on content - it discriminates against people who register to create interesting topics or post (new) news; and after all, this is a discussion forum that thrives on activity. We also have to remember that not everyone who joins only posts in the V area, so it could cause other sub-forums to lose activity too.

 

We have 7 forum leaders in the V area alone, 2 of which are global mods, on top of plenty of helpful members who use the report function appropriately; so we have more than enough to handle your every day trolls. A couple of weeks doesn't seem very long, I get that, but it's better without restrictions.

 

A forum as popular as this will always get trolls; the best thing IMO is for long term members to set examples in their own posts and topics rather than continuing to reply to spam, but unfortunately that is near impossible to enforce. It might be frustrating during the quiet periods, but they will all be forgotten and easily ignored once there are endless things to discuss when GTA V is released