Original Post
Posts in the Help Wanted forum MUST be formatted according to a required template, without which they are subject to deletion, closing or other moderation. The last section of the template is titled "Feedback", and specifies what sort of responses the user posting the thread wants. Suggested options are "encouraging only", "all" or "none" (although members are welcome to type anything else sensible in there instead), and the action taken by moderators is in this particular forum partially based upon which of those options are selected. This particular section of the template is quite old, and I suspect a lot of our current members don't know why it exists, so a brief bit of GDNet history... A long time ago before I became moderator of the Help Wanted forum there was no required template in the forum. The forum had reasonably low traffic, and any flaming or derailing of threads was dealt with quickly and easily. Over time however as the forum got busier our previous moderator unfortunately had less time available, and increasing amounts of work were required to keep the forum running smoothly. It became increasingly common for threads to very quickly turn into arguments, and even amongst the better of them very few were able to get any actual recruiting done. At some point, our previous moderator simply vanished and the Help Wanted forum was left without a moderator for several months. During this time the site staff put in place a rule that NO feedback was allowed to any post in an attempt to curb the rampant flaming that very quickly derailed almost every thread posted to the forum. Whilst effective at preventing flaming/thread-derailing and VERY easy to police this was obviously FAR from ideal. It was at this point that I took over as Help Wanted moderator, and after a couple of weeks made several modifications to the template including the addition of the "feedback" section allowing users to more easily control the responses they received whilst not having to disallow responses totally as had previously been done. Recently I've noticed a trend where the feedback section of the template is not honoured by many of those replying. Obviously I can't allow this to continue, and so rather than taking what I suspect would be a MUCH less popular option and going back to disallowing feedback all together, I will be cracking down on such responses over the next few weeks. I will be issuing warnings to offending users and may make modifications to or delete some offending posts. I hope that those users who are effected realise that this is nothing personal and continue to contribute to the forum when they're able to do so without disrupting threads that have elected to receive none or encouraging responses only; the flip-side of such a selection often being that such threads will drop off the front-page much faster without responses.
