Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Introduction Spam Reduction?

Okay, guys. I love you and all, and I think it's great that you're helping out with the newbies, but there has got to be a better way.

Is it at all possible for this to be reduced to "Novalyyn replied to 77 topics on the Introduction forum?" This would save an immense amount of space and make it so I don't have to un-friend my friends to avoid having to scroll through a few pages of introduction topics before I find topics relevant to me.

(It isn't all just Nova, either. This was just a catalyst. I get alerted by a lot of different intro posts that my friends reply to fairly often.)

I am in no way condemning those of you who like to go through the Introductions forum and rack up brownie points, but it just seems wasteful (and it definitely is distracting) to have each individual topic named and given its own divider on the homepage because of one user who replies to fifteen different topics in the same forum within the span of a few minutes.

If a feature to minimize the way the horde of posts appears on the home page is out of the question, perhaps a feature that would auto-lock introduction posts after a day or two would help? Many of these posts are around a week old (avg. 4 days, so work week ) and have plenty of helpful replies full of useful info and questions about the player (that typically don't even receive responses!) to get a person started without needing another generic "Welcome to RPR! We've got lots of great people here. I'm sure you'll love it!" message that adds nothing to the topic. It's unnecessary, and this late after a topic is started I'd go as far as to call it spam. For instance, one of these posts was started on May 3. It had 9 responses before today, the last one being on May 4 (by Kim, who was curious about what would make an RP partner a successful match, and went unanswered) and now it's been raised by the necromancer known as The Great Quest for Accolades.

Another fix to this would be to blacklist key words from your feed entirely. If there were some way I could block a post's title if it contained the words "hi," "hello," "new," "intro," "greeting," etc. it would significantly cut down on spam.

If not any of the above options, it might also be feasible to create a feature to allow one to unsubscribe from a forum entirely.

I understand that coding is a lot of work for Kim, so if there are alternatives to adding entirely new features to a full queue I am absolutely willing to hear them.

Thanks for your time.

The average time people take to welcome new members on an intro topic is about 3-5 days (this ties in directly with the accolade you get for replying to intro topics in a timely fashion) so it's perfectly normal to see people replying to topics this long. (Weeks old topics are discouraged to reply to.) I'm not in favor of auto-locking topics though. Some new members don't get a chance to respond within a week to the welcoming posts you get, and it seems overkill and quite unwelcoming to prevent them from replying to their own board and engage in interesting discussions when they're asked questions. So I don't think that suggestion would work out at all.

It can become problematic when people go on replying sprees, but it's not just bound to the introduction topics. Some people I'm friends with engage in a lot of forum games and I see their activity flooding my feed too.

We currently already have the option to stop watching someone's activity in the friends list which can hotfix the issue for now, although it silences them entirely.

I'm not sure what a proper way to tackle this issue would be. I check threads for replies to questions I asked and I like to keep tabs on the discussions friends have going on. Grouping them together into a "So and so replied x times to Introduction topics" makes the notification more or less useless, since there's no point in being told that if I don't know which topics they are. I think unsubscribing from specific forums as a whole is a solution I'm most in favor of though.

I'm kind of on the same page as Okay, with the fact that there needs to be more filtering made for the main page. Even my subscribed rp pages get lost so easily from everything that everyone else is doing. And epic week wrecked the subscribed page because it doesn't bundle up like on the regular page.
But yes I would like to see more ways to filter things.

Speaking of, I'd kind of like an IC and OOC filter too!

I'm thinking it could be a clickable link that would either expand or take you to a new page to show you all of the topics. That would reduce clutter without totally making the notification useless.

That sounds like a great idea!

The way to fix this is to just allow the notifications to combine many replies to different forum topics by the same person into one bunch. This is already in progress! Changes to notifications are alow and finicky, as this is a feature that handles so much info for so many people that it's easy to create massive lag when not done well.


I apologize for the inconvenience in the meanwhile. I promise it's being worked on.

4 days is the established acceptable length of time in which it is okay to continue with primary responses to introduction topics. 4 days is neither a week or a work week. People who necro posts from much longer after this period get talked to, and the number is gradually falling. But of course mistakes to occasionally happen.

In any other topic I'd agree with you, but when it comes to introduction posts, what it adds is a sense that many people are happy to see you and that a new player is wanted here -- this is something sorely lacking from the internet in general, and new players that continue here overwhelmingly cite the friendly welcome that they got as one of the main things that drew them in. If you go to a party where you don't know anyone, a single person coming up to you and saying hello would not make other people saying hi to you feel irrelevant, it'd make you feel welcome and not ignored. This is why I feel the need to defend people who have made it their project to welcome new players from any kind of aspersion that they are doing it for "brownie points" or "just for accolades"! Moerover, I and a number of others have made it a policy of responding to every single intro post it was humanly possible to do so since the day the site began.

If you consider answers within 24 hours to also be spam, auto-locking topics would not assist you!

Is this going to be like the way kudos are handled? If it is, I'm not sure what to expect. One thing I dislike about grouping kudos together is that you have to go through a lot of extra clicks to find the kudos that was given, as it only shows names + the last kudos made (which isn't necessarily the last kudos a person received). I'm not sure I'll be a fan of this if something similar happens to reply topics. Wouldn't that make it even harder to check topics and get involved with discussions? Will we still be able to see a topic name at first glance, click it and go to it?

It'll be handled pretty much like someone starting a whole bunch of new topics is handled, except with responses.

One more option right now is instead of unfriending them, you could go to the friends page and stop watching their posts!

A version of the combiner is actually in effect now. It has slightly increased lag on the notifications page so it'll need tweaking and monitoring, but probably that part is only of concern to me.

Kim, you are a saint. Thank you so much.

I've been thinking it might be nice to be able to turn off notifications by board, instead of only by user. So, using this add an example, someone could simply stop receiving notifications of any posts made to Introductions - but can keep getting user-specific posts elsewhere. That combo thing for individuals should be great, though!

I actually have almost all my friend post notifications turned off. Some folks post very frequently, and others not so much, and I'm only really worried about seeing responses to certain things. Once the vino thing is out, I might see about turning more back on.

I also would like to point out that the mass welcomes I did weren't for the accolade, but because I'd fallen way behind again. I've been trying to welcome as many people as I can since before that accolade was offered. I admit I used to aim more specifically for the nearly-empty threads (and do still give less attention the more posts a topic has), but it was pointed out that it's always nice to receive more greets, and I've noticed that sometimes all the existing posts are just between 2 or 3 people, including the op. I imagine there are others acting on things much the same!

Same here! The accolades are nice, but before this I never really dug into the intro topics because it was so hard to figure out who was recent and who had posted weeks ago, especially when others caught up on older topics. The main reason I post to intro topics now is because 1) I love welcoming people! and 2) it's REALLY easy to figure out when a new member posted thanks to the upgrade on the Community page.

I report bugs because I want the site to work well and I welcome people because I enjoy heartfelt welcomes too. The accolades are just a nice bonus. I find this is true for almost everyone who posts now, especially now that the novelty of the accolades has worn off.

What vino thing?