Jericho2550 said:
The mac community has significantly grown over the past year, and MacRumors has had a surge in member registration, not a bad thing, but I feel there are many who sign up an account to specifically post a question, then they disappear and never log back on. Or some can have very rude posts, not all.
I was thinking a solution to this could be that people are not allowed to post only after they've been registered for an x amount of time, this way, the new member can get a feel of what MacRumors is all about and will be able to post in a proper manner. Maybe if they're not allowed to make a post for the first 7 days of their registration will force some to start using the search function and the whole site would get less pointless posts that get replies criticizing the poster to search.
I think this is an idea that should be considered by whoever makes such decisions 🙂
Your idea has been considered before, and it's good to bring it up for discussion now and then. The tradeoff with a "waiting period" is that it prevents new members from asking questions that are important to them now, and they will "take their business" elsewhere if they have an immediate problem to solve. Providing such member-to-member help is an important aspect of MacRumors.
Also, we get a surge of new members when there are Apple events or announcements, and people want to be able to discuss and react to news while the events are approaching, in progress, or just completed.
So, while a waiting period would weed out unwanted hit-and-run posts (trolling) and increase the average quality of posts by new members, we think that it would reduce the overall usefulness of MacRumors to institute such a delay.
However, in theory the rules could differ for particular forums, e.g., news story threads vs. question and answer threads vs. community discussion threads, and that's an idea that I don't think we've discussed in the forums.
Finally, some forum websites are set up so that posts are pre-reviewed (aka "moderated"). With that system, posts can be made by new members but they do not appear in the forums until they have had a human review. While this can solve the problem too, it takes much more time and effort, introduces a posting delay of its own, and can cause the forum content to reflect biases of the chosen moderators more than after-the-fact moderation is likely to do.