Scared of posting on siteFollow

This whole rate up/down system does restrict free speech and promote sheepy behaviour. If it only did so if you value the colour of your name, it wouldn't be that big a deal. My qualm is that posts can be nuked for having differing opinions. That just isn't cricket.

For one thing, don't care about your karma. And if you care so much about a karma system on a forum that you won't post for fear of going down, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the issue isn't with the system.

Caveat: if you're talking about the FFX or FFXIV forums, know that they're a particular kind of terrible and it has nothing to do with the karma system.

Great, another person who learned constitutional law from Duck Dynasty.

Click your name in the upper right. Click "Forum Settings". Change "Thread Filter" to "Never Filter". Now Sub-D posts won't be hidden from you.

The point of the karma system was specifically to allow for idiocy to be weeded out of the conversation, so that it didn't get derailed.

That mattered a lot more in the past, when the boards were much more active. Now it would only really matter for the XIV board, where it doesn't matter anyway, because the XIV board is the second level of hell.

Realistically, the problem is that the XI community on these boards is atrocious. Well, it was always elitist, with the game being what it was, but the individual job forums were usually pretty helpful (the warrior board, for instance, taking steps to get new Warriors level-appropriate GAxes).

But as the game aged, the newbies disappeared and people quit. So you really just ended up with a bunch of elitist idiots on a board padding their own and each other's inflated senses of self worth. When FFXIV's forums were created, a lot of them started posting there, too (for unsurprising reasons). That pretty instantly established the culture of the board as a FFXI 2.0 board, and it's not likely to change.

Let me put it this way - when FFXIV came out, a lot of posters on Zam's non-FFXIV board were playing it. We all just used a different thread in the general games forum to talk about the game, rather than gouge our eyes out with the XIV board.

TL;DR: If you don't have a thick skin, don't use the FFXIV board. Or the Asylum. Though the Asylum is a lot more inviting...

All the other boards seem dead to me. Can you give me links to other ones you're talking about. Even killingifrit.com looks completely dead now. Idi I feel like a old woman trying to find these boards online.

We do. They generally have orange names with a thingy that says "admin" under their name. Users can self moderate as well by reporting various posts which immidiatly send them to all the admins for review, or by using the Karma system to rate things up or down.

Edited, Dec 28th 2013 11:23am by Kaolian

Here is a question, what exactly are your questions that your worried about posting? And to be honest i dont think i would worry to much about the rating system on these boards most the people here are most helpful, and will assist anyway they can. If you have a question about EQ or WoW I may be able to help....

Constitutions? On the internet? I didn't mention a constitution.

All I'm saying is that on forums without rating systems, people have more varied opinions and posts that aren't a rephrasing of what other highly rated people have posted.

I relatively rarely see opinion posts getting blasted unless they're genuinely stupid, not because they're disagreeing with the rater.

Exception, of course, being the FFXIV forum. There you might get rated down just because you posted something and your name was blue.

Rule number one of posting on Allakhazam: Karma doesn't matter. If you think it does, you're doing it wrong.
Rule number two of posting on Allakhazam: Only pansies filter posts.

Edited, Dec 29th 2013 2:06am by Turin

We actually try to keep our bickering and in-fighting on the XIV board within ourselves/ to known posters - if someone is on post 1 and they post a question, they're not going to get jumped on because scaring off newbies is bad policy. (And even if it's a question some community members find stupid, karma doesn't affect you until post 10.)

Unfortunately, it's hard to shake off early first impressions.