Oh no, not arbitrary at all.
If you look at the number of relevant and new/interesting information containing beginner posts, they are fairly low (I'd guess in the order of 30% max).
Is it fair to filter out by user name / post count / join date?
Of course it's fair, I'm only doing it to myself.
I'm not censoring anybody.
I'd just programmatically refuse to see messages from people who are:
- joined 3 months ago and now have 1000+ messages (most likely off-topic spammers contributing only noise)
- people with very little posts and probably have not used the search at all (too lazy, can't be bothered or whatnot)
- people with certain ids (ignore this poster is nice, although a bit cumbersome to manage large kill lists)
Of course, I'd probably initially miss some very enlightening and interesting posts as well. Every now and then at least.
However, if they really are that truly remarkable, I'm sure some other people will cross-post to them, after which I can read them.
This place is really in dire need of some social filtering
This used to be readable and manageable three years ago, but these days it's the same questions repeated almost every day, posts in completely wrong forums, people not using the search, thread crapping all over the place and people posting silly/useless/noisy posts just to get their post count up.
And moderators doing very little about it (I can feel their pain, the work load for that would be horrendous if one started to clean things up).
I can understand why some people have started to go back to headwize and other newer places. Much better S/N ratio there.
It's just so much easier to follow things, when people:
- search first, read first, ask questions a bit later
- post in the proper forum
- post in the proper thread
- post proper content (and not a full page quote and "ditto" at the end)
But that's not happening.
I'm not willing to give up on hope yet myself, but I guss I have to resort to some heavy filtering to be able to manage myself. I'd like to visit here every now and then and use my time available to read interesting posts and hopefully also post interesting stuff.
Not spend all my stuff reading frequently asked questions, off-topic threads/posts and whatnot.
Do I think there could be a better solution to filtering (e.g. a newbies' forum or something better)? Sure, but it's not within my power to make that happen.
So I'll try to filter.
If I manage to make a useful filter for myself. I'll post it here. One doesn't have to use it. It's up to oneself to decide that.
