If you (collectively) only want posters who are prepared to read all the rules and/or lurk for lengthy periods to get a feel for the place before posting, that is of course your decision. Perhaps it’s good to alert newcomers that a free-and-easy style is not a good fit for the forum. But I think it is pretty off-putting for casual posters.
At this point it would probably be better to concentrate on keeping old members rather than gaining new ones, and whether that is best accomplished by stricter or less strict moderation is quite the question.
We want people who follow the rules, period.
If they’re new and slip up and get a note before figuring out what they should/shouldn’t do, no harm.
If they continue to be disruptive after that, I’d rather they weren’t around.
Cut them slack because we can’t afford to lose them? Once we start that crap, this place isn’t worth coming to. I see this “Rules are fine as long as long as they favor me, otherwise I’ll just do what I want” attitude in politics and all over the internet, and I think it sucks.
Nope. Not at all. I’ve has been asking for harsher moderation basically as long as I’ve been here, and I’m not the only minority poster who has.
And that includes women-as-minorities, where the now-harsher moderation around misogyny was because it was very much asked for.
Feature, not a bug.
In the same way that you (individually) prefer house guests who are able to navigate themselves to the bathroom and defecate into the designated toilet appliance, versus taking a cheerful dump on the coffee table. That’s your decision to enforce your preference for the former, and to be an unwilling, unwelcoming host to the latter, even though it means you reduce the number of house guests who are allowed to stay with you.
Okay, then accept this is a forum for grumpy old men who want the kids to stay off their collective lawn, and forget about attracting anyone else.
You’re trying to set up a false dichotomy between that and chaos. That’s ridiculous. Every functioning online community has enforced rules. Name one that doesn’t.
You wouldn’t want to let in the wrong sort of (X), after all.
Different cultures have different values, so the desire to be inclusive is inevitably in tension with building the sort of society you want to live in.
There are multiple online communities that embrace transphobic, racist, or sexist behavior. If this place doesn’t fit their “free speech” needs they can go to them or create their own. If this place dies because of that, well that’s what is going happen.
Yes, every functioning community has rules. I think long timers don’t realise how finicky and arcane the rules here appear to outsiders, nor how hostile those responses were. Few newcomers are going to meet your high standards, but that’s not a problem if it’s what you want.
Why do I know that asking for examples of finicky and arcane SDMB rules is a waste of my time?
Talking about “the rules” is useless. What rules are finicky and arcane, and how? This is literally the forum to discuss that sort of thing. The powers that be actually listen to feedback and make adjustments when warranted. In fact, they just got through re-doing the rules and asked for feedback, see here.
Hmm… I don’t see you participating in the discussion. Why not?
The distinctions between the various forums are the most obvious example. Even established posters often have threads moved.
It’s a tradeoff, the whole question is a tradeoff. Judging by the responses here, most members don’t really want new people joining, and it isn’t likely to happen anyway, so just enjoy the forum for what it is.
I don’t post regularly anymore, so I didn’t know and don’t care. Now I’ve popped in and seen that nothing has changed, I will cease wasting my time.
Yes, I certainly can remember all the new, and old, posters summarily banned for breaking that rule!
IOWs try again, but this time actually bring something.
Are you talking about the ones that kept breaking rules even after being warned many times?
Or it could be that the price you would have us pay to bring in people is dear a price to pay. An example of a message board that you think does it right would go a long way, because without such an example all we have is your unsubstantiated thoughts to go on.
I think I’ve seen one poster warned for starting threads in the wrong place. And that was after more than a week of them doing it and being, politely, asked to pay attention to where they were starting threads.
Well okay then.