Createspam, Createblog has created a monster Options

[NoSex]

Alright. I have noticed recently that these boards have been suffering from an obscene amount of spam and one on one conversation based posting. The entire vibe and feel of the boards have, in my opinion, reached a kind of low. The debate threads are more stagnant than ever. The lounge is a waste of time. The entertainment threads suffer any kind of in-depth or worthwhile posts. It just seems like the community boards are really beginning to suck.

The problem is, how would we solve this problem?
Do we need to punish those spammers? If so, will traffic decrease to a useless degree?
Maybe we can try to attract some older parties?
The debate thread could become exclusive. But, then it might actually become entirely stagnant.
The idea for an art subforum seems to be a push in the right direction.
Or maybe I should just find a more suitable community board?

What do you guys think?

[*mipadi*]

There's also the point that cB might simply be too big to be a cohesive community. cB has almost 250,000 members, and over 2 million posts. It's hard to keep up with the personal lives of even a fraction of the members on the board on a regular basis. I have no statistics on how many members are active on at least a weekly basis, but even if it's only 0.25%, that's still over 600 active members, which is a lot. That's as large as my high school, and I certainly didn't build lasting bonds with everyone else in my high school.

There might come a point where, yes, a group of members with common interests and goals do have to break off and form their own community, be it another forum, an AIM chat, an IRC chat, or just a close email connection.

Absolutely.

So, I think our goal should seem obvious: Discourage meaningless impersonal "drive-by posting," while encouraging meaingful and personal posting.

The problem is exactly how we would do that.
However, I think a fantastic start would be dumping these "drive-by posting threads" into the sanbox and creating rules against highly general and impersonal threads in anywhere but the sandbox.

Fundamentally, I like that idea. I think it would do a lot to help build bonds. But I also don't like layering more and more rules onto the community. I don't like saying "This is what you can and can't post." I think the community needs to do the work. Don't like "drive-by" threads? Then don't post in them so much. Reward threads that add a personal element to cB by posting in them. Rules can only go so far in shaping a board's personality and culture.