Thread

Dear EE friends,

(I would very much like to hear your input on this. So if you have any experiences and ideas in this area, please let me hear!)

We’re running a Discussion Forum since 18 months back, a religious forum in which all points of view are welcome. This obviously has its pro’s and con’s. You provide a platform for people to have an open and honest debate about life’s biggest mysteries. At the same time, more often than not, you get very low, even base, quality of some of the discussions. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to keep a sufficiently high quality here.

Now, since you currently can’t have any moderation approval of Forum Posts, is there any way you could approach a more letter-to-the-editor-newspaper-style-debate – with or without the Forum module – where people can send us their contributions and we can pick those contributions that shows good quality? Much like a newspaper would do.

If you would choose to accomplish this without the Forum Module, how would you go about it? Does anyone have any experience on this? Ideas? Suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

//Mats

P.S. Maybe somone has developed an extension or something that adds moderation approval functionality to the Forum Module? That would instantly solve all our problems. D.S.

Hi Mats,

Not really sure about the forum software as I have never had a site to use it on yet but I suppose you could use a weblog entry which would act as the first post in the thread and then use comments for all the rest of the posts. Comments can be moderated before going live so you could pick and choose in that way perhaps.

Don’t know if that helps at all?

Best wishes,

Mark

mWall, I think mark is correct - you are looking more for a standard blog function.

Now, you CAN do something like this - you can limit your members to ONLY REPLIES and not allow them to start topics - that may help.

I run a BIG forum, and we have found that having some reasonable moderators and setting the tone (or rules or guidelines) can help a lot.

But, heck, I would not want to run a political or religious forum!

If you want to kill your community then moderate. I for one pretty much left the Joomla community because after the licensing argument of last year I felt that the leadership of that project wanted no dissent in the community and moderated the forums to death. And I am not the only one that left because of it. People flow to where they can voice their opinions. Unfortunately for you moderating religious discussions can be ridiculous. I can only imagine some of the discussions you are seeing…

Thanks, guys, for your replies! Yes indeed, we’re seeing some very poor discussions. Running a religious forum isn’t the easiest thing I’ve done in my life. But many people feel a need to express their feelings and seem to be quite happy about having a place to do that. So I guess we’re just supplying a long-felt want.

I will consider your suggestion to simply start a new weblog with entries (topic starters)  + moderated comments. This will surely take some steam off the Discussion Forum and raise the quality level of the more important subjects a few notches.

Cheers,  😊

// Mats