Island of Bad Posts?

April 11, 2001 12:31 PM

I just noticed another insanely long no-link post was pulled this morning. It might be useful to have a Island of Bad Posts archive where stuff that gets pulled is anonymized and listed along with a 25 word description of why it was pulled. This page could be linked to the register page for new users so they can learn through negative example as well as learning by positive example just by reading the site. Plus I'm sure a lot of us are just curious about what's getting pulled....
posted by jessamyn to feature requests at 12:31 PM (6 comments total)

In general, I don't like to teach people by showing them what's wrong. I've noticed things get off on the wrong foot if you say "welcome! now don't do this, that, or the other thing, and don't even think of doing *that* ever."

I think a better approach is to focus on positive things (I haven't implemented this yet, but I will this week), new users should see a list of good things, what they can aspire to, and what I think the site could/should be. Reinforce positives, and people may act in a positive fashion.

I hate to say it, but having a graveyard of no-nos just puts me on the spot, having to defend every action, creating more work for me. I don't like acting as the supreme overlord here, because really, everyone's a part of what makes the site great, and something like this would tend to reinforce that it's all mine. I rarely delete stuff, usually only a couple things a week, so I don't know if it's a problem.
posted by mathowie at 12:49 PM on April 11, 2001

If you don't want to, I'd love to be Supreme Overlord. It would look great on my resume.
posted by waxpancake at 12:52 PM on April 11, 2001

It doesn't matter whether you stripped the names off the post; everyone would still know who did them, and those who didn't know would would find out.
posted by aaron at 1:57 PM on April 11, 2001

I've still got feathers...
posted by norm at 2:34 PM on April 11, 2001

I think Jessamyn raises a good point though: it's hard to know what's wrong around here. I don't want to see a list of "this isn't allowed" and "this is bad" but sometimes I would like a thread to remain but be closed (this happened recently).

When a post just goes away, it's like we've swept it under the rug. When the offending poster gets an admonition from Matt, only s/he learns. If some offending posts could remain, with an accompanying explanation regarding the unacceptability of its contents, we would all learn.
posted by megnut at 2:21 PM on April 12, 2001

If we're worried about entering the land of bruised egos but still want to see examples of poor posts, I bet it would be pretty easy to manufacture some based on similar deleted posts. There seem to be several flavors of bad posts (self-promotion, no link, double post, lousy description, etc) that pop up time and again.
posted by Aaaugh! at 3:02 PM on April 12, 2001