Hello, Pie (or perhaps soggy walnuts? no sure which of the duplicate accounts I should refer to).
Thanks for your feedback. We’re always looking to improve and we welcome feedback! I do agree with some things that @anon99370119 has said, even if I might have put it a little differently.
To add to those thoughts, a hardware store would typically attract people genuinely looking for help on a project of some kind and my guess is that they’d be adults for the most part (and perhaps mostly North American in this case?). By contrast, we cater to a very wide age group from around the world. We have quite a bit of dialog that gets lost in translation.
In addition to that, the flight sim community in general is a pretty passionate bunch and things get heated often. Add language and age barriers to that and you can typically end up with trolls. I would be that a hardware store or forum doesn’t quite have the same set of challenges. Square peg in a round hole (to put it in hardware terms). All of this leads to the need for trust levels, otherwise the job becomes too cumbersome for our mods (who are volunteers). Without mods (and we have been working on overall language and tone internally; something the moderators have embraced and are rocking!) the Infinite Flight brand and community we’re so proud of can suffer greatly.
Having said all of that, we’re always looking for ways to improve and we’ll take your thoughts to heart.
Pie makes some good points, compared to some forums I belong to, this forum is very strict,however this forum has such a wide range of ages of the users and experience it needs to be like that. There are some areas that it can be relaxed on (I won’t comment here as some have been discussed above) but overall I think there is a good job been done.
I see where you’re coming from but there’s two major issues with this;
TLs are built in with discourse and can’t be removed
The target audiences are very different. For THF it’s more people aged 30+ and for the IFC we have many 13 and 14 year Olds. Now that’s not to say that if you’re 30 or older you can’t be on the IFC, it’s just that there is younger, and sometimes less mature people here.
I can agree to a certain extent. Sometimes I feel that I can’t even express my opinion. Once I said I that a livery shouldn’t have been added on the 737 IN MY OPINON and it got flagged almost instantly. I love the community and I am happy with the mods jobs but I’m kind of sick of the way it is run sometimes.
If you ever have a question on why a post was closed or deleted, please PM a member of the moderation team. We are human and do make mistakes from time to time. I’ve closed posts thinking one thing and then someone would message me about it and reopen it. Often times I will get an email on why I closed something and after I explain it many accept and see why it was closed.
Majority of the flags I see are off-topic comments. Posting a random picture of a 320 in a 737 thread for example with no text. The reason we close duplicate feature requests is because we want the votes in the right spot and it is not fair to the community to have a dozen duplicate requests to vote on. There is also a large number of flags that we ignore for various reasons and the thread stays intact.
We aren’t out there actively looking for your posts/threads to delete, I promise! Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions, we will be more than glad to help.
I agree with some of the things you are saying, however, this one is the one I kinda go not really not that this is a bad idea, its that the categories set out the guidelines for the community, without these categories, you’d have a complete mess and even the mods might suffer a severe brain aneurysm.
I agree with some part on the required trust levels. However the mods/admins of the community decided it best to have it the way it is. And you even see some people who doesn’t have the ability to make posts in Real World Aviation post really good topics and they get to keep their topic.
All I’m saying is, without the all the strictness and all of the rules and regulations, this would be more of a madhouse than the communtiy you’d like it to be.
I like the IFC strict, now there are things that should be tweaked. I agree with changes need to be done with #real-world-aviation to at least TL1. I think that #features should be TL3 to avoid half written requests. But TLs need to stay. It isn’t hard to get up to TL1 or 2 to be able to post everywhere.
I’m sorry but I’m going to disagree with TL3’s only in #features. People want to request things they want in the game. I don’t see why we need only TL3’s to request stuff. If we do that, not all the TL3’s will think of things a TL2 might have.
As far as I know it is TL2’s who can start to threads in Real World and Features? It’s onky TL1 who can not start a thread, but they can like read and reply to any thread which will build up their form “ XP ‘ (for want of a better expression) and so reach TL2.
My only real comment is that sometimes the threads are not allowed to drift in the same way a natural conversation does. There is a difference between off-topic and thread drift posts , however not always hard to see and so nees to be policed according
TL2 is currently needed for Features. Not everyone can make it to TL3 so TL2 is a good compromise. The reason a TL is needed for features is that (in my experience since becoming a mod) new users to the forum sign up and instantly request a livery/feature/plane that has been out there for a year or more without searching. Requiring a trust level is an effort to hope they have learned how the forum works and functions, mainly the search button, before posting feature requests.
Many if not all of the rules have very logical reasons behind them.