Is it just me or are we getting a lot more trolls lately?

[mlalahoi]

Hi, First let me say that I love this site and have learned massive amounts of stuff by reading and searching and the occasional question.
I have noticed lately that the number of people who have been members for 2 weeks and have 1700 posts is rapidly increasing. I also see a lot more posts like:

"yeah I think my bro had a progam like that once whre you had to move thing diffrnt LOL maybe :) :D LOL "

and

"yeah that would be so cool if someone could do that, too bad i don't know how to program LOL :) "

and surely a lot more posts getting jacked by flame-wars and outright trolls. I know that this is somewhat inevitable when a site like XDA offers so much. IT will get hugely popular and sooner or later the AOL'ers arrive and turn it to shite. I really, really hope that doesn't happen to my favourite site...but it kind of feels like it's starting to go that way....is there anything to be done? Some kind of flag on people who get senior member status within 6 hours of joining? Some kind of age-verification system before allowing new members? Some kind of post-filtering algorithm that auto deletes any post with more than 5 smiley's and two LOL's in it??

Seriously though, maybe I'm being a jerk, but does anyone else notice this lately? Any thoughts?

[levenum]

Hello mlalahoi.

As you can see by the 'Join Date' on the top right of my post I have been here a while.

Yes this forum used to be different but it also used to be a lot smaller.
But word of unofficial WM upgrades, iPhone themes and free unlockers travels fast.

Combined with the growth in popularity of HTC it self and WM OS in general the number of users on this site has increased significantly in the past 1.5 years or so.

The administration of this site strives to keep it as free and accessible as it always was so instead of limiting user registration they increased the number of moderators to cope with the onslaught of junk posts that inevitably accompanies the increase in user base.

But we still can't catch every post, specially in general forums where there can be as many as 3 pages of new threads per day.

This is where you and other users who care about this site come in. In the top right corner of every post there is a '!' button.
You can use it to report posts that are offensive, wrong or plain SPAM. The moderators will get a notification with a link to the post and will take appropriate action.

Lets all keep the forum clean together!

[mariner_heart]

thats a good point to be raised. one has to flip so many pages just to view some serious and productive comments.

[xda27]

why is it that i try to download but get an attachment.htm file that doesnt open but my desktop or where eve i save it

[chunkymonkey]

why is it that i try to download but get an attachment.htm file that doesnt open but my desktop or where eve i save it

Probably (a) you're either using a download manager (don't) or using 'save as' (don't) or (b) you've posted this question in the wrong thread by the way (i.e. it should have its own thread I think).

Disable any download managers. Free Download Manager is one that I use and makes this mistake on attachments if I let it.

Sorry for the semi-sarcasm - wasn't a genuine flame mate. Enjoy the attachments, very important part of the site.

(Oh, look - my posts just went up by one!! :) )

[Westie277]

Hi mlalahoi i do agree i joind when i first got my hermesthanks to my teachcher showing me the wounders of XDA-Dev and I essecialy agree with the silly posts that flood xda....

XDA statuses are not something to flash off (even though i carnt wait to upgrade :D)

What i dont agree with is this:
Some kind of age-verification system before allowing new members?
Im not as old as others on this website but XDA has inspired me to try C+ programming everything...

I can agree that it is probibly the young population that causing the flood... but not all of us are alike!

[maccaberry]

Couldn't agree more with this thread. I am among those who might soon attract derision from some of you true 'senior' members. I recently joined and I am happy to say that all but 4 of my posts have been helping other members. Of the 4, 2 were questions and 2 were comments. But I would hardly say I am even close to being senior in my knowledge, yet here I am getting awfully close on post count alone.

But since I have joined and taken an active interest in the titan pages where a lot of work is going on at the moment, I have seen at least 10 ppl become senior members by asking dumb questions and making completely erroneous advice that in some cases could almost brick a device - all in name of their beloved post count.

For an interested novice (but definitely not a noob) like myself I would welcome a ranking system whereby you could see the seniority of a poster not by their post count but by their reputation for actually helping others or doing useful development.

At ppcgeeks they have a system whereby you can vote for ('rep') a post or poster to indicate if it was useful or just drivel. This way you have a more democratic system than just relying on the poor overworked moderators to do the filtering. These 'rep' votes increase your reputation as a useful poster.

It's very unlikely this system could be abused because you can't 'rep' yourself. This would really weed out the trolls.

[cushcalc]

. . . I would welcome a ranking system whereby you could see the seniority of a poster not by their post count but by their reputation for actually helping others or doing useful development.

At ppcgeeks they have a system whereby you can vote for ('rep') a post or poster to indicate if it was useful or just drivel. This way you have a more democratic system than just relying on the poor overworked moderators to do the filtering. These 'rep' votes increase your reputation as a useful poster.

It's very unlikely this system could be abused because you can't 'rep' yourself. This would really weed out the trolls.

This seems like a great idea! I wonder if this forum's software has this feature available . . . ?

Edit: I just checked out the ppcgeeks forums - another nice feature is Multiquote - really slick way to respond to 2 or more posts at once, rather than having to cut and paste like here.