It has come to my attention that on many occasions, the forum sometimes generates ill feelings and ill will to and from different members (I am guilty of this myself) and can occasionally generate full on arguments resulting in members being banned from posting for a set amount of time and or lead to members deactivating their accounts or avoiding the forum altogether. Where these disagreements (often not about coins / exonumia or banknotes), clash are through culture / political or geographical ideology, and tend to start in deep routed simple misunderstanding of what has been written or a presumption of how the member is writing his or hers comment.
As a simple and non specific example, member A writes a reply with the actual intention of being helpful, witty and informative, however member B reads the reply as being aggressive, arrogant and sarcastic. If this is to do with problems in writing in one language and the understanding of actual said meaning and intention of the words, or due to the current mood of the member at the time, I cannot speculate. However I feel that even with the forum policy and the great work that the Administrators put in to cool a heated discussion down, the forum could and should be improved to negate these confrontations. I think the following problems could to be addressed to stop such misunderstandings;
1.
Problem - long standing members disagreeing over the best way to help new members with their questions through having differing beliefs and or ideas.
Causes - disagreements between members who would like to help, members who often help (but are sometimes getting annoyed at new members not helping themselves) and the new members who sometimes believe the forum is their right to an answer.
Partial Solution - Automated Robot requesting images.
2.
Problem - Forum becoming cluttered with requests from one time members to identity and value their coins.
Causes - people’s desperation to become rich, but having no intention of using the website for its main purpose, instead just creating an account to post in the forum once, never to be seen again.
Partial Solution - none.
3.
Problem - the Forum has become separated and incoherent, with worthy posts being lost in certain sections and unrelevant posts clogging up the more popular sections.
Causes - members just posting something under any section, lack of knowledge on forum policy (not reading) and protocol.
Partial Solution - Forum Policy, moderators moving questions from one section to another.
4.
Problem - lots of identification requests for ancient or unusual language coins, for example Roman or Arabic.
Causes - (my assumption here) majority of members are not using the catalogue to search via weight, size or using imaging option.
Partial Solution - none.
Further Solution ;
- Further automated robot requests requiring a link to the Numista page. (Perhaps requires subject drop down list)
- Other automated robot request; new members required to read forum policy, search the catalogue with „lettering, weight, dimensions, etc) and not just „denomination“.
- Having an automatic redirection to the FAQ page upon first forum post for new members, only allowing them to post to the forum only after they have tried to answer their own question first.
- Having a grace period before new members can post to the forum after creating an account.
- Forcing members to first search the catalogue using various search methods. (From my personal experience I know how difficult it is to search ancient coins, yet I have always scrolled through hundreds of possibilities from the weight and size inputs alone on the search function.)
- Restrictions on the number of identification or valuation requests members can post to the forum.
- Reducing the number of forum sections.
- Having a forum referee like a catalogue referee.
- Assigning identification and valuation requests to specific volunteer members.
Ideas from other members;
- DizzyBlue - How about change the title wording on the folder “Coin Identification and valuations” to just “Coin Identification” and if members choose to add valuations that's up to them. Might be less tempting for people to join and just ask for values?
- Dejan - As for identification requests, I suggest a kind of questionary to be filled, with max info a member can provide about the coin BEFORE posting. Or the key to open a thread should be a “search by image” first, something like “captcha”.
These are just my thoughts, do other members think the forum has become too tetchy? too cluttered? none welcoming?
And more importantly, do members think it needs improving? changing? modifying? Or is it working fine as it is? Does anyone have any other ideas to improve the forum or have opinions about my „further solutions“ above?
I just feel sometimes less and less members are joining the conversations in the forum for one reason or another. I know sometimes I have to take a break from the forum.
