And, since Spike failed to comment before the Den was closed, just how does the Gaming Forum assist "members with questions directly related to digital art" or "help other artists with art"? Or is this yet another selective application of the standards that R'osity's become infamous for?

"Cyber, the problem with that is, any thumbnail with a nude woman or breasts in it will get the "most viewed" everytime. Thats the downside of it."

My point exactly by it not being "Family Friendly".

However, the only way to pull it away from being a "popularity contest" is to prohibit, in as much as possible, the abuses that make it so and to, somehow, increase the population of the Community participating in it (which will help squelch "ballot stuffing"). They could always exclude any that have the "Nudity" flag from the running, if they desired, just like they could limit the genre or any other identifying attribute.

It can be done, but it takes planning, coordination, and work, which will probably stop it from being done since it most likely doesn't contribute enough to the bottom line to make it a worthwhile investment in time and coding.

Personally, I think the Hot20 should be the 20 most viewed images (from individual IPs that is). That way, it's based solely on hits vs votes. However, I suppose, trying to track the number of views would be too hard to code into the system considering some of the reasons other improvements are shot down. Also, considering the content of the most popular images, it may detract from the "Family Friendly" environment.

Is that any different from when they were new? ;)

"How would we go through the entire site and erase the posts made by any given member?"

A well-crafted SQL statement? :)

"Now if each active member could each just send me $1....;o)"

You'd probably end up with a few grand, at best. :)

There's no problem with High Speed Internet... Do you think they'd be able to do that to you in just 15 minutes on dial-up? :)

Attached Link: Den: About this forum

Refer to the link if you want to know the reasons the Den came about. There was some topic drift - especially toward the end - but it should help explain a little if you missed the grand opening.

"They are not under any obligation, however, to allow anything to be posted by anyone at any time. Quite the contrary, they are often under a number of legal and other obligations to their investors and business partners to specifically restrict certain kinds of information. And, even if they weren't, they pay the server bills, they buy the hard drives, they employee programmers and designers to bring this service to us; they can define their own rules, and they do."

Under normal circumstances, I'd agree with you 100%. But closing down an Off Topic forum, for posts that were, well, Off Topic (vs the TOS mentioning banning individual people - not closing down an entire forum - for posting personal attacks; which were alleged and continued after the forum was closed) seems a tad overbearing and, IMHO, not in compliance with the agreement made at the time of membership (aka the TOS).

AFAIC, R'osity made their decision and I'm fine with it, but it doesn't mean that people have to agree with the reasoning behind the decisions. In fact, The Den emerged, more or less, as "OT Lite" a few weeks/months later because there was, is, and always will be a desire to communicate information that is not necessarily topical to the theme of the forums/site.

"I myself have clicked on a link that contained a session id Lillian that had been sent to me in an IM here on rosity..."

"Excuse me Armorbeast, please email or IM me the link in question. I would like to see that for myself."

I think there was a lack of punctuation and Armorbeast didn't intend to say the link was from LillianH, but another member.

The sad part is that some of us have provided potential fixes, even doing the grunt work, and none have been tried, AFAIK.

SOS-DD.

That's one thing R'osity'll most likely never know: A forum member/customer here may just be a CEO or relative of someone important in a corporation elsewhere where they may eventually seek to do business.

I wonder how many potential Bondware customers have donned the moniker of "member", checked the place out, and decided to go elsewhere?

That'd be one of my first priorities in researching a company.

Message edited on: 07/22/2004 18:17

Actually, I guess I already did share the files as people can use the images from the page and type out the text if they wanted to. :)

I don't know, either - never touched a MAC in my life. :) However, they're easy to make with the right software (I used Adobe ImageReady) and test on any platform.

I don't know if we can attach .zip files, but I'd be willing to share the test page and image files for people to try out.

Message edited on: 07/17/2004 10:01