Blow it up. Trade everyone for draft picks.
The SoSH boards are the only other forums I've seen that have a comparable feel to Celticsblog at its best. They seem to have a strong culture of self-policing that I am not sure we want on these forums.
I feel like the only real solutions are:
1. Ignore button
2. Lead by example and hope posters see the quality of post(s) most desire.
3. Find a way to call-out bad posts in a non-confrontational way.
Or we can tank, I guess. 14% chance it works.
jiri presents us all with three very good options to consider, if not rules to abide by. (thanks jiri)
an
ignore button would be welcomed and help to clean up each person's feelings and hence approach to posting. SoSH (of which i am a member) has that option and i have used it only twice. but it removed what i considered to be an antagonistic, immature, and generally obnoxious pair of posters. my posting and reading pleasure soared as a result of not seeing them.
i have urged before that the all mighty arbiters of CS please restore that function here. i now respectively do so again.
quality of posts/calling out, as i have mentioned before, SoSH has one central and abiding mandate for everyone -
don't suck. really, you can ask them and they will tell you that is the case. and they enforce it. mods regularly chastise posters if they post sucky posts. and if the posters continue to suck, then they do not belong there and are booted.
indeed, there is a super-secret-special-subform just for discussing whether or not new posters are worth keeping around. the forum benefits from this healthy discussion.
but they all take part in enforcing that rule. it helps everyone as a result, and, it demonstrates that SoSH is not for everyone. they have even managed to transform themselves....relatively. the bad old days of personal pile ons, NSFW mysogeny, and juvenile crudeness are much reduced. and the joy of posting there is much increased.
cripes guys, if SoSH can transform itself, so can CS. it begins with letting everyone know that the quality of post counts and affects everyone here. i would imagine that at first our magnificent mods would spent a lot of time telling people, professionally, things such as "stop attacking others or you get a time out", "support your baseless opinions with proof and argumentation or stop posting", "this place is not about you, but about the Red Sox. you need to stop trying to be the center of the discussion", and my personal favorite "with all due respect, this is the stupidest ****ing post i have ever seen. you need to not suck."
SoSH has standards, good ones. and they enforce them. oh, and they also do not hesitate to let posters know when they post good posts. very supportive in that way.
thank you roy for starting the thread. thank you jiri for you constructive points above. thank you jeff for keeping this place running. thank you everyone for the good posts and good humor you have displayed.
let's not suck.