A new outsiders perspective - (Shoot me if you will) I am an educated man 4 year engineering degree (not weather related), but when I came on here I was made to feel very inferior and uneducated by many posters. The sites mods particularly. I am an experienced mod since the mid 90's, and this is a classic case of over modding. That's fine if you want an exclusive club, which those that run this site may want. But it's not going to foster growth and folks like me sure as hell are not going to hang around long term. Now I pretty much just pop in once in a while to see if I missed any big weather stories and rarely post.
Andrew, did you take the time to read through and digest the
site rules, as well as those pertaining specifically to the
Target Area? Though I ask from more of a rhetorical standpoint, I only inquire candidly and do not mean that question to come across as insulting.
There is no intention of making this site an exclusive haven for the storm chasing illuminati, i.e., the site is not limited to only veteran storm chasers with an established reputation or those who hail from meteorology-related academia, but I can attest that of all the message boards I have either posted on or avidly read, since the Internet became popular in the 1990s, Stormtrack is indeed the most heavily moderated, and it has been since I joined the site. Again, this is nothing new; the site has been operated in a similar manner since its inception as far as I can tell. The reasoning for stringent expectations for post content isn't to foster an exclusive club and berate newer members; on the contrary, the goal has always been to promote a
professional resource of information available to storm chasing and severe weather aficionados.
I think the aforesaid example that Robert gave of problematic, one-liner posts that sometimes have plagued quality FCST posts made by other members serves as a great example of my conjecture. This really isn't anything new. The staff strives to be as professional and polite as they possibly can be when addressing posts that run afoul of site rules or procedures, so I wouldn't take that as being akin to trying to make anyone feel "inferior or uneducated."
Many sites probably don't have such a litany of rules or procedures to follow, especially for various sub-forums like our Target Area, but that's always been the one key ingredient that separates Stromtrack from many other message boards and Internet forums where threads often quickly evolve into one-liners and off-topic discussions that are of little relevance to the original topic. While there may be further room for improvement in regards to making the site rules and procedures less ambiguous, Tim and the staff members (past and present) have tried to reorganize the rules and procedures several times over the past few years to make them less cumbersome and more lucid.