Rapidly Declining Quality on Storm Track

[Andrew Pritchard]

This is all me and Grillo's fault, isn't it??

I'll agree that a lot of the issue is winter, and the majority of us are bored and don't know what to do with ourselves. With no forecast or NOW threads to browse non-stop we just make dumb posts elsewhere.

As far as the spelling and grammar, it's gotten to the point where obviously I've become a jerk and poked fun at some of the grammar and spelling on here. I don't mean to make it personal but it's not that hard to throw a period in the middle of your paragraph once in a while, or be familiar with the spellings of the word "tornado" or "supercell", you know? Some of the people may just be young and have not aquired typing skills yet, others may be new to the internet/forums, and the rest are just...

 

[B Ozanne]

Sorry, but there is no excuse for some of the horrible grammar and spelling on this forum. It doesn't fly in the real world, it doesn't fly in school, and it should not fly here.

It is not the foreigners I am talking about either. I am honored they would take the time to learn our language and contribute in our forum. Its the Americans. This is one of the most technologically advanced and well educated countries in the world....with free school.

BTW, I think Firefox 2.0 has a spellcheck feature built in.

 

[David Drummond]

I know a member that recieved a warning from a moderator the other night (via the board features -- not a classic verbal one via PM) for calling someone a "jerk" in the Richard Simmons B&G thread -- and it wasn't written in a derogatory context, it was a classic comeback (e.g. "your mom is a jerk") in a comical sense when a different member called Letterman a jerk above it. I'd rather be called an "MF" by a member in some forum then to sift through pages of crap from members that don't even know what a cold front is -- posting in the Forecasts section!

You'd think if a moderator has such an easy time issuing warnings over stuff like this ("ad-hominem" attacks) that you'd think there would be no problem with stupid posts and stupid posters being removed -- especially after generating a plethora of worthless posts (I can name a few members that have made pervasive stupid postings and get away with it). There are numerous members that have contributed absolutely nothing to chase-related discussion, especially in the Chase Forecasts section, yet they have posted an accumulation crap everywhere else on the forum.

It's not that hard to use the ban and warning buttons, bros! If it's done so easily on "ad-hominem" attacks, then it shouldn't be too hard to do it for other annoyances and/or violations.

Since you wanted to specifically address something I did Nick, yes I issued a warning to someone that called someone else a jerk. It's not always easy for a moderator to tell if it's a tongue-in-cheek playfull calling, or something more serious. If we can't always tell, other readers might not be able to. That sort of joking around is best left to PMs.

We don't know each and every member of the board personally to judge their actions by. Tim has a rule against it, so yes the warning was issued. I would do it again as long as Tim has a rule against it. It was a temporary warning anyway, expires in 10 days.

Tim hasn't mandated any rules yet that I know of the ban or issue warnings for "stupid posters" or "stupid posts". So no, we don't issue warnings or ban people for that at this time.

Since deciding what exactly is stupid and what isn't could vary quite a bit from one person's perception to the next person's perception, I don't see a rule coming for that.

I agree, there are some that post that could use some dire help in the spelling and grammar department, but while one of those posts is annoying, making 5 more posts to correct or make fun of the person is 5 times as annoying.

 

[nickgrillo]

Incorrect... From the Rules:

4. Quality. High post quality is a benchmark of Stormtrack membership. Users are considered to be in violation if they (1) contribute excessive numbers of "one-liners", "LOL", and "smilies" -type posts; or (2) post in Bar & Grill without a corresponding number of quality chase/weather posts. Users routinely contributing noise to our discussions are subject to suspension or termination.

I wonder why this isn't practiced regularly? I sure see no sign of this rule being enforced at all... LMAO...

 

[David Drummond]

Incorrect... From the Rules:

4. Quality. High post quality is a benchmark of Stormtrack membership. Users are considered to be in violation if they (1) contribute excessive numbers of "one-liners", "LOL", and "smilies" -type posts; or (2) post in Bar & Grill without a corresponding number of quality chase/weather posts. Users routinely contributing noise to our discussions are subject to suspension or termination.

I wonder why this isn't practiced regularly? I sure see no sign of this rule being enforced at all... LMAO...

The report button up there is open to anyone on the forum. If there is a post you feel violates a rule Nick, your more than welcome to use it at any time, and the mods will review the post/thread and determine what action (if any) is taken.

 

[Andrew Pritchard]

Wasn't there a time when people without a certain percentage of posts being weather related were not able to post in the off-topic forums? I could be wrong, but remember something similar to that a year or two ago. Is that not an option anymore with this server, or did we just decide to do away with it?

Perhaps this would just lead to a mess of non-sense in the weather sections.

 

[nickgrillo]

Wasn't there a time when people without a certain percentage of posts being weather related were not able to post in the off-topic forums? I could be wrong, but remember something similar to that a year or two ago. Is that not an option anymore with this server, or did we just decide to do away with it?

Perhaps this would just lead to a mess of non-sense in the weather sections.

Yeah, I believe your EE posts couldn't represent more than 30% of your total postings within the board -- that was implimented when the "change" occurred back in 8/05. Of course, I'm sure that has been done away with, too! Not that it helped all that much, though.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Incorrect... From the Rules:

4. Quality. High post quality is a benchmark of Stormtrack membership. Users are considered to be in violation if they (1) contribute excessive numbers of "one-liners", "LOL", and "smilies" -type posts; or (2) post in Bar & Grill without a corresponding number of quality chase/weather posts. Users routinely contributing noise to our discussions are subject to suspension or termination.

I wonder why this isn't practiced regularly? I sure see no sign of this rule being enforced at all... LMAO...

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't occurring. Moderators are encouraged to handle all administrative and moderating matters through the PM system to keep such matters off the public board. So, unless there is a problem/violation that occurs several times in a thread, any moderating/administrative action will not be specifically noted in the thread. So again, just because you don't see us acting on something certainly does not mean that we don't.

In addition, it would be extremely difficult to try to enforce a quality rule outside of the condition that you noted in the rule. If I recall correctly, we tend to do a couple of memberbase "prunings" each year, which includes performing a B&G-to-meteorological content ratio examination. In the past, users deemed to have too high of a proportion of B&G posts to chasing-related posts have been disallowed from posting in the B&G forum. This can have an unintended consequence of low-quality posts in other chasing-related subforums like "Weather and Chasing" solely because users want to decrease their B&G-to-chasing content ratio. Then, on the end of the mods, it's nearly impossible to judge what is "good enough" to count. We certainly cannot go into that game... We've had similar discussions in the past, but the general consensus from the Stormtrack membership was that everyone should be able to chime in to any discussion, with no regard to how basic or "advanced" the topic matter is. This is fine, but this also indirectly means that Stormtrack is a public forum, into which anyone can join (a la "anyone could subscribe to the old Stormtrack magazine, so anyone should be able to join Stormtrack, regardless of whether they chase"). Note that there really should be no implied connection between the knowledge level of a member or discussion (beginner, advanced, etc) and the quality of a thread. We were all beginners at one time, and there are certainly high-quality discussions that may address "beginner" topics, just as there are low-quality threads that may try to address more advanced topics. We have many members who are new to chasing and try their best to maintain a high-quality board. We appreciate all members as long as the rules are followed.

At this time, the best way, I believe, to keep ST a high-quality board is to do what we can individually. In other words, those who can should contribute to technical or more advanced discussions. Likewise, avoid commenting in those threads that you consider "low-quality". If you have concerns about a particular member, please PM one of the moderators, and we will try to address those concerns.

 

[nickgrillo]

I'll never understand the bouncing back-and-forth of this board... There was a major brawl back last summer about having people write essays / prove chase expierence in order to join. Now the board allows "anyone" to join? I'm not gonna disagree and bring that whole stupid subject back up again, but it's just interesting how this "transformation" took place and why it did... ?

(the thing is with the "anyone could subscribe to ST" is that it meant anyone could read the magazine. Now anyone can write and "contribute" [if you wanna call it that] on ST, regardless if they chase, or ever even plan to chase or not).

 

[PeteMcConnell]

It appears to me that the grammar and spelling problems are possibly based from schools not holding a high enough standard. Read any newspaper these days and you'll find error after error. It's become an epidemic as far as I can see. So at least it's not a problem just for ST. My comment would be that maybe we need to be a little less critical of others. I look at ST as a fellowship of chasers. Sometimes it seems like we're trying to scare people away from the chasing community instead of making them feel welcome. Just a thought.

 

[Robert Dewey]

By quality, do you mean all those snow threads Rob? (that was a joke....but a point as well)

Yes, that's partially what I mean... The quality on those snow threads were beyond horrible. Dan Robinson and a few others had some pretty good coverage in the reports, and there were some good forecasts in the FCST threads, but for the most part it was garbage.

 

[Scott Olson]

It's important that users use the report feature if they think a post doesn't meet the guidelines of ST. This helps us enforce the rules by pointing out users who are not in compliance with the rules. There are reasons we avoid setting clear standards for what constitues good enough for Stormtrack and enforcement would still be subjective. Instead I would encourage more of the high quality posts/threads we have seen in the past. In depth posts which show real effort and time will set the standard and rub off on some of the newer users. In the Forecast/Reports areas all of the enforcement is behind the scenes and that doesn't mean we don't miss some. With the new influx of users and time of year, it's not to suprising that some issues would arise in that area. If you see any post you think might violate the rules, please report it. Posting in that thread will only further contribute to a lower signal to noise ratio.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I think the site is doing a lot better than it was a few weeks ago when every time you'd check there'd be no new posts at all. As far as grammar and quality go, I guess it doesn't bug me, at least not enough to worry too much about it. I wanted to help some get their your/you're useage down but they just don't care, which is fine. By quality, do you mean all those snow threads Rob? (that was a joke....but a point as well)

The only thing I don't get about how things are run is the constant Weather and Chasing topics in Bar and Grill. I've wondered about that many times but like anything it doesn't really bug me enough to get wound up about(but since I'm here). For a while I never logged on and just read weather and chasing threads or the others you could read while not logged in. I never cared for much in bar and grill. Then one day I logged on and went in there and was like, crap, they are all in here(many months ago). Looks like the top 3 posts in there right now belong in weather and chasing. Not that it matters I guess.

In case people read Mike's post about the particular 'top 3' threads in B&G that should be in W&C and think "Huh?", I just moved several threads into W&C. Mike was right -- the threads involved chasing and were not "off-topic". I do understand why the original posters started them in B&G (because they indirectly involved chasing, such as how to convince someone else that you chasing is okay, or how you plan to organize your future trip, etc), but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that W&C may be a more fitting forum.

This is a good example, however... If you have suggestions, please feel free to let a moderator know (this isn't directed at Mike necessarily, but at all members). Likewise, if you have concerns, you should obviously let the moderators now. This thread itself is good in that input from members is probably the leading means by which we can improve this forum.

 

[Dustin Wilcox]

It appears to me that the grammar and spelling problems are possibly based from schools not holding a high enough standard. Read any newspaper these days and you'll find error after error. It's become an epidemic as far as I can see.

I think some of the problem can be directly attributed to Text Messaging, in this fast past world people try to get their point across as fast as possible. Honestly I don’t think the spelling and grammar is that big of a deal, if a post is filled with miss spelled words and several grammatical errors but is full of a lot of weather/scientific information I can get past the grammatical errors. The problem is often the post with many grammatical errors are frequently the ones with "useless" information, so one has a hard time looking past the errors.

 

[MatthewCarman]

Hello Everyone, Yes my spelling and grammer is not perfect I will admit. I make mistakes and I do fix them when I see them. In my review of Stormsof2006 I made some and I fixed them. It would help if people would be friendly and let you know when your spelling is bad so you can fix it instead of making fun of you or calling you names. Not that I have bad spelling or grammer but I make a mistake now and then just like everyone else.

I recently recieved a PM from soeone I will keep nameless.

Everyone on here wants to know if you are mentally challenged? If so, then your posts make sense.

Instead of trying to help me out and let me know what the problem was this guy just sent a PM that in my eyes wasint very nice. I rechecked all of my posts and saw only one mistake in the SO2006 thread. It would help us out if people would be more friendly and helpfull.

Also I was flamed for my Richard Simmons thread. I didnt see the big deal. Yes I have contributed to the weather and chasing thread many times and have nearly 200 posts. Someone mentioned earlier that people should contribute alot in weather and chasing with quiality posts before posting in the Chaser Bar and grill. I feel I have but if some people dont I wont post there anymore.

Wasn't there a time when people without a certain percentage of posts being weather related were not able to post in the off-topic forums? I could be wrong, but remember something similar to that a year or two ago. Is that not an option anymore with this server, or did we just decide to do away with it?

I have posted some things in the past I should not have but please dont hold a grudge against me anyone.

Yes I am new and Yes I do not chase yet but I did send in a paragraph about myself and I was accepted. If at any time The moderaters feel I dont belong they can ask me to leave and I wont take it personally.

My biggest complaint is unfriendly people. I have noticed many people on here are not very nice and because of this I spend alot more time visiting friendlier weather sites.

Having that said I ment no offence to anyone and I try to be respectfull of everyone here. I feel I am a nice person and wish people would treat me that way. Have a nice day and Take Care everyone.

Your Friend MatthewCarman.