Look, I set this to site feedback, but it’s not what’s wrong with the site, rather, what’s wrong with the people… Let me explain.
So, we have a new person come to the forum. A fresh mind, full of new ideas. (and some old ones)
He posts one, and gets bashed by some random guy saying “it’s already been suggested. Search up your suggestion before posting”
How would you feel if you were this person. Personally, I would want to leave.
Here’s why we shouldn’t do this. When people suggest stuff like this, we can work with it better based on info from newer devlogs. So please, stop bashing people for suggesting new things. Even if they have been suggested before
I understand what you mean, we don’t want newcomers to instantly be turned off of the forum. Ideally, a newcomer would search around on the forum for a topic that he might want to post. If he sees something that has already been suggested exactly how he imagined it, there would be no point to making another post.
However, if a person sees a topic that has already been suggested, but not to their personal ideal, they could then improve upon the previous posts by taking previous ideas and combining them with his own to create a unique topic.
This is however, the ideal scenario, one which we are not presented with all too often. I generally see the exact same post over and over again by different people with nothing new added on, leading to people stating that this has already been posted.
All of the topics have already been discussed to death too, which isn’t helping matters, the only real new topics we get are ones from Devlogs which only happen once every month.
When I first joined the forums, before I had even made my first post, I was quite put off by how quickly posts would be attacked by a forum regular who had already made their mind up on the subject in a somewhat related thread three centuries ago or because of some small detail that needed tweaking. Complaining about it didn’t do anything, but I’ve tried to approach vague, poorly translated, poorly researched, poorly formatted, and redundant posts like they have some potential and the topic can be guided into the right direction, and to give the serious posts that are already on the right track exactly the harsh scrutiny they need to get everything tweaked to get the idea as close to perfection as I can see how. I like to imagine that I’ve followed through on these principles which is why I never look at my own post history but if I’m honest, I haven’t always.
I agree with this post, I took a break from the forums because of this. (plus I want to wait for the game to come out before I make more suggestions but that’s a tangent.)
Disciplining your users and making them educate themselves on what’s being said and ehat has been said is a great idea. I should know. Three or four years ago, when I first got into Unturned, I was told by other users to stop suggesting things that’d been said before (meaning recently over there. It’s far more streamlined and professional on these forums) and eventually I grew to research previous topics similar to mine to expand upon those instead of making a carbon copy repost. Same thing happened on my old TF2 server group. People would suggest things and we’d tell them that a topic like that already exists, please look it up beforehand to avoid reposts. I’m not advocating this but what happened was we eventually weeded out the people who would suggest things just to suggest them or get them in the servers and ended up with on average smarter and more dedicated community members, many of which went on to become staff there.
Like humans, we learned things from mistake. Once ate a lava-hot burrito, you’ll learned to wait for it to cool down. Once eating a spoiled food, you’ll learned to read the expiration date. If we didn’t say that it’s already suggested, then he/she would just keep doing that mistake.
But, if we’re too harsh then yes, it is our fault.
Again, not everyone like to willingly learn something from a random stranger.