[ThirdSight]

I have to agree with a lot of what EveV has been suggesting. In fact, a lot of the suggestions I can trace back to GaiaOnline (lo, how far my life has sunk). There's sections on there where people can be immature, rant & rave about stupid things, and then there's other parts of the forums where people can get a bit more serious. It just gives people a place to goof off, even for the most serious and honest of posters.

Forcing there to be a requirement wouldn't fly at all. If they can't get in there at the beginning of their membership, members don't care about getting in there at all; it's just a forum after all.

There are, as far as my near-sightedness can take me, three issues regarding the implimentation of a "Serious Discussion" forum. The first is that anyone of any age can sign up to use these forums. There's a thread swimming around somewhere about a 12 year old worrying about being a good mother. Language is always, for one reason or another, an offensive matter, and when people get passionate about a debate, they'll start using "adult language" (a term that, quite frankly, doesn't and can't exist). Regardless, that's one issue.

Another revolves around passionate people. As stated earlier, when people get passionate about an issue, and a debate starts getting hot, people will start getting nasty with one another; it doesn't happen all the time to rational adults, but it does happen from time to time. When that happens, people get offended, and when people get offended, they'll leave the forums. We'd start losing membership left and right because of silly, immature arguments that started from (you guessed it) the "Serious Discussion" forum, a place where we're supposed to act like rational adults who won't get hot and bothered over silly trivial things.

The third issue is that we just simply don't have enough active members for this to be effective. In the future, maybe; now, no way. Looking back to Gaia again, the community there is massive, so a serious debate can last for quite some time. Here, on the other hand, a serious conversation would only last for, at most, maybe a week before the thread starts to slowly deviate from the original topic. Threads would be started up left and right (not a problem), but they'd be closed down fairly quickly (that's the problem).

A good idea, but there's just a few things that need changing/addressing beforehand.




...Sorry for the Wall O' Text.