Let's talk the most important things in life
... MGoPoints. There once was a time not so long ago that the measure of a man was his aggregate MGoPoints. In what is becoming a yearly tirade, I will outline why we should go back to this:
1) MGoPoints matter. Yes they do, otherwise they wouldn't be displayed underneath your name, ipso facto they matter.
2) Life was more exciting. Is it the right time to make a Brady Hoke can't recruit joke without a "/s" behind it? Will people laugh and click, and will I get to watch the little green score rise until it says +37, or will my score plummet? I pity the unlucky souls who have never experienced the joy of a true posbang after a well-crafted remark, or the despair of a potent negbang after uttering the phrase "DickRod".
3) Do you dislike this post? What are you going to do, -1 me? Oops, I don't care, because I just gained 1 MGoPoint by posting my inane thoughts to the board.
4) How do we defend ourselves against the likes of King of Belch, RDT, or Magnus (when he gets in those grumpy moods)? There was no greater feeling of solidarity among the board proletariat in defense of the aggression of stupidity than to band together in an onslaught of red downvoting. What do we see now when 100 people neg someone? -1 Trolling. How ... uninspiring.
I leave you with this:
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me."
Brian Cook, I beg you, I urge you, I implore you. Let us become men, and put away this childish playtime of not keeping score. Give us back the old ways, the better ways, the times when we gained our MGoPoints not by virtue of pushing the submit key, but by paying the iron price of exercising our witticisms, well-thought rebukes, and Mike Cox jokes. Bring us back to the glory days. Bring us back to the days where THE_KNOWLEDGE would receive + 189 for saying "Comments commence". Do it, or I'll be forced to write this same post next offseason, just like I did last year.
but we need to know who the dingleberry was who thought up this clusterfuck rating system in the first place. "Overrated" "Underrated" WTF?
Somebody must be punished. Justice must be served.
Soup.
can any of you forward me a AAA 'trip ticket' to bolivia? i might as well study up on my new homeland.
do they have football in bolivia....?
I am in the minority but I prefer to use words over neg bombing people so it is clear to them why they suck. The point system is lazy, IMO.
that words are important, but in the old system I don't remember many people forgoing a comment by simply upvoting or downvoting.
If anything, the aggregation of positive or negative points displayed an important level of passion that is sorely lacking in the current system.
That intensity could occasionally be euphoric, and was often juvinile & herd-like; but it was passion nonetheless.
So it is the lack of passion that is missing and the points that will bring that back? I don’t bite, they are just meaningless points on the internet. Some people post on every other thread and have a ton of points but don’t add much value. Others enjoy the reading bystander role but jump in with great thought when something rattles them up. I go in waves of when I post or don’t but it has nothing to do with MGopoints and I don’t take a user’s comment less seriously if they only have a few points.
From the guy who uses "Bro" in every post??
Yeah Bro.
important that goal,,, er, miss was? I am sure it meant alot to that player. I have always said its all about perspective. I laughed the first time I seen this miss because I am not a fan, player or coach on this team.
The current system is like a good steady, employer matched Ira, just keep plugging away...
A very wise man who must have been from Latin America—since he spoke Latin--once uttered the phrase:
“Argumentum ad populum”:
It means: The more people that agree with a statement, the more true it must be.
So, we should not spend so much time thinking and writing. We oughta just do more rating of other peoples’ thoughts. Then, through our punishment of thoughts different from our own, we can create a board with complete agreement. (a kind of animal farm without the animals).
Eventually, we won’t need to think at all about what’s said in a post. We won't even need to read it. We can automatically tell how good it must be by just looking at the poster's point total.
I can work at a reasonable pace to gain my points. I can also strike it rich and be rewarded for my brilliance. It all depends on the incentives to determine how much and on which topics I post.
the old system made me lurk for a long time to get a feel for the place before I just jumped in. Now there is no real consequence for just signing up and posting crap. It gave this place a unique self regulated culture found nowhere else.
I started posting in the current point system, so I don't have first hand experience about what the old days were like. But oh the stories I've heard.
...so I feel cheated. Sounds like I missed out on a glorious time.
Please place my point in an unmarked envelope. Thank you.
Thought this was going to be a thread after the Wings loss. Im so down. I thought we were going to talk about the real things in life that matter. I guess not
As a guy who came from the boards, and a onetime diarist who was always a little too proud of how much I shot up the points ranks whenever my articles got a zillion pluses, it took a lot of convincing for me to give up on the plus/minus thing. I even had an awesome image I'd post to super-plus something that makes no sense without plusing:
Original:
Update:
I got turned around. Brian doesn't like to explain the things but there are good reasons for not reinstating pluses and minuses like we had before.
1. Site changes tend to gum up the works because it's Drupal and Brian just taught himself how to do everything, and the plug-ins are really just Linux-like overgrown macros people wrote for their own usage. Not a lot of sites of our size still use it for that reason. Also there are only 10k other sites in the U.S. of our size, almost all of which just develop their own code.
2. Whole friggidy site is going to be changing. People like the pluses and minuses so they'll come back then. Until then we're playing out the string on this site and have no time or reason to go through the messy process of incorporating a plug-in that's not necessary. Soon enough complaints like these will be nothing next to the massive outrage from folks who hate the new site and don't know where everything is and are ticked off that the feature they come for isn't in the main window.
3. This site is Drupal 6. The Drupal 6 modules aren't supported anymore. That plus and minus system we used before hasn't been updated since 2009. The other (better) since 2007. That's 3 Michigan head coaches ago!!!
4. The more modules running, the bigger our database has to be, and the slower the site will be for readers who are signed in.
5. What you're talking about is going back to an ancillary system that didn't do as good a job at actual reader moderating as the current one. Why reinsert a thing that 200 people out of 300,000 regular readers care about?
In all seriousness, I strongly disagree that the old system wasn't as good at moderation. The old system showed how strongly this board is against MLive/RCMB behavior. I also disagree that only 200 out of 300k care about this, or at least I am curious where you get that data. I honestly think the old way of doing things was better because it taught people how to act, in a way that was much more intuitive than this strange system where you can only see up to +5 or -1.
I understand the coding issues, but that's not really what I was arguing.
200 i get from the max # of people you'll usually see commenting on the board every day. The majority of our readers will lurk for a year, comment on and off, and otherwise to care about the user experience.
What sucks is it's our core audience it bothers.
I AM THE KWISATZ HADERACH, AND I SAY THE MGOPOINTS MUST FLOW
books way better than any of the films, but i got that.
now to test your claim as the K.H. - just exactly how will the football team do this year, and will we beat ohio?
I don't understand the coding issues (EECS 100 kicked my ass royally), but miss the fun and intuitive nature of the point system. Didn't someone do a fancy survey that showed that most users (or I guess those that completed the survey) overwhelmingly missed many components of the older system?
And the new site will have far more complaints than this. But I have to agree I don't see how you can say the new system does a better job. At best it's a zero sum game and really doesn't do any better or worse a job. The old system you could stop people from posting threads, and subjected their point total to shame. This system does absolutely nothing. It may be going from nothing to just a little bit, but if there's any difference, the old way was better. I don't get how this system could in any way be better. (Because you can label it something that has nothing to do with what you're + or - ing the post for??)
Brian and crew have not one, but two HTTV publications to turn around here in the next couple of months. I'm in favor of the old points system returning as well, but there are only so many hours in the day.
I think my best post had +28 and -24 for a net of +4... those were the days...
Mine seems to go from 1 to 2 then back to 1 again for seemingly no reason whatosever. I guess it really doesn't matter, especially after three glasses of pinot noir on Wednesday night....
THE IMPORTANT THING IS MY WIFE IS SLEEPING WITH HER NEW BOYFRIEND WHO IS FROM CHICAGO AND I WANTED TO FOCUS ON THE UNIMPORTANT THINGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
/s?
And to you 299,800 lurkers out there, you will enjoy it more than you think and you will hardly ever get your credit card numbers stolen (a joke).
if your negs fall above a certain threshold on any thread, your points will be cannibalized. You will be rounded up by the mods and dropped off at a virtual jail---then your ip address will be strip searched for all the personal details obtainable and your access will be locked up with chains with only occasional 30-minute breaks to get out of the cell to exercise your feeble posting abilities.
In this prison, the "guards" will be those with high points. They will be given authority to dictate 24-hour-a-day rules. They will try in every way to humiliate the "prisoners"every remaining post in an effort to break their will. They will be “gang-tackled” with a flood of negative points from guards everywhere any time they say anything that is remotely disagreeable with the guards' prior posts or known beliefs.
Some dissenters many say: “Oh, doesn’t that sound a bit like Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment?. Zimbardo and others were able to create a prison atmosphere that transformed its participants. The results revealed how much anyone, when given complete control over others, can act like a monster. Of course, the transformation eventually became so disturbing that the experiment abruptly ended.
But that could never happen here. There is never any excessive “piling on” when a post starts to get negged. Nobody ever negs anyone without a good reason--they never do so just to hide the content of posts that disagree with theirs. The only punishment given here is richly deserved. Right?
There are lots of people on here who are grumpier than I am, particularly a couple guys who spend half their time on this blog bashing me...
But I guess you know you've made it when you're mentioned in the same breath as RDT.
You seem a little too complimentary . . . are Magnus and the Glove the same poster? Or are you all RDT?
Magnus, you're like my 5th grade crush, I tease you because I secretly adore you. No, for real, I really enjoy your comments here and on TTB, I just needed another example to get to a nice round 3, and I picked you for your notoriously (at times) grumpy attitude. <3
I post exact;y as infrequently as my join date/point total indicates. If this "old system" of which I have no experience I would maybe post more. Or less. The same amount.
That. Is. All.
I wish it would come back. I stopped posting because the blog lost a lot of appeal to me when the points went away. Combine that with the loss of TomVH and people like MGOShoe leaving for extended periods of time made the blog a little less enjoyable on an interaction level. I still enjoy the content and much of the comments, so I read and don't participate.
that the measure of a man was his aggregate MGoPoints
While were talking about important things in life, validation for significant lurking would be nice. Many are fervent readers, but infrequent posters. Someone who has been visiting the site once a day for the last 4 years should be entitled to start a thread just as much as the idiot who has posted 'AWESOME' 100 times.
Just a thought.