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Originally Posted by Greylocks
Blaming me is easy because I speak my mind.
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Yes, and you do it grudgingly and in an unwelcoming fashion. Your efforts to educate when you're polite and sincere are appreciated. When you're being passive agressive, it is not and its obvious. Sorry, but I speak my mind too.
I've been standing on the sidelines for a couple years observing all this and thinking about it too. Its clear to me that regular users are antagonized by new posters asking the same questions repeatedly. Its clear the FAQs are not always being read, and I don't think its always because people don't want to read them. There is a LOT of information there, and some of it is hard to dig through to find answers to the one or two immediate questions one has when they first hit this site. I think a careful reorganization of that information may help. The information is good, its just sometimes hard to wade through.
A section to parents is also missing. I'm willing to author that. I have background in that being an Airsofter, a Scouter and a parent, and I've written similar documents before. I have a good idea of what parents want to know and I've already acted as a parent interface to new underaged airsofters and mentored them as well - successfully too.
I've also been speaking to Spleen and I've made some suggestions that the mods and admins of ASC may accept, reject or ignore altogether. I'm not party to the ASC inner circle so I can't comment further in that regard. But I do think there is a solution to the problem, with a little bit of PHP and a graduated system of access, you can eliminate a lot of the more annoying posts that antagonize regular users. If someone still posts questions like that, it should get instashuttled to a separate forum and people tasked to deal with those people and questions who are willing to be patient can deal with it. If its someone being an asshat, there is always the mod hammer, which really should be the tool of last resort.
To do that we would need a fairly decent pool of willing volunteers who would exhibit patience. It has to be a large pool because there are a huge number of new users signing up here daily and since its a volunteer role, you have to spread the load reasonably.
So, between graduated access, clarification and reorganization of the FAQ system, and a new user mentor process, I think you can fix most of what is currently broken in the present solution. There also has to be a willingness to try it - I know a lot of the current mods are frustrated by the history of this problem, but I think a fresh effort might be worth the try.
Alternatively we can go on flaming new users and watching our numbers dwindle as we become an insular, jaded, clique of in-joke cool kids dissing all those outside our social group...
...no, that doesn't appeal to me either.