Proposal:
An increased minimum qualfiication for new users to make threads and/or posts.
Why:
In the past few months, (I think as Qubes has grown in popularity), there has been an increase in posts that are entirely speculative/detractive.
For clarification, I’m not referring to general advice, which I myself often give out on the forum to respectively generalised/non-specific questions.
I am refering to posts, but really more poignantly to threads, which contribute nothing to the discourse of this forum other than to ask questions which at best can be described as foolish, and at worst an attempt to sow discord amongst the community*.
The effect of this is making the forum unpleasant to visit, by clogging it up with spammy threads and posts, particularly annoying when searching for content. I’ve also noticed that often said new accounts, who make such threads, go on to ask very loosely related (if related at all) questions on other threads, which inevitably leads to clogging up that thread with increasingly generalised and unrelated advice/responses.
*
I assume intelligence in the first instance, and don’t assume malice. But it should not go without saying that it is cheap & trivial for hostile actors to derail discourse in this manner, and in any instance - whether incompetence or malice we should treat each and every user with equal assumption of intelligence and question their assumptions. Better to be called foolish, than to be left a fool.
Implementation:
I assume there are already plugins available which could have some weighting system for new users’ posts so they could not create a thread if they had more posts removed or did not have x likes etc. The main concern is thread creation as it pushes down other threads and posts within threads are relatively trivial to removal compared to the impact a thread, which quickly attracts replies, has upon the forum/community discourse.