Only time will tell...

[metaN0IA]

About this new forum:

I think the registration feature goes against the spirit of the forums themselves. Forums are supposed to be easy, quick ways for a community to ask/reply questions. Of course, it can be abused of, in the same way that people can abuse of freedom of speech. But those risks and consequences are worth it.

The registration process is slow and will affect the number of users and posts in the forum. Instead of a forum, it'll become a "club", where only a handful of people (always the same ones) will meet, and thus the overall usefulness of the forum will diminish.

On the positive side, maybe there will be few useless, repeated posts, such as "Where is Ronaldo?", "Can I change ingame speech?" and such. Also, maybe the messages will be more "juicy", as only the really commited and interested people uses the forum.

Concluding: My first impression is negative. Only time will tell. But if the new forum format doesn't work, I hope Matt, Ric and the ones in charge of the forum reconsider this decision.

[This message has been edited by Ric (edited 08-08-1999).]

 

[Ric]

Thanks for your input on the new forum! All new things take getting used to. Our hope behind having a registration process is not to monitor what people have to say or disallow interesting opinions or thoughts.
Rather we hope to stop the small percent of people that have nothing better to do than belittle and make fun of others. How can anyone forget the terrible abuse first Chau Le and then Chris Davies took for doing nothing more than providing a way...a FREE way, to enjoy FIFA 99 more! The abuse I saw them take is what got me involved in the first place.

Our goal is not to continually monitor what is written and said in these forums, but rather, provide a means to feel free to express what you have to say without the fear of having it torn apart in a racist or ignorant type of way.

Actually, in the past, messages with extreme language, regardless of the quality of the message otherwise, were deleted the minute I saw them because I don't believe anything worth saying needs to be said that way. Now bad "words" are automatically changed to **** so basically they become ineffective in the author's intent, and hopefully, will make those people think of a better, more constructive, way of getting his/her message across.

Finally, you are correct in saying there will be less people posting. I believe those that have never had anything good to say will not bother registering. But I also believe this will make the forums more enjoyable for all of us.

My hope is that everyone continues to make these forums the best Soccer Gaming forums on the net! After all, the reason for the forums is not to attack someone else, but to offer or ask for help, or make interesting suggestions. In that spirit, the forums will be better than ever!

Ric

 

[G2Bam]

I would tend to agree with both parties here, on the one hand we need to keep the web's tradition and a-political nature.

However, because of this free speech and non-political stance, there are an unfortunate few who think this means they can abuse groups or individuals on grounds of race, religion or nationality.

These people have to be restrained in some way. But it is worth remembering that in their actions they are actually exercising their right to freedom of speech on the web.

Where they are wrong and you (the administrator) are right though, is that the Fifa forum is not the place for this kind of remark or contribution, there are many other places on the web for this kind of thing.

So making the forum a 'members only' site was the only way of stopping this kind of behaviour.

I hope now that we can look forward to hearing proper comments about the game that we all love and play so much.

Brian McAulay AMIAP.



[This message has been edited by G2Bam (edited 08-10-1999).]