Greetings, denizens of the thrive forums. I have made this thread to deal with a common issue that has been occurring as of late. If you are a frequent attendee of the Misc thread, you would most likely know what this will be about. For those of you fortunate enough to not have had to deal with this, allow me to shed some light upon the subject. Recently there has been a significant surge in activity on the forums. Some of this activity has been good, but a lot of it is low effort posting, or more specifically, fluff.
Fluff is different to spam. Spam is a series of posts made one after the other to quite literally, spam the forums. Fluff however is a type of post which adheres to all of the rules of posting (minimum word count, on-topic, etc.) but lacks any sort of real meaning. This type of post is highly problematic, as people who observe the phenomenon are unable to speak out against it, for it technically does not break any rules.
A hypothetical example of this is as follows:
Example
[Normal User]
hey what if the forum background was red instead of blue
[Typical User]
I like this idea, what if it was a new piece of fanart to celebrate the release of 0.5.0?
[Fluffposter]
yeah I agree with this idea to make the background a different colour
Did you catch that? The Fluffposter essentially added nothing to the conversation, where as Typical user did add new content to the idea. However, Fluffposter remained inside the community guidelines, so cannot be properly told off for this behaviour.
Well, it isn’t. By itself, Fluffposting is perfectly fine. Where it becomes dangerous is when a user decides to continuously post this filler content on every thread possible. This can lead to rapid degradation of thread quality, as well as an exponential increase of conversations with no real substance. Although the misc thread is for miscellaneous topics, this doesn’t mean it can be used for low effort content.
If you do want to tell someone that you like their idea, simply press the ‘heart’ button on their post. It adds up to their liked post count, and keeps the forum clear of filler content. If you do need to say something, maybe add a suggestion, or even some constructive criticism.
Simply think before you speak, and if your post doesn’t add anything to the conversation, just like the post instead to keep our forums squeaky clean. Thank you for taking your time to read this.