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Changes to forum visibility settings: Statuses [POLL]

What should the privacy settings be for the status bar?

  • Visible only to members

    Votes: 1 6.7%
  • Visible to members only by default, with the option to make public

    Votes: 8 53.3%
  • Visible to all by default, with the option to make private (current)

    Votes: 6 40.0%

  • Total voters
    15

lIlI

Staff member
Moderator
Apr 6, 2018
837
The Lightning Strike
After discussions of the forum's current default settings, and what is visible to guests, we're bringing up the possibility of changing some settings in regards to the status function and to give registered users the option of more privacy by default! Though most of these changes would only affect guests or new users, we'd appreciate a general opinion for where it will affect existing users, hence this poll!

At the moment the status section is visible to all, guest or user, with the ability to set your statuses to member only from privacy settings (with this being set by default to visible to all visitors when registering). With the proposed changes, the status would only be visible to users who have logged in except in situations where you have set your privacy settings to be followers only or nobody. The status panel will be removed entirely from the main page when viewing the forum as a guest. Alternatively, some may prefer it being public for various reasons in which we can, as an alternative option, propose that future registrations are set to members only in these settings, where it becomes an opt-in system for statuses to be visible rather than an opt-out system. You're free to only vote in the poll, but if you have input that simply voting in the poll wouldn't express feel free to reply. Thank you for your time.

Also check out the second poll, regarding the Journals section
 
Last edited:

mobius017

Aspiring ∞ Creator
Apr 8, 2018
1,980
This reminds me of a similar idea, regarding the creation of a hidden subforum, that came up a number of years ago.

the VO subsection that everybody is talking about was a 18+ section where most of the rules were thrown out the window, and so ppl were allowed to be raunchy and more wild. It was mostly full of shit posting and memes, esp at the end of VO. I wasn't around VO when the drama was at its worst, but bc of its Anything Goes nature there were a lot of call out threads and opinions threads and angry threads that started a lot of infighting and drama amongst users. It had moderation when the drama spun out of control but things became hectic very fast and eventually became a huge stain on VO. It had a lot of good things in it too, and it was fun when it was fun, but when it was nasty is was a horror fest
I'm not sure if I'd use a hidden subforum or not, but that sounds like exactly the sort of situation everyone was hoping wouldn't happen here. Having said that, the subforum isn't necessarily a bad idea--it could be good if we wanted to do some kind of sitewide collaboration thing that wasn't exposed to non-members or something (Not sure what that'd be--a song everyone could collaborate on that actually got released for general distribution? Some kind of members-only group trip to a concert?). It just seems like it would be best if such a subforum followed the same rules as everywhere else.

(I mean, when you come down to it, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc., are free and easily available for anyone to use for whatever, after all.)
I can see the appeal of having private areas of the boards. I think the culture of the boards benefits from everything remaining as open/public as possible, though. The above quote, and especially the quoted quote, discuss what happened on Vocaloid Otaku when there were private subforums, and I would really like for us not to face those same issues here. Granted, there was a different moderation policy on the VO subforum, but I think keeping things open goes a long way toward preventing that kind of behavioral decay without having to rely on the moderation team to more carefully police the private areas. Granted also, I have a lot of respect for the folks who visit VVN currently, but at the same time, as people come and go, I think the support of having content be public will do nothing but help us.
 

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