We're starting to get shitposting epidemics up here in GD now too WHICH I OPPOSE and people seem to forget that I actually DO want real discussion in here AND in my thread.
I think one problem is that you have way too much of a sense of ownership and policing. You can say that you're against "shitposting" all day, but in the end, you're just another forum member and throwing your weight around isn't going to help anyone. In short, acting like a moderator won't help, because you are not one, and you can't say you
don't act like one, because it's plainly clear from your posting history. You pretend that your own thread is like some little fiefdom you govern, where you can lock and unlock at your whim and make decrees about who can and can't post what, even though it's an extremely nebulously-defined thread in the first place. I sincerely doubt that this is the intent of giving users the ability to lock their own threads, and I think you've provided a fairly good example of how such a system can be abused, especially where extremely long and loosely-guided threads are concerned.
I actually support their view that the spam posts need to stop, but I don't support their methods at all. No matter what they say they did continually drop in en-mass to make the same points which isn't a good way to try and get a point across since people are understandability going to assume that it was planned out between them.
Why is this true of people from IRC and no other group on this forum? This place is full of different little groups of like-minded individuals who tend to post at similar times in similar places, so I don't understand why this one in particular gets singled out.
I'm not going to state who said this, because posting IRC logs around is a shitty thing to do, but the following was said in #bay12games:
This is the first day ever I'm using this thing, IRC yes? And suddenly I understand much better the critic about the "What made you blah" threads.
Before this I didn't understand it much, but if you have the oppurtunity to be here using those threads seems silly.
I'd like to suggest that the regular denizens of threads like What made you _______ (and I'm particularly thinking of Janet, mainly because she just posted) should try hanging out on IRC. Sure, we sometimes spend half an hour talking about metallurgy and whether DF's system of elasticities and yields is really realistic enough... but we're nice people, we don't bite, we don't turn you into zombies. And just maybe you'll find that forums aren't really the right place to discuss how your day's been and who really pissed you off at school this afternoon.
Yes, the "Made You Feel <Thing>" today threads, and That One Giant Roleplaying Thread could definitely use a realtime environment, especially the latter. Some things just aren't well-suited to a forum, so it's at least worth considering alternatives, especially since starting an IRC channel, even a private one, is completely free and very, very easy, and might end up being a better or more convenient choice for some things. I'm not saying this just to get people to stop doing those things
here, but because I sincerely believe there are better-suited media for threads like that (especially the short-post several-pages-per-hour roleplay), which might suit all involved pretty well. There is also an argument that a thread that generates pages upon pages of posts in a period of a few hours causes difficulty in moderation.