This is exactly when it started. TreeKiwi is only doing his job though, and part of that involves increasing awareness of the game's community and encouraging players to frequent official platforms such as the forum and social media. Having new members join the forum is a good thing for the game, but it's a lot of work for the moderation team. A while ago the forum started to receive a lot of spam posts, which led to a fairly drastic change in policy that requires the first X posts by all new forum members to be approved by a moderator. You can imagine the number of posts requiring approval that generates on a daily basis. This was to stop spam bots creating accounts and posting junk on the forum. That alone increased the workload for the moderation team overnight. For every post that made it into this thread and shouldn't have, there were probably a couple of dozen that were disapproved.stancomputerhunter wrote:For me, it started to get really bad when TK told thousands and thousands of players (via Status Updates) where to post their trophy shots to be considered for a random draw that would win a weekly prize. Along with language issues, new players, and just guys who were looking to strike lightening in a bottle and win some em$, this is what we got.
A discussion is going on within the moderation team right now about what to do with these threads moving forward. In the meantime, my personal opinion is that enforcing a minimum score rule is just not going to work. We have 44 species in the game now, which means moderators would either need to know the threshold for each of those off the top of their heads, or constantly refer to a guide. I speak only for myself when I say I don't want that job, and if that ever becomes an official moderation role, I will promptly turn in my trusty orange badge. Posting instructions will make no difference. Making a banner that flashes in bright orange will make no difference. No matter how comprehensive or thorough the guidelines, you can guarantee they will be ignored by the majority.
Rares should not be allowed, and if I've accidentally let one slip through the moderation cracks, I apologise. Non-typicals should also be moved to the appropriate thread. Everything else in my opinion is down to interpretation. What one might think qualifies as a trophy could differ greatly to what I think. I'm sure in the early days I posted stuff in here that I would be too embarrassed to even harvest now. The best thing to do when an animal is far from being trophy material, is just let it pass. It will disappear off the page in a few more posts. Like Kevin said, someone might post a 140 whitetail deer then read comments about how it's nothing special. That's never fun to read when you've made an effort to create a forum account to show off your animal. That could quite easily convince a new member to ditch the forum entirely.
In short, if someone can come up with a way to put the "common" back in common sense, they will be extremely wealthy very fast. Until then, we need to accept that from time to time, this thread will have smatterings of dross that don't really qualify as trophies in the eyes of the general player base. Hopefully the counter to it is that more people join the forum, and are encouraged to spend more money on the game we love. Also, remember you can report a post if you really think it's not in the right place, or requires moderation. Until there's a clause in the Code of Conduct about posting animals that aren't trophies though, please refrain from reporting such posts since they are not in violation of anything.