: As much as I support the dissemination of Marathon-related memes through the
: world, I'm not going to take it upon myself to introduce Craig up there to
: the wonders of Marathon and invite him back to post. If someone else does,
: then fine. I do have to warn against any sort of influx of n00bs, however,
: as this is part of what did in the Mara.org forums. Every day it became
: post after post of these little leeches responding back and forth with the
: most pointless drivel; the place soured as Marathon was no longer the main
: topic of discussion.
And that doesn't happen already? =P
Yes, there's always the risk of the forum becoming so infested by n00bs that it's useless to the rest of us, but somehow I don't think that a handful of Halo converts will kill us. After all, some of our more serious posters of today entered the forum that way. I'm much more concerned with the forum being co-opted by all the Halo fans who know nothing about Marathon and don't want to know anything about Marathon. I just thought that my response to Craig would be a lot more helpful than the sort of "buzz off" responses we gave Stephen. If Craig actually takes the time to follow the links and play Marathon, chances are he'll have more to say here than mindless drivel. And now I can always cite that post in response to other Halo n00bs crashing our forum.
: The fact is this: as Halo continues to become more popular, as the sequel is
: released, as the 4th book does, like, finally come out, we're only going
: to see more and more of these. Once they become more common they'll start
: responding to eachother's posts. Before you know it, this will be the Halo
: Boo/k forum. Don't think it's possible? There aren't many of us compared
: to the how many Halo boo/k readers are out there and we've all seen it
: happen to forums before; it would be easier to fix the problem now than
: when the threads start multiplying.
I couldn't agree more with you on this. The more posts to Halo threads, the more Google will link to us and the more inappropriate posts we'll see. This is how Google works, so the only way to shut it down is to lock these threads. This isn't about free speech - anyone can start a new Halo thread if they choose - but we have to thwart the Google engine's penchant for linking to highly cross-linked discussions such as occur in the Story Forum.
Think of it this way - the Halo book thread and it's kin are the W'rkncacnter of our forum.
