A few days ago, Café users noticed a new member posting an inordinate number of messages in "Penny for Your Thoughts", presumably to gain access to "Inner Thoughts."

I believe, as a consequence (or perhaps because this was viewed as "the last straw"), users have now become very reluctant to speak openly in "Inner Thoughts". As a practical matter, "Inner Thoughts" is no longer a forum for an "In depth discussions that may involve the secrets and methods employed in mentalism and hypnosis."

A thread was started in "Penny for Your Thoughts" in which Café members have offered suggestions on how to better manage entry to "Inner Thoughts":
http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewt......um=15&49

Is it possible to implement any of these suggestions? Thanks, in advance, for your reply.

This has happened in nearly all the forums at one time or another. I particularly find it funny when it happens in my own favorite forum, because the posts don't count there, so they keep going on and on but it's only wasting their time.

Anyway, it's a permanent problem, and one I've thought a lot about, though I'm not in management here and no one is likely to care whether I've come up with a supposed better solution or not. But I've never come up with a better solution. Now that you've posted to a new thread in Pennies (which I hadn't seen, because like all soft-boned people I just avoid the place for the waves of hostility I'd seen there), I've read a couple of other proposals which are also problematic.

The best I've been able to come up with is to make a member formally apply to get into the secret forums. But then the mods might get spammed by 500 applications per day or something. I don't know.

My point is that I agree the system is broken. Like many problems we have at the Café, this is one that has developed as the community has grown from a couple of hundred magicians to a small online city with a soon-to-be population of 50,000 people from a plethora of backgrounds. What worked ten years ago simply no longer works. Post counts, and restricting the counting of posts to only "meaningful" forums, only heighten the sense that those secret forums have gold in them. My opinion is that they don't. In fact, if you gave me 24 hours and whiskey for motivation I could cull enough "secrets" from the non-secret Café forums to prove to any rational person that the whole point was dead a few years ago.

Steve has said that changes are in the works. Let's hope that he's got some changes that will better deal with this problem as well as the others.

I wonder how many "Pennys" regulars used the "Report This Post" button?

Ed

I do, when I feel it's appropriate. I'm unclear as to how your question relates to this thread.

Ed's comment is very applicable to this thread. We can't see every post or monitor every user every day. If someone starts posting frequently and it's a concern, it should be reported. We try to watch for this but it's not always possible.

Well, that's sort of the point...that someone can do this and access "Inner Thoughts" without anyone necessarily noticing.

The point of this post is to ask whether any measures can be taken to render such shenanigans useless.

Evidently "someone" did notice, or this thread wouldn't exist. And, as Ed pointed out… there is a Report This Post features, which would go a long way toward self-policing our favorite forums.

I've managed forums in the past. It's a lot of work… and someone always complains about how it's done. Perhaps closer attention by the regulars and better use of the Report Post option might just be the answer.

Thanks you Michael. You've hit the nail on the head. Staff can only do just so much and if those that see supposed problems and would report them,all of our jobs would be a lot easier.