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Well, today I entered the Extended Discussion and what did I find? Almost nothing but potentially wonderful, in-depth topics, ruined by poor grammar, lack of punctuation, inconsistent replies, etc. And I have seen some potentially beautiful topics, topics including morality, sex and the church, etc. And they have all been ruined by the facts aforementioned.

And what disgusts me is that this deplorable state has even permeated the ED's subforums. Psychology and Sociology, Morality and Religion, Science and Technology... They are all filled with these utterly pathetic topics concerning the most menial issues and complications and created by absolute peons, their understanding of the world ending with their computer.

So, the question that I pose to you is: Is the ED beyond salvage? Has the problem become so inherent in the forum that the entire system has to be remade from the ground up?

1. I heard that the mods that moniter the ED are never there, but they've got other jobs too and they seem pretty active to me... but I dunno.
2. Yeah. The ED's kind of ******** up now.
3. Sometimes (but rarely) the person using txt tlk might actually be saying something worth reading but we can't read it. That sometimes leads to loads of flaming and well... bye bye, perfectly good topic.

It's impossible to enforce intelligence and proper language in something so vast as the ED. All we can do is accept that and hope to find the occasional jewel buried in all the crap. The ED will never be what it was meant to be, but that was an inevitability.

The world's IQ is a constant--the population is just increasing.

This is a tad elitist don't you think?
It's all well and good to say 'txt tlk' should be outlawed but it is in a sense a viable form of communication for some. It's all but a free-standing language. Anyway, it may not look pretty, but if it gets the work done does it really matter?
I'll agree to a degree that the ED doesn't have as many thought provoking topics as one might enjoy, but people are replying to many of them thus stimulating some kind of opinion.
Maybe there should be stricter moderation, but what really considers an 'Extended Discussion'. I look at GD and to me, its turned into Chatterbox.

All I'm saying is that you really need to cut the elitist crap.

The closest way to really eliminate the spam problem is to get rid of the Gaia economy. Without the gold incentive people would lose the major reason behind "fklsfsdfsdfdsjfklj" and "muny muny muny muny lolololol" posts.

Of course, nobody wants that to happen. Perfectly fine, perfectly fine.

But the floods can still be tamed at least a little bit if all serious EDers would do their part. Regular posters could help out by contributing to discussion instead of feeding the spammers' fire. I'm guilty of this too, but too often people are replying to spam topics and posts by bitching at the poster instead of doing the one thing people can do about it - which is report them. There is also the Save ED petition that people can sign which has a pretty damn decent plan that could potentially slow down spammers (Which reminds me - I never did get around to signing it myself xd )

Users can also help out be sending in feedback in the appropriate forum. I've noticed a few things about the site that I think should change. Homework help requests are quite common here and I think it should get its own forum, plus I think there should be an at least ED forum-wide ban on chatspeak and txt tlk. If ED is supposed to be the more intelligent version of GD, the posters should follow suit.

Mods/helpers (myself included) can do their part by actually getting online, moving/deleting threads/posts and handling reports. Now, I'm not saying that all the mods and helpers are lazy bastards who never do anything, but it seems every time I'm on (which is pretty much off and on all day) I'm the only online mod/helper in the forum or one of two/three online. The report queues are still backed up because there are hardly ever mods to handle it. I'm constantly PMed and asked (or demanded by a whining thread move-ee, but that's besides the point) to delete a thread or handle a scamming/hacking report, none of those being things I can do but I'm asked anyway because I'm the only one online. Simply put, we need more online mods. I know we recently got a new batch a while back, but (and with all due respect to all moderators who do their jobs) it wasn't enough.

Admins can do their part by recruiting more moderators. I'm sure this is a problem all across the site, too - I know GD isn't exactly a literate haven.

YES! You're a mod?

The response I got from my mentor: