I want to express my dissatisfaction with the issues around the double posting rule. While in itself the rule is good and just, when applied too rigid it can complicate forumlife and offer a cold and burocratic shoulder. I will motivate why. First of, I think when there is a 24 hour time gap between two posts it cannot be marked as a doublepost/ spamming because spammers do not keep to any rules or timetables. If you think about it logically you will come to the conclusion that no spammer can effectively do his spamming and keep to this 24 rule at the same time. When we have to haphazardously mix our new message in with a previous one it not only feels unnatural and stilted, it also takes away our opportunity to later see when we posted what, since the timestamp is on top of the message. It also creates the problem that the new message does not show up as a new message on the mainpage, attracting no attention. This is suposed to be resolved by posting another double message on top of that saying: DELETE X, so the moderator can delete it. Personally I think it's nice gesture, but not a solid way of fixing the problem at all. The thing is, when you are posting a new message, you want it to look like a new message and not be dependant on someone else having to post something inbetween quickly, so you can say: Look, I didn't doublepost ! I think that there is another reason for doubleposting we should tolerate. When someone makes two posts in a row but they contain something new and meaningfull like a video, a set of random paints, a drawing of a kitten sitting on frodo's lap, etc. These messages are purposefull and actually add value to the forum, we should not punish someone for making an effort, right ? So, I have decided to no longer anxiously try to avoid an accidental "doublepost", I hope the people in charge of keeping order on this forum will respect my point of view. I will however keep to the 24 hour rule since I think that really makes sense (you can keep me to it !), especially in the case of posting double. I heard someone say the reason for spamming is that the number of posts go up and you get another status or something. I can garantee you that, even though I noticed I am the number one poster, this is not even meanfull or interresting to me. You have my permission to change my post-count into anything you want it to be.
Note*
We are not the only forum that deals with this problem, on other forums people can
really get in eachothers hair about it and often, keeping to this rule too strictly leads
to disputes, disharmony a bad atmosphere and people being demotivated and leaving
the forum as a result, all becouse we avoided spamming ! This raises the question if
the cure isn't worse then the thing we want to heal ? Clear rules need to be established
offcourse. I would like to suggest to officially include exeptions to the doubleposting
rule in the forum rules.