Many forums/fora have systems that reward people for accumulating a higher post count. On The Crane Pool Forum, you get to progress through the historical Mets (ranked from 1-500) finally achieving Tom Seaverhood when you’ve participated enough. On other forums, you progress through a simpler rank system and accumulate stars under your name. But on a couple fora, you get game bonuses.
And that has proven to be a source of grief in my life.
I’m an admin on a team of three admins. Because of a row initiated by someone who is a known complainer, and because one of the admin’s feelings were hurt. one of the boards on that forum is set up to no longer count posts made there toward game bonuses. And because of this, two of my friends won’t post there anymore.
Why do I care?
Well, there are some running games on that board. One that we inherited from The Crane Pool Forum is called “Answer/Ask” and the point of the game is to answer the question that’s up and then ask the next question. And there are other games as well.
And I want to play these games with my friends. Not just because I like them but because I like their style of play. One said, ” just don’t want to spend 8 minutes thinking of a clever answer, then another few minutes finding a good question, and finally formatting it to look nice.” To me that’s a bit bogus. When points did count, they were only worth 1/50th of a bonus.
The other one claims that posting there would be “spamming”. Um, no. The people who were throwing that word around were specifically complaining about guys who racked up postcounts toward bonuses. Since that doesn’t apply, it can’t possibly be spam.
It feels like they’re trying to make me feel bad enough about their not playing that I turn bonuses back on. And I don’t like that for reasons that should be obvious.
I’ve been told not to worry about it. That people on the internet aren’t real anyway. I’m not sure I agree with that, but it’s just a game and if they can walk away, so can I. If it’s not fun anymore, I can stop doing it. And so I shall.
