New Forum Privleges

[death_au]

I completely understand and agree with the desire to want to get some feedback and cut off leechers, but there is no practical way of getting it to work.
If I understand correctly, you want people to at least provide feedback (or contribute in some other manner) before they get access to downloads. This just doesn't work. You have to be able to download something before you can provide feedback on it, and not everyone has the time / patience / talent to create something worth contributing.
So in effect, you end up turning away users and shrinking the community. A lot of us started off as leechers who slowly formed a desire to give back. Sure the number of people to change in this way is few, but these contributers (including myself) would have been turned away and not ended up getting into FoF, and not contributing.

I agree with nwru: it should be kept open to all. You do suffer from a lack of feedback, but we're all hobbyists, doing this in our own spare time for our own gratification.
Also, I have to agree with aander on this point:

That IS your feedback. It's also your thanks. Lots of downloads mean you have good charts and/or wanted songs.

Snake said his feedback ratio was 7:8500. 8500? That's eight and a half thousand downloads. Someone likes what you're doing there. I don't think anything I've ever made has reached a thousand.
EDIT: turns out my oldschool theme has over 2000 downloads, who knew?

[aander91]

Holy...what? 8500? My highest download count is Angels and Demons at a whopping 65! Quit your whining!

[ADeadlierSnake]

Lol, no, thats my total for ALL 50 of my songs. Although my highest downloaded chart has 773 downloads as of now. But yeah, its just a bit of a putoff when you dont get any feedback. I wont press the issue of changing things any further though because it sounds like the decision is pretty much unanimous that there really isnt much to be done. Thank you all for the feedback though

[slashfan7964]

I too would like to get some decent feedback on my charts. I agree with what aander said before. If something isn't up to par, then someone usually has balls enough to say something. Even still a nice "thanks" would be nice. I think 273 is mine currently.

[tibiazak]

My knee-jerk reaction: holy crap, bad idea.

Explanation: Kinda what Death and Nwru said, there's no way to conceivably limit access to downloads without causing other problems. Excess spam, people upset because they can't get the downloads they want, etc.

That said, it wouldn't bother me to see certain content (not sure how to decide which) limited to people that post, contribute, give feedback, etc. I've seen systems like that on at least one other forum before, where you have to have something like 30 posts, and then you can request access to a specific forum for people who are actually contributing to the forum as a whole. The problem is deciding what content goes into that forum, and what specific guidelines get you access. You'd have to pick content that's worthy of expending the extra time to give feedback and contribute, but at the same time, not cause the overall quality of the non-limited stuff to go down, because if that goes down, then we lose members, and if we lose members, we lose potential contributors in the future.

While I understand what you guys are saying, and why you want this, realize that from a non-fretter/modder perspective, this would have to be done VERY carefully because there is the potential for some very bad effects - worse than a bunch of non-contributing leechers and/or not getting thanked for your work. By all means, keep discussing this, but keep in mind what nwru and death have said. (My opinions are my own and not discussed with the rest of the admins and mods, therefore don't go saying 'BUT A MODERATOR SAID THIS!')

[SoD Sasquatch]

Sorry I have been offline for a while, I had a recent (almost death) in the family. I see that this discussion just pretty much went downhill from here, I was not taking sides on this issue I, of course, just wanted to see what everyone thought. I appreciate you guys not getting angry with the idea and sticking to "logical discussion". It's always good to #1, find out how people feel who are doing the work around the office, and #2, bring new ideas to the workplace, even if it's bad. Hell, people thought Edison was completly lunatic for wanting to create the lightbulb and wow, what an invention. That ttaught me a lesson; when I have an idea, even if I think it's a bad idea, I try to ask about what people think about it. Hey, it's better to know that it was a bad/good idea then to have wandered forever...(what a waste). Anyway, so I'm going to get back to doing what I do best on the site since I'm a little behind. Thank you all for taking the time to comment on these ideas.

[Ambiguity]

I do kind of like the idea of a premium downloads section and a normal section, I've seen it on multiple other forums too. Like some others said though, I've also seen it increase what some might consider spam(like just saying "good job" in non-premium contribution topics so they could gain access into the premium ones), which on those forums everyone took it pretty lightly unless it was extremely ridiculous spam.

If we were to have a section like that though, I think this post might shed some light onto choosing what is "quality":

That IS your feedback. It's also your thanks. Lots of downloads mean you have good charts and/or wanted songs.