I don't think the way the suggestion box works is satisfactory in one aspect, from what I can see. I want to push for a sort of legal grave-digging in the Suggestion box.

Good suggestions often die in the suggestion box because of an ending of new posts. When some good suggestions are posted, they are initially met with some feedback consisting of approval and some reforming. But these talks don't last long, because eventually the suggestion becomes agreed on and no one posts anymore. Nobody is going to keep posting "I agree" in the thread to keep it alive. Which results in the thread falling further and further down the topic list, and eventually becoming illegal to post in.
The threads become dead regardless of the quality of the suggestion.

It's not productive nor constructive for this to continue in the Suggestion Box. If good, well thought-out suggestions end up dead solely due to forum policy- it's getting us nowhere.
All worthy proposals need to be allowed to be bumped back up to attention.

This is the part where it gets a little more complicated on the staff's part. Since there might be various "un-worthy" suggestions being bumped back up, as well as non-feasible suggestions.
But I think a little more collaboration can solve this. Whoever in charge can scan the bumped threads and determine which are worthy of being bumped up, and prune others. Or there might be some sort of threshold drawn out at a time to not allow threads from before this date are out-of-bounds. Or possibly to make it easier on staff, a PM-only policy could arise in which players can ask for permission for specific threads to be bumped with permission.


I think we can all at least agree on the premise of this problem, and subsequently hammer out the solutions to it in this thread- being the aforementioned or not.

Approving topic for discussion.

Perhaps instead of a time warning there could be a "if this page was X pages back" or eliminating gravedigging altogether.

The 4 day limit kind of hampers the slower forums, I've seen 4 day old topics on the FIRST PAGE of Global Politics sometimes, for example, and I think the suggestion box is important enough to warrant a relaxed gravedigging policy.

I actually think the "PM a Mod for Approval to Bump" idea is the most work of all.

IMO, just remove the concept of "gravedigging" entirely from the Suggestion Box only. If a topic shouldn't have been bumped, it can just be then closed and done with.

Hm. This may also serve to stem the tide of duplicate ideas we've had from time to time.

PMing us Mods for bump approval would be a disaster; I don't believe that many players would realize which mods to PM for said approval and end up filling the mailboxes of mods who don't have anything to do with that forum.

That was one of the ideas in the OP. The only problem I can see is that possibly many topics can be bumped back up and it can make the box a huge mess. This is all just speculation though.

I think the PM policy would be better because only players that really care about their suggestions would bother compiling an argument to have their suggestions bumped back up. So there wouldn't be many PM's anyway.

And as long as there is an announcement/pinned thread in the Suggestion Box laying out explicitly how it works- I don't think there will be any confusion of who to PM.

I've also seen people in Gameplay Discussions get warned for Gravedigging topics that were less than halfway down the topic list. :S

Anyway, this is something I've thought about before, because the concept of grave digging doesn't really apply to the Suggestion Box. (Really, you could make a case for Gameplay and Question Center, too, but that's not the point here). Grave digs are meant to keep old, out-dated and irrelevant topics from beng dug up for discussion. Especially in OWF areas where this can be extremely disruptive. Many Suggestions can stay relevant until they are implemented or something else changes that renders them void.

I would disagree. Just because it is posted does not mean it is read and/or understood.

Seeing as the CURRENT pinned threads are rarely read, I don't see how spelling things out in new pinned threads would really do anything. I agree that the grave-digging policy should be more lax.

Theoretically, the system that is stated in the pinned thread has a list of dead topics that if someone wants to post in they send me a message about. That actually worked to a certain extent, however then the list got less updated, and the increase of threads made it a lot harder to keep track of, and again - few people were bothering to read the pinned threads.

Getting rid of gravedigging so long as the posts added are reasonable and have something to do with the original idea seems like a reasonable idea.

Well on this, I'll just take your opinion over mine. Given you are/were the Suggestion Box mod.



In my mind, the bumping should not only be relevant to the OP of the thread but the thread being bumped has to be somewhat.....well supported.
ex:This suggestion is obviously not a good one, and if bumped should be closed even if bump is relevant.
(Example was too easy, but you get my point)

So if you disagree with the PM-only, then what do you favor? Anything in the OP or otherwise?

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And I don't know how it works from admin's side, but say if there was a suggestion that was just unfeasible or for some reason just not going to happen, it would be helpful for it to just be plainly locked.

The moderation has discussed this idea and the following rule change has been made. Providing that the additional post adds something constructive to the debate the gravedigging rule will not apply in the suggestion box only (please note this does not apply to the question centre). As per the forum rules thread: