Since the hard hand doesn't work, the Hibernate forums are now completely open and all forum rules have been relaxed to "do whatever you like". All bans have been removed.

Expect less replies from the Hibernate guys in the future.

Christian,

Is there anyway the forum could be separated into new-to-hibernate Users and Advanced Users ? And maybe you guys could just monitor the Advanced Users forum with restrictions etc...

I personally enjoy coming out here and trying to help people because it gives me a better understanding of the product, but I fully understand your frustration because even I have to sometimes stop trying to help people who just don't want to provide enough details or just want to be spoon fed.

Either way,
Thanks to all of you for your help and great work!
Preston

We tried everything in the past three years. From my experience with other Internet areas, chaos always takes over any unmoderated public space.

We tried moderating but it just doesn't work. If you moderate not enough you can as well leave it alone, whatever group of newbies is trying to catch up to the common knowledge base will easily overwhelm anything you do. If you moderate more and delete and ban aggressively (tried that for the past 8 weeks) you create a climate that doesn't help discussion, not to mention the personal insults by crazy lunatics frothing at the mouth, that pile up in the moderators inbox.

We'll have to see if this forum is different from the general rule on the Internet and chaos can be held back by regulars but moderation is over now.

We had a plan to adopt a point-based system: you get points if people like your answers, and you need points to post questions. This is rather trivial, conceptually, but needs a few days PHPBB hacking to adapt the plugin (there is one that is similar but somewhat complex). If somebody wants to do this, you're welcome to give it a try. We tried everything else, be assured.

Just to answer your question: People are not able to say if they are "advanced" or "beginners". We had this split in the early days, there was no difference in the questions. It's sad but you have to assume that the regular visitor has "left" and "right" written on his socks.