It is recommended to adjust the permissions for downloading and reading materials

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To: All managers, I have been in charge of the *forum section for two weeks now, and I suddenly noticed that there are many fewer posts in it. After investigating the reasons, one of them is that the New Year is approaching and everyone is quite busy. Another reason is that fewer materials are being posted, which leads to a decrease in downloads; as a result, people post less and participate less as well.        Here I list the impacts of the current limited permissions for downloading and reading materials: 1. Excessive downloading of materials, with severe lack of communication.         Many content publishers share the carefully prepared materials they have created with others, only to find that those materials are downloaded by many people without any feedback. It would be advisable to improve the system for downloading materials, so that those who publish them can receive feedback from others; this is both a form of affirmation and mutual assistance. The publisher provides materials to everyone, and the feedback from downloaders is used to evaluate those materials, helping the publisher to improve them. For example, some people post notes sharing their experiences in learning something; such material is extremely valuable as it allows others to learn a great deal from it. There are often issues within that material that need to be identified and resolved, and this is of practical significance. Yet the poster only receives meaningless responses like “Thank you, great material,” with no actual feedback. As a result, existing problems cannot be addressed nor new ones discovered – so what value does such a post have?        2. Should the following information be read or used?        The cleaner has posted an explanation stating that we are users of the materials, not collectors, but in fact most people do collect such materials – whether they’re useful or not, as long as they consider them valuable. If that’s the case, I hope to increase the reading permissions for downloading such materials, with cleaners posting announcements to encourage everyone to raise those permissions. This approach might be a bit narrow-minded, as materials gain value only through dissemination; they are useful only when shared among those who need them. It’s pointless to store large amounts of information that is irrelevant or hardly ever used, as many people simply leave it there without even taking a look at it.        3. What are the consequences of too easy downloading?        Irrigation: one post equals one unit of wealth; most information can be obtained with 10 units of wealth. “Smart” people can download what they need by posting just 10 posts. As a result, many such “smart” people will be active on the forum – they simply find some relevant articles online, copy and paste them. Forum moderators cannot just delete new members’ posts, as few people pay attention to such posts; their purpose is merely to help those people accumulate wealth. Once they had accumulated enough wealth, they downloaded the materials they needed and then disappeared; perhaps they would return soon to do the same thing again before leaving once more.   My personal suggestion: set minimum and maximum limits on the permissions for downloading and reading materials. Publishers of materials are encouraged to set their own thresholds; a minimum value of 40 is recommended for fourth graders. Those who consider the value of certain materials to be low may set it at 30 for third graders, while those who think the materials are of high value can set it at 50 for fifth graders. I personally believe this approach is reasonable. I hope everyone can discuss this together. It should be noted that, in my opinion, it takes a great deal of patience for someone to advance to the fifth level by posting diligently through copying and pasting. As privileges increase, there will be more spam posts; at this point, encouraging them to engage more in discussions and help others will naturally reduce the amount of spam. After all, one post only earns 1 unit of reward, while points are usually awarded at a rate of 5 to 10 times that amount. Finally, I suggest reducing the scale of point awards – since there isn’t that much material available for people to download on the forum, it would be appropriate to set the point rewards at 3 to 10 times the value of regular posts or high-quality posts. In this way, the consumption and creation of wealth can be balanced, preventing many people from holding onto wealth uselessly.         This post was last edited by naska on 2008-1-21 16:46]