Forum Feedback - Bumping own Threads

Hello, thank you for bringing this up! Would you mind setting up a poll for this suggestion? It would certainly make moderation easier for me and Dave, but we do have a slight concern because players have been known to get confused about time stamps on forums as it's set to whichever time zone you selected with your forum account.

 

I voted once every 24hr not because I'm particularly against the change, but I feel like the current system works. It's not a clear you can or cannot bump (unlike voting, faming, bossing, or doing a repeatable quest), but rather there is some flexibility. I don't think anyone would be punished if one day they bump their thread at 7pm, and the next day they bump at 5pm, and conversely I don't see anyone abusing the current system.

 

I was going to mention this (the bump button), since I absolutely hate how market threads are just chock full of useless "bump" posts. However, if a user bumped their thread, then does every post during the cooldown period not bump it? I ask because sometimes friends like to comment on each other's market threads for various reasons, which kind of circumvents the 24 hour rule in a way. However, we'd probably want to maintain bumping from all posts, since imo if someone bids on an item of yours, that should contribute to thread visibility. Anyway, it can be added right now to where things wouldn't change as much, if at all, so I'm for it in some capacity. At the very least, adding a bump button with a visible timer will help users to know when they can bump their thread next.

I voted for "Once per UTC day". I think that is a better, more flexible option. I say flexible because in order for me to switch to bumping in a different time of day, I don't have to skip a day of bumping to do so, in other words, I can easily switch up when I want to bump my thread. The current system is too rigid.

I'd like to hear reasons people want to keep the current system, other than the "if it ain't broke don't fix it", because I genuinely see this as a positive change.

 

I stand corrected. In that case, I support your cause! I've changed my vote.

 

Hello everyone, it seems that over the past week the votes have consistently leaned in favor of the suggested change. Before we move forward with any internal decisions though, Dave and I were hoping for more written feedback by players regarding this change. While we both personally see the benefits of this change, we are mainly concerned about the mass of confusion that will inevitably arise in the forums as we transition to this new rule--especially considering that many players strictly and exclusively use the Market Place section of the forums. And it is probably not a good idea to forcibly set the time zone for all players to UTC. In addition, we are also potentially concerned about whether this change would lead to unintended consequences, such as a daily spike of players bumping their marketplace threads at server time reset. It's less about "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and more about addressing whether the benefits outweigh the potential negative consequences, as this rule is a rather minor rule to begin with.

Also, to provide a bit of transparency, we currently do not strictly enforce the 24 hour bump rule and give a reasonable amount of leeway--especially if players are not consistently and intentionally bumping within 24 hours. While this certainly isn't as flexible as the suggested change, it is worth noting that the forums are manually moderated and do not operate on automatic systems like the in-game voting timer.

Thanks everyone!

 

Hi Sen, since you brought up the potential confusion of changing this rule, I have a somewhat related suggestion. When we make abuse reports or ban appeals, we have to read a small set of instructions and check a box. Perhaps we can include the bump every 24hr/daily rule in a similar box and ask market forum users to agree to the rule before posting? I personally heard of this rule by word of mouth and would otherwise never have known about it from an official source. And as my earlier comments on this thread revealed, even as a long standing member of the community, I still wasn't clear on the details of the rule.

 

That's a great suggestion! Do players (especially those who post often in that section) think that this would be too much of a hassle for such a minor rule?

 

There are plenty of Xenforo addons to prevent users from early bumping - they can even be selected for specific sections so that other topics aren't disturbed. I haven't seen the web dev on/reply in quite some time so i'm not sure we even have one at the moment that could implement a change like this. It would take some of the workload off the forum mods since the system is dummy proof.

If an addon were possible I'd support a bump reset at server reset time

 

Hello everyone! As per this announcement we have now updated the bumping rule accordingly. We will move this thread based on any further feedback during the provisional period.