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Yes or equipment being borrowed or returned. The DBTC posts are mostly about people not posting pictures. What do those post gain in a public forum?
 
This is all just in my humble opinion. Not trying to stir the pot, I know folks work really hard on the forum.
 
We talked about this quite a bit before. And as you pointed out it will always be a work in progress, so it’s good to hear people’s thoughts on it.

I strongly feel like BARcode has significantly improved so many things for the club it really can’t be overstated. And we (especially Pablo @svreef) are still working to improve it including some great improvements he made recently.

All that said, I also find some of the bot posts to be a bit much, mostly because I can’t tell if they are something relevant to me or not without clicking through on them and they aren’t at least half the time. For me there are 2 types of bot posts where I think there’s room for improvement, ones where it looks like it might be interesting but it isn’t, and ones where it is actually something interesting from a member but looks uninteresting because it is posted by the bot and gets buried.

First- The reminder posts, like to make a DBTC journal update. Maybe these could be a PM to the one person involved rather than a post for all to see? Otherwise I think maybe someone updated a DBTC like made more frags available or posted a pic or something but it is actually just a nag of some other member.

Second - When a user updates something in BARcode of interest to others maybe BARcode should impersonate that user when it posts the update (so that it looks like it’s from the user because it is indirectly from the user). Examples would be adding more available frags in a DBTC, making a DBTC journal update, and in general when a user actively does something in BARcode and BARcode is posting about it. As Pablo has pointed out, we need to be careful here that people don’t get too weirded out by the bot posting as a human… but I think it’ll be pretty obvious and it could also have a [post generated by BARcode] at the bottom or something. The point here is to show us that the post is being made (indirectly) by a member and not auto-generated by a bot.
 
Also worth pointing out that BARcode does already impersonate users when starting a DBTC thread for someone, and I don’t think anyone has a problem with that.
 
Special DBTC thread generation is OK. But having all those updates be from a user does not seem like a good idea to me.
Thought: DBTC updates could be in a different forum directory, and that could be excluded from "New Posts"
So they are there, easily found, but not as in your face.
 
Thanks for listening to my 2 cents. If it was shown that is was posted by a Bot and I am I’m not interested I can ignore it. I think a PM would be wise for someone that didn’t post a picture of the coral they received from DBTC.
I was out of the hobby for about 5 years. The BAR forum and DBTC look to be greatly improved so kudos to all the work that was put in to make this club better.
I think DBTC is an awesome program for coral propagation and will always support it.
I’m an old but new member. When I hit the itch to buy a new aquarium the first place I came was to BAR. It was awesome to see a lot of new members on here and sad that a lot are not.
Can’t wait for it to be safe enough (pandemic) to have in person meetings, frag swaps and field trips on a regular basis.
 
rygh said:
Just a note: You can "ignore" users, and BarCode is a user. Just hold mouse over the user icon. It is an option.
Click to expand...
Please don’t anyone do that. Many of BARcode’s posts are required to be visible to members for this club to function. Imagine the confusion and frustration if a user isn’t seeing any posts from BARcode and is trying to figure out what is going on in an equipment borrow thread or DBTC. Please don’t.
 
I’m not going to ignore DBTC posts. There is information I want to see. Just not the abundance of posts asking people to post pictures of a coral they received. That should be a PM or is DBTC applying peer pressure to make the program successful?
 
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I like this suggestion. Make the transfer of frags or creation of frags a public post, but a reminder to post a picture can be made into a pm. It may even motivate more picture posts as I know I react to PM's more than notifications.
 
I'm open to change anything as long as we have agreement and a concise plan - not a trickle of change requests.

That being said, in my opinion the annoyance of bot posts in "what's new" is only temporary and wanes. It's not necessary to make drastic changes to fix that particular problem.

DBTC nagging is a core feature - the number 1 request from @Coral reefer and is designed to keep things fresh. When it brings old items to the top of the list, it also helps to let users know those items exist. They are often followed by requests for frags.

Equipment nagging is very important and we added more of it recently - no one wants that job, so let the bots do it.
 
No worries, just thought it was annoying. I can’t say how much I appreciate all the hard work to get it to the point that it has.
Happy Reefing Everyone!
 
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