It seems like a bit of a positive feedback loop – the more people post small talk and short posts on the RMB, the more new people get the sense that this RMB is like any other. It doesn’t take much to reinforce that perception, because small talk and short posts are the norm on NationStates’s RMBs.
Turbeaux I’d be happy to start constantly redirecting people to Discord if we want that. Even the main discord channel, #the-woodland-glen, could accommodate most of the one-liners that appear on the RMB. We could also make it explicit in the WFE that the RMB is meant for substantive discussions and that small talk should be taken to Discord.
However, I worry a bit that making “RMB is for mature discussions” a hard and fast rule destroys some of the natural draw of Forest. Sure, a nicely manicured park full of thriving native plants and an open understory is more pleasant than a wild forest full of half-dead scraggly vines, but it’s not really better than a wild forest full of thriving native plants and an open understory. Our RMB is special because we’ve developed an especially mature community without any hard rules to mold it that way, and we lose something that’s unique about Forest when our norms are weakened enough that we replace them with fiat.
It’s hard, because even the act of acknowledging that the Forest RMB has different standards and trying to govern it into returning to those standards feels a bit like forcing what should be natural.
So I think the solution may have to be gently pushing the RMB back every time one-liners appear – whether by suppression or by redirecting the conversation – as quickly as possible, but not making the rule explicit lest we lose what makes Forest truly special. The goal should be to make all but the most oblivious of trolls feel like they are trespassing norms (but not like they are breaking the Law of the Government) when they post a one-liner on the RMB.
