Games ending before they begin

I am not against seeing a total post count as many sites like this have it. I am not sure about the posts per week or month though.

There are times a persons posting amount will go up and down. For example say someone gets sick and cannot post really for a month or even more. They might be a regular poster normally but that sickness and they withdraw from games will make their post per week drop. Also as others said, some may not be in games that require many posts per week and therefore their count will be lower than someone who does. If they decide to join a game that requires frequent posting then they may get overlooked.

We can already see when a person joined so we already have that and if we can see a total post count between the two we should get the information that people are talking about. Is the person new or are they active on the board or not.

I know this can be frustrating but to much policing can also have an adverse affect. I was on a board that started making lots of rules. What I can say is that it caused much frustration and a drop in members over a variety of issues.

Also I am a little concerned of a reputation mechanic (one of the things the board above did). This turns things into a popularity contest. For example: On this board I have had two players join and quit at the beginning games I was in or was a player multiple times (each was 3 or more times). Now that said one of them I just won't allow in my games anymore. The second, I gave one more chance as I saw it and they have been a good player in that game. Now if I was giving "reputation" points both would have gotten negative from me though maybe in other games they are productive active players. This then would have made it hard for them to join other games possibly. Some players will click or don't click with other players, This does not make the other players a problem but if two player's play style don't mesh a person might get a negative rep from the other due to it which would be sad as it could affect the others ability to use this site.

I think being cautious of new SW games from new GMs is a good thing. I hope I didn't imply that I didn't think it was, I certainly didn't intend to.

And I agree that there's probably not a lot of site engineering that can be done to prevent it from happening, though I'm completely uneducated on security. I do think that increasing the moderator team, if there's community and administration support for that, to help keep an eye on these things would probably help a lot.

But for me, the big thing is making, publicizing and enforcing community standards around things that suggest some important principles the community abides by.

Perhaps some type of gamification could be helpful? GMs that are known reliable get a nifty badge, etc. This would have the effect of rewarding committed GMS without "punishing" new folks. A carrot rather than a stick.

This approach would would give player's at least some confidence that the game they're enrolling in has a chance of succeeding.

Those badges would be hard to moderate, though. Who gets them?
If it's mods who hand them out, what if I only ever GM in games with no mods present. If anyone can just request them for their GM, there's no actual quality control so they'd be pointless anyway. If players request them and then mods check through a game's history, then what standards do they apply? That's also a privacy issue, since not everyone might want outsiders to read their game.

Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges.

If someone is advertising a game in the tavern, and you've played with them before, then just write a recommendation. That's what I've seen other people do (and I've done it myself) - I think a kind and public word of recommendation works better than any system badges.

The approach I would take is to have stats generated automatically, but badges awarded manually. Mods would have a list with names and key stats (join date, #posts, #games, etc.) I think it would be fairly easy to come up with a standard way of awarding a badge without having to actively inspect everybody's activity history.

Something like:
gold badge: member 15 months, 250 posts, 10 games
silver badge: member 6 months, 100 posts, 5 games
bronze badge: member 3 months, 50 posts, 2 games

I'm using arbitrary numbers, but I don't think it would take a whole lot of effort to come up with a reasonable system.

I like this approach because it:
-rewards positive rather than punishing negative
-gives a very quick way for Players to have confidence in starting a new game
-gives an opportunity to celebrate GMs for contributing to the community. Perhaps a monthly announcement for awarding badges?

I agree that it's probably not a good idea to have mods peeking in on games, but I don't think it'd be necessary.

Personal recommendations are definitely more valuable, but also much less consistent.

I don't know that this is the best solution, but it may check enough boxes to make it worthwhile.

I don't have anything against the idea of badges, but it doesn't really seem to solve the issue of GM ghosting without hurting newer players. It puts new GMs and GM ghosts in the same unbadged boat, which means that you can't tell the difference between a newbie and a ghost GM by looking at the badge.

So, if you're using the badges to avoid ghost GMs, that hurts newbies since they're also unbadged, and thus also being avoided. If you're giving an unbadged GM the benefit of the doubt, then that doesn't really stop ghost GMs, since they can pretend to be newbies.

But it does give a new player some indication of whether they're going to join a reliable game or not. The thread was started to address the specific issue of GMs starting games and not actually playing them. This type of system may help with that.

The main goal of badges is

1. a way to quickly communicate information that will help determine whether a player is interested in joining a game.
2. Provide motivation for quality GM's to keep doing their thing.

What it doesn't do is address the culture of playing with new folks. I do think that one of the strong points of GP is including new players, and we certainly would want to be careful of stigmatizing that.

Also, perhaps you could differentiate between a New Player and an an unbadged character?

I don't really see any use in badges. They don't help address this issue, they only place a divide between "low-ranked" and "high-ranked" players.

Creating division is a risk. Perhaps that could be mitigated by only applying badges to GMs, as the problem we are trying to solve is with GMs.

I do think that I'd be more inclined to join a game (or possibly have higher expectations) with a GM that has some type of track record of running long-term games, so in that sense I don't think they are useless.

I guess it comes down to the goal:

Prevent GMs from creating games they don't intend to actually start.

OR

Identify GMs that have created games they didn't intend to start.

The first is much harder to achieve than the second. I'm not sold that badges are the best idea either, but I do think providing easily accessible information regarding a GMs history would be a great starting point and badges are one way to do that.

Other ways of achieving that could be:

-A high score (could simply be the total # of replies in their most active thread, or total number of posts, whatever.)
-Community driven awards - I'm less excited about this idea, but its an option
-An "Endorsements" page for each GMs profile. Player's could leave a quick note about their positive experiences with a given GM. I'd probably allow a GM to delete comments. This would combine the earlier suggestion of commenting on threads for IC by GMs you played with before, but wouldn't require you to do this every time.

Every solution is vulnerable to being gamed. But it raises the barrier for entry for somebody to want to create a game with no intention of actually playing. In my opinion, that's the best we can hope for without major changes/inconvenience.

But badges would be unable to distinguish honest new GMs from future ghosters. There's no way to tell those groups apart so all you'd be doing is disincentivizing people from joining games run by new members, which is not something I think is a good idea.
This could be done by listing more details about a GM's previous games on their user page. Stuff like when it was opened, how many posts total in there and when it was closed (if it was). Then people can go to the GM's page and get an idea of their history if they want to.
But I'd be hesitant of assigning quality markers with the intention of directing people away from some and towards others basically just based on how long they've been here.

None of those solutions exclusively raise the barrier of entry for people with dishonest intentions, because that's impossible. They just raise the barrier of entry for new members.

Doesn't your suggestion of making more stats available for GMs do precisely the same thing?

You would have to weigh the possibility of losing new GMs because nobody joins their games with the possibility of losing new players because they keep getting ghosted in games they want to join.

It's just a hunch, but I think GMs who ghost is a larger problem.

Regardless, I think that both of these issues could be mitigated, but only by promoting a culture of welcoming new folks rather than a policy change. I think GP is pretty good at reaching out to new players.

So, based on this and previous discussions, I will implement some "gamification", for the fun of it. No badges, at most maybe fun ranks, which have no meaning other than activity. I've posted previous on various mechanics, and this is making me consider others/more. I'll post once I have some thoughts on how it could work.

One thought that was raised by admins is adding/requiring 2FA (Two Factor Authentication). I know how to implement that via an app anyone can download to a phone, and if we collected phone numbers, I'd make sure they're encrypted on the GP side, so even I would never know the number. That said, it obviously makes logging in a bit more a pain, but does help reduce who can log in. Short of having multiple phones, if we block one 2FA number, it would prevent any other accounts from that number.

This seems like a worthwhile idea.

I'm more partial to oddtrail's solutions than using 2FA. Honestly, 2FA sounds more like burning down your house because you have ants...

Hopefully, the game I started will actually get going by the end of January. Just learning this site so I'm setting things up as I go.

Considering how rarely I have to re-log in to the site, it seems like 2FA would be a pretty small inconvenience.

I administer systems for my company. Some users feel that 2FA is the only thing preventing our company from taking over the world, or at least the reason for them being deficient in their job.

I'm always skeptical about giving out my number and it's almost as easy to get a dummy phone number as an email address.