How longs a bit of string?

[Pose]

I have seen a few of us questioning our intake rate of late and wanted to get a general feel for what others think, and have it all in 1 place

[magiter]

I have voted as create a new alliance, but i would be happy with the limit at 40 and the weed out inactives to make space for more useful players.

[eproxy]

The problem with weeding out inactive is identifying who they are (bearing in mind that the suspects quite often are just quiet). Personally I think another alliance would be just us going on to create another interplay, and we all know how they end up. However of all the possible alternatives I think this is the best one.

[bishop]

Can someone explain what's wrong with just letting them into our alliance, and deciding from there whether or not they're worth keeping? We don't have so many application that we're gonna end up the size of Digg.

[inyati]

Communication is the cornerstone for the alliance. Can FoM guarantee that what is discussed and planned on this forum reaches the "silent" ones, and is rightly executed?

[Cesium]

Weed out the inactives for God's sake!

[Arminius]

How about regular 'manoeuvres' to identify the active ones? Every so often there's an exercise such as 'dump 1 ST on island x:x:x', and then we can see a) our response times and b) who's active. Fail to take part in a manoeuvre a few times and you get a yellow card or the boot...

May sound silly, but would give us something to pass the time.

[Sol]

When I was admin, I used to create activity lists in the alliance forum. I'd put everyones name on the list and they had a certain time to remove their name from the list by copying,pasting, removing their name from the list and posting it. By the due date anyone whose name remained on the list were seen as inactive and kicked out. Might have seemed too harsh to some, but I set a reasonable deadline and I saw it as a members responsibility to not only keep up with his/her isles, but to be informed of alliance internal and external problems.

I realize that this forum is quite big to keep up with, so I don't know how one would attempt to keep everyone in check.

I don't like the idea of creating another alliance. I'm often reminded of .:VI:. and how that fell apart...It would be a shame if we ended up like that.

[inyati]

I like Arminius's idea. Basicly it doesnt "hurt" those that hardly come to the forum and respects the individual reason for that to occur, while at the same time tests how communication channels work ingame. A player might not like or have time to read all the blabber, but that doesnt mean he'll not read mail or ingame forum and execute "orders".

In truth, Morkin functions much the same way. Many dont come here, but when we sound the alarme in our forum, everyone rallys immediatly.

Manouvers could be, sending out stonethrowers during a certain period to someones island. That person notes the names and reports them. Failing to comply 3 manouvers (or anyother number) will seriously harm your Karma.

[Gornall]

arminius said:

How about regular 'manoeuvres' to identify the active ones? Every so often there's an exercise such as 'dump 1 ST on island x:x:x', and then we can see a) our response times and b) who's active. Fail to take part in a manoeuvre a few times and you get a yellow card or the boot...

May sound silly, but would give us something to pass the time.

I was all for a feeder alliance as such but I kinda like this idea.

Regardless of how many members FoM has I still reckon it would have the same solid core it has now, thats all that matters really? So long as you don't bank on everyone to respond to everything.

[SkulkrinBait]

I voted yes, but weed out inactives to make room.

However, this might be better:

We can recruit more people into FoM as we currently do, maybe have a limit of 40 max and weed out the inactives as we go.

But, if we have someone wanting to join FoM who we aren't quite sure about, but they aren't a definite "no", then we put them into a FoM feeder. We would monitor their performance and after a qualifying period of good conduct we then let them into FoM. This would help weed out spies and inactives and would allow potentially good players to show their talents, whether it be diplomatic skills, administration skills or whatever.

[Arminius]

Having a feeder also means a time-delay before potential spies have access to our internal discussions.

[inyati]

A question to all veteran FoMer's:
We have many interesting things in this forum like the database, noobs data posts, etc.
How comfortable are you with letting new members have instant access to it?

(not being sarcastic, really would like to hear peoples opinion)

[eproxy]

I'd certainly want to make it restricted at first... at the end of the day the only way you can prove the 'loyalty' of someone is for them to prove it with both time and deeds.

[SkulkrinBait]

So how about a feeder alliance as the default? Everyone goes into there until they "prove" themselves and then they are allowed into FoM.

Solves a few problems, maybe causes some as well.

;D