[otoc]

BUMP

So the consensus is that human intervention should take place as opposed to a better way to code the software?

I'm in agreement with michael5472 that a software fix is the way to go. Not all of us have the luxury of people who have grown up with the technology. Some of us are getting people that have never posted on forums before---a different age group that tends to take criticism in a not so constructive way. Sometime a business decision to let it stay outweighs the slam 'em with a hammer approach.

I tried the mentioned approach and the forum became a place where ALL CAP POSTING WAS THE SUBJECT AND ACTIVE MEMBERS TEAMED UP in an effort to slam the forum instead.

My choice was to ban the majority of active members while the forum was still getting traction. Not a good idea. A better concept would be to make the SHOUT function something that didn't look at smilies or a few lowercase letters to disable it. As it stands, it really doesn't do much of anything. I'd rather the setting be removed from the admin control panel until there was some functionality built into it. The fact is the current feature as written is too easy to be nullified.

I tried a post on the vB.com site as a suggestion, but NADA responses so here I am. The average age of my members is over 45. I'm not going to fight that battle on a ban approach when a simple (or not so simple) code change would deal with it automatically and I could simply say "sorry" that's a feature I don't want to change. It's just not worth the effort.

What would it take to write a better SHOUT function as a plug-in? One that simply counted the number of 3+ letter words and had a setting to convert all of the post into lowercase if the max was breached. Such coding would be worth the effort for once done excluding the issue of version changes.

I know that could be considered a stupid question by some, but any links toward related how-to docs would be appreciated.