Come Netscape and AOL, and the lack of distinction made for USENET and the web. Because of how the USENET interfaces are handled, users rarely saw anything that told them to lurk before posting, and people would jump right into the group without looking at FAQs or other topic headers. Many of these were FAQish questions, and thus began the rather major shift of USENET from being useful to being only mildly so. (this is about 1995, just as far back as Google has the archives at this time; you need to go back even further than that to see this). While there was a lot of noise generated by spamming newsgroups, the remaining posts still had a worse S/N ratio than before. Today, it's only gotten worse, as we now have HTML posts, and newsreaders that break standard convention with how posts are formatted.
But in terms of PM, the fact that it's easy to post any question could artificially be lowering the S/N ratio that other monks have found to be disheartening. If there was a *small* barrier to prevent those that might be posting a FAQish question, the S/N ratio would increase dramatically.
Is it neccessarily muzzling new users? IMO, no, because it only happens once (for the first time you post), and you have the ability to lurk even then. I can think of situations that you might come in as a new user and wish to post ASAP where the question is legit and an answer needed quickly and can't be handled easily in the CB, but the number of other situations where you want a fast answer as a new user (homework due, workwork due) outweight these.
There's lots of other things to put up a small barrier to the first post to prevent the noise, such as restating how to post, where to post, where the FAQs are, pointing the user to searches and other possible answers, etc etc. But these are easily ignored no matter how much visual clues you give the user, and those new users that are in the case where they need the answer fast and don't want to do the work are going to ignore such warnings moreso than other users. So some mechanism built into the site that slows down the first post seems to me to be the only way to reduce the number of FAQish questions and improve S/N.
In reply to Re: Muzzling new/anon users
by Masem
in thread Don't just provide a module name
by gryphon
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