I understand a lot of the sentiments in this thread, and overall I'm somewhere in the middle in terms of the spotlight system.
I totally get and agree with Karthik and the others thinking along those lines. Spotlights lately have been at best silly and at worst something no one will understand in the future at all. Seriously, look at page 1 of the Spotlight list and compare it to page 51. You can't argue that there hasn't been a drop in quality content.
I also agree with Gregor. So much of what I've learned about FRC was from months of reading every spotlit thread I could get my hands on. When I was a bored, inspired high schooler with a whole summer of nothing to do, I read at least a dozen of those threads a day and soaked up knowledge like a sponge. Some method to preserve quality threads and posts is beneficial.
Ultimately, though, I want the solution that lets us upgrade VB as quickly as possible. There are a lot of new features that would be very beneficial to the community. I personally don't care for / won't use social media integration, but VB's Social Groups in particular have a lot of potential. Depending on implementation, teams could make their own private Social Groups. This would help encourage more CD use and also provide a place for teams to collaborate online that isn't Facebook.
So my proposal is simple: Get rid of Spotlights in software as we know them. Archive all of the threads and quotes somewhere. Then, on an independent website (or at least, not a VB page), we can start compiling links to good threads. If there's a resource somewhere with lots of insightful CD threads that's kept up to date by a handful of users, then students can still learn from them as Gregor and I have. It could also collect inspirational quotes like Spotlights are supposed to do, if we want. Basically, I'm saying there's no reason we can't replicate the functionality of Spotlight as a community outside of a custom vBulletin plugin that impedes updates.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jwallace15
Did some thinking last night when my computer was off; what if you limit spotlighting posts to those with a full bar of rep/ >1000 posts? That way whoever is spotlighting a post clearly knows what they're doing and won't waste the forum's time with useless tripe.
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A lot of the "bad" spotlights come from these users.