Try not to take my posts as official. I'd recommend only taking theymos' word has official, and every other users as their interpretation. Basically, there isn't a whole lot of rules that are set in concrete, and theymos allows personal interpretation of the rules to some degree. Thus, moderators opinions can somewhat differ from time to time. However, if a staff user is wandering a little too far from the guidelines, theymos is likely to give them a message. In fact, I'd describe the vast majority of the standards set by theymos as guidelines, while there only being a few that are enforced like strict rules, i.e plagiarism.
Thank you for the information @Welsh. I think that regarding this particular topic - maximum posts per day - while your posts related to rules/guidelines represent your own interpretation based on a set of believes/knowledge that you have of the rules, I could have used a better wording when I quoted your reply in order to show some kind of "definite answer" to OP's inquiry - not as such as
official per se, but rather a concrete answer. I'll be more careful with my wording from now on.
I highly doubt theymos will impose any sort of restriction to the volume of posts a user can make, as we know, and I touched upon it briefly earlier in the thread; people differ on their commitment to the forum. However, an observation I've made is during the earlier years of registering, and when you might say they're most excited about Bitcoin, that's likely when a user posts higher amounts than normal. Doesn't always mean they're spam, but generally when your posting several times an hour, then the quality of the posts go down.
This is also another good point that I think hasn't been brought up to the discussion (so far). I think that in order to explain it fully - or at least my take on it - we have to think about the (possible) reasons that members do end up in our forum and how these reasons end up being reflected on their activity within our forum. To me they are pretty clear (speaking in general terms) and, as I've told in the past, I could sum them up in two types:
- The "narrow" field of vision ones /generate passive income "easily" spirit - Users that heard/discovered about the campaign publicity that runs in here but didn't decided to explore what it means/implies to wear a signature for such campaigns. They rush into making random threads about something that happened in the world with generic themes or spam post comments that sometimes may not match with the issue that is been discussing in thread just to see the post counter go up. They fail to see that in order to reach the requirements to integrate the campaigns they have X requirements, the main ones tied to account progression. From their point of view the amount of effort that it takes isn't worth and they quickly loose interest and end up never logging in again (they were looking for a source of income that was easy to establish).
- The ones that actually want to take in the discussion/development of BTC as a currency - The "type" basically describes the purpose. These are the type of users that do try their best to give their voice whenever they see fit, try to contribute/establish relations with members here and even try to come up with original ideas that haven't been discussed before. From within this class of user may originate two sub-classes : The ones that decide to combine their positive thinking/activity with campaign services (which is valid by itself) and the ones that decide to follow the same path that they were making without "vouching" for such service.
Each has their own reasons ,and each of them is valid, so long as the goal of both is the same : contribute positively to the growth of the forum (I tend to overuse the word "organic" but I think it represents the way that our growth should be).
Like Welsh rightfully said, I suppose that if we could draft a graphic of the activity of a newly registered user that came here with the goal
(A) - "narrow" field of vision I believe we would/could be looking at something like this[1]:
For clarification : Assuming that a user registers at point 0 in time, the difference between
Total Posts vs.
"Net" Total Posts is that the latter represents what remains in the forum of OP's activity after his/her rule breaking posts were deleted by the mods. This "spike" in
Total Posts is the "manifestation" of the user urge to rank up quickly in the forum to get that activity counter up (Gotta get those juicy campaigns right?). These, in turn, end up what we may call "junk posts" that do end up filling threads/sections of our forum. I think that the activity (as in posts) starts decreasing as soon as the member realizes that there is a tight moderation and what he/she though that would be a piece of cake ends up being a greater task that he/she initially thought of - that "easy to reach campaing" starts looking very, very far away now. Eventually he/she will basically just go back to a "beer money" scheme that won't take him 1/1000 of the effort that he would have to employ to actually contribute to the forum (sadly another one will arrive - this is an endless cycle). A quick note about the "1/1000 effort" - I don't believe that rising thought the forum represents a herculean task - but granted for users with the motivation behind such as
Type A, they will see our "requirements" as dull, pathetic, not necessary, etc etc (as we are reminded from time to time from unsatisfied newbies). My other interpretation is that this is an incredible argument to sustain the idea that this system actually
works - we are "filtering" noise within the huge influx that our forum generate while at the same time rewarding positive contributions / allowing members who actually care to go up the ranks.
Plus, I wouldn't say the moderators are particularly overworked, so this isn't something to be concerned about. The limiting factor of moderators I would argue is lack of reporting. Obviously, Hilariousandco released some of the reporting statistics recently, and we get thousands every month, but split between a lot of us, and how much quicker it is to handle reports are a moderator, as well as the overall activity of this forum, that isn't an awful lot.
I think that it's understandable that members who are more active / care about the general direction of the forum do inquiry, from time to time, if the work of the moderators is balanced or not... This is particular understandable since we have no way of knowing how can we "quantify" the amount of work that each mod has. I'm not saying that we should know the daily routine of the mods - I think that should reserved for the inner layers of the forum structure - but taking in consideration that we don't know how our numbers impact the overall life balance of our mods, I think it's rather understandable that these "worries" pop up every now and then. It is interesting, however, that the limiting factor of moderators would be lack of reporting ... I honestly don't have any suggestion to increase this. If I could list some "random" ideas:
- Perhaps creating a system that rewards users based on the number of "good reports" that he/she has generated towards the forum?
- Or perhaps having a report being delivered each month telling us that something like " With your report we were able to ban X , Y , Z user (...)".
My goal was trying to create a more personal relation with the reports generated (and their impact) but I'm not sure if the amount of effort that it would take to implement such measure would have meaningful results ...
[1] Made with
https://excalidraw.com/
) BUT AWESOME : 
