Forum replying standards.

[Azaxx]

In more specifically the past month, but even as far back to Halo 4, we've had thousands of members sign up to the forums and pose their questions towards 343i. While we do have the banner with "Community Forums" at the top of the page, not everyone understands that this is simply a site for fans/community members. This can be caused by a number of reasons for example; lack of English comprehension, skipping over the top of the page and only going into the forum sections where required and or even being linked here by Microsoft's Customer Support themselves.

All of these reasons are legitimate to why people don't always understand that this is simply a community website and nothing officially related to 343 Industries and Microsoft Corporation. Many of these people will post interesting and well thought out threads towards 343i and MS, with the intention of having them read over their posts and hopefully shape the games that are out and/or are to come. That could be bug posts, future game improvement ideas or even wanting to know from officials how to get/do things regarding the game.

 

On the other hand you have people who come in with foul behavior with their posting and are dealt with accordingly, we thank the members who do report this to our attention. This really does help us clean out the forums to give a better look to the newer members who sign up, and to the guests who browse without need to log in.

 

However on the other hand we have existing members who load up pages and see these confused members and simply link them to Halo Waypoint (the official website of 343 Industries) and quite simply telling them to go away over there. This isn't good for multiple reasons; It's a rude way of getting rid of people who sign up and lowers the prospect of having quality members stick around with our forums (no one can predict who will stay and who will go all the time), it also counts as spam (we've seen multiple people post simple one sentence lines linking them to Waypoint), and it's also known that people don't actually help these confused members anyways and just increase post count for themselves.

 

This quite simply isn't acceptable, and is coming to an end. Any member who wishes to help these members should give an actual attempt to solving newer member's queries in the absolute best way they can, with the link at the end of their post to Halo Waypoint if it's further needed. Simply saying "This isn't 343i's real website, go to halo waypoint" is now a punishable offense and will be dealt accordingly.

 

We'll start cleaning up the most recent forum posts of these, so expect posts to disappear with a moderator post in replacement for some of these threads as examples. Further continuation however will have to be dealt with unfortunately. In addition to this, if there is a rude post in the forums, you do not under any circumstances respond to it with a rude reply. This will be moderated harshly as it's not a good image for the forums as new and old members are equally guilty of this. If you wish to have the thread dealt with if you believe it's not at a standard to which we maintain, please simply report the thread and the moderator who's active will attend to it as soon as they can.

 

We understand that most of you members will not need to change your acts with this, since you're all in the clear, but please keep this at the back of your mind anyways.

-Moderating Team.