User blog comment:Sonasaurus/Hey, you awake in there?/@comment-1978336-20120826014057

We need to be a bit more newb-friendly, at least for the time being. We're losing old users much faster than we're gaining new ones, and while there should be plenty of new users once Halo 4 is released, it's likely that 95% of them will quickly be scared off by the big bad NCF template. At least for the time being, it may be best to show a bit of leniency towards new users. While we shouldn't just start to allowing Mary-Sue/Gary-Stus, godmods, crossovers, text-talk, or just plain bad writing, we should be more forgiving about improper dates, ranks, SPARTAN tags. Almost all of us here have a tendency to come down fairly hard on new users for getting such things wrong, myself included, and it's not always fair of us to do so. While we all surely know that obscure little details are important, new users can't realistically always be expected to know such things when they come to the site, and hence they really don't really deserve to be treated and punished so harshly. Most of us here know that even those who are serious about the quality of their writing probably won't get every little detail right the first time around, and when we bash them for it we come across as mean, and that's probably going to be their first impression of us, upon which they will likely base their opinions of the community as a whole. If that's the idea we give them about us right off of the bat, they're probably not going to stick around for long. Rather than that, we should be trying to show new users that Halo Fanon is a place for writers grow and collaborate with one another, which is going to make users want to stay. So, instead of ramming our rules down newbies' throats, we should try to gently and carefully introduce them to the to the idea of canon-friendliness and the like, issues will likely resolve themselves as writers become more conscious about the quality of their work. However, this should only apply to writers who show promise. No mercy to those who clearly do not and will not care about the quality of what they add to the site; we don't want them here.