Part of the reason i suggest an overall thread with polling is that many pro-NV advocates feel that a large percentage of the forum views charlie as "so biased" as to be ignorable. This makes them more comfortable/likely to counter any post with a simple ad hominem and no explanation.
If say a poll revealed the community is divided into 20%proNV/20%proAMD/60%undecided, then the pro advocates would be less inclined to think that everyone else views the situation as they do. They would then be more likely to expand on any counter argument.
The other reason for an overall thread is that those that do post anti charlie/fuad refutes end up posting them over and over in each thread that gets started.
Complexity: the same author may be more or less credible depending on what he or she writes about. E.g., if Charlie writes about Sandforce vs Intel or something, is he as biased as when he writes about AMD vs NV?
For the record I would have been more skeptical if Charlie were all alone in the launch timeframe, but an AMD official already stated that a big chunk of their 6xxx rollout would occur before Christmas, and other rumors were floating around about a media event on or about Oct. 12, etc. Charlie's info corroborates with that, and he also specifically says mid-to-late Nov rollout for Cayman, which is something nobody before him had specifically stated. Other rumors also said Caymans have been in production for weeks now. Given the context in which Charlie's statement occurred, I think it's very believable.
Remember guys the emphasis here needs to be on generality of the method and ease of enforcement.
Build the world's most perfect author credibility ranking system you can imagine but if it comes to represent a bewildering logic-table of if's and then's when it comes to the moderator's time involvement for enforcement then the system will be a fail at time zero.
Needs to be
easily enforceable if it is going to be a VC&G forum policy. And it needs to have buy-in from the rest of the forum mods as well. I'm not alone here.
Its really up to you guys to put in the effort to make the community you want. As it stands right now, posts such as Happy Medium's above are going to be ruled as "acceptable/inactionable" because they are not member-callouts and they are simply representative of the poster's opinion regarding the credibility of the article underpinning the OP itself.
If the forum wants the bare minimum bar to be any higher than this standard then it is up to the forum to craft a proposal and present it to the mods, and the proposal's adoption will hinge critically on the breadth of the community that supports it as well as our expectations of it being easily enforceable.
The example I provided above was merely an example of something I know works in the real-world already and doesn't involve an excessive measure of time to enforce because it places the burden of proof on the person wishing to express their
justified opinion.
It is really no different than when people make effort to justify their opinions on other topics, for example whether or not Steam Survey data can be leveraged as valid information for discussion
XYZ. (this goes to GaiaHunter's argument regarding the complexity of assessing a specific author...the burden of convincingly waging such an assessment falls to the shoulders of the assessor)
Then it becomes a simpler matter for moderators to assess whether sufficient justification was delivered, as well as the fact the forum community itself will express as much anyways in the event that the justification is lacking.
The alternative is that we do nothing, status quo reigns victory another day, and I will continue to
adapt the working definition of thread-crapping on a case-by-case basis in regards to posting negative sentiments of article authors.
In this specific case my viewpoint is that while Happy's post is a self-satisfying one he is allowed to express it but should not be surprised if his fellow members point out that on its own the expressed opinion doesn't really add value to the thread.
But from a moderator standpoint on ruling it a thread-crap or some such it is very much a "Conclusion: non-actionable" type situation.
(note: since the thread's OP - blastingcap - has weighed in on the subject here I do not feel it is entirely out-of-bounds for this discussion to continue in their thread, however I do feel it is best for the community if a new thread was created so that more community members might look into the thread and realize what is being discussed is not just Cayman topics)