Musings on forum chaos

[Nick]

Hi Tolvor,

Welcome to the Astral Pulse! [] Thanks also for your input. There is a lot of ground to cover in maintaining a quality forum. Our administrator works very hard at this, as do the moderators. It is not an easy task with a forum this large. We try to cover the different forums as thoroughly as possible, but also ask that members private message us if there is something of concern.

Looking forward to your participation in the forum.

All the best,

[Tolvor]

I'm a new member and I've been catching up with the discussions that have been going on.  Most worrisome is that there seems to be a high level of annoyance with the DBZ/ki crowd resulting in some people quitting the forum.  In the messages that I have been able to find in the last two weeks, this place is actually doing pretty good.  There is significant useful traffic of info, and people are civil.

I'm somewhat sure that everyone here has frequented a major forum before this.  I've probably visited hundreds, and frequented dozens.  Every one of the forums had their own special brand of net-loony(*1, below), without exception.  Many had several *camps* of net-loonies who would endlessly debate their brand of looniness with each other.  The very worst case resulted in a three way lawsuit (for defamation and fraud) in a usenet forum about blackjack (no I wasn't involved).  

The trick to a forum surviving is to handle the abusers correctly.  If they break the rules, ban them (and if they alias, kill the ip).  If they want to discuss how astral projection applies to DBZ/Ki (huh?) then create a new forum division for them that the rest of us can ignore.  If the problem persists figure out a way to have a user-level forum filter, with kill-words (btw I'm a programmer so yes, I know how difficult this can be). If the problem still persists do what slashdot.org does (IMO the best run forum), implement a user-to-user level moderation capability.  As a last resort, warn them about their inappropriate topic, and then kill the future threads.  I hate censorship in theory, but sometimes it does get the point across.

Hoping that the net-abusers will grow up, think before they speak, search before they ask, consider their audience, and to be polite is a lost cause.  They enjoy chaos, and consider flamewars fun.  For other members (the majority) to survive, you must either tolerate and completely ignore them, or eliminate them.  Fortunately the problem here isn't bad.

Just some musings of mine, take them or leave them.  I'm off to get some sleep.

BTW, an high post count for trivial postings is its own punishment.  



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*1)
net-loony - odious poster in a usenet forum who is grossly off-topic and ignores common sense when posting.  Using l33t-speak in a teacher-centric forum would be loony.  Net loonies are considered to be more dangerous than the common (l)user, and marginally smarter than the net-munchkin, but hasn't yet degenerated to the evil troll, spoofer, or clone, yet.  They are considered to be immune to all warnings and disparaging comments.  Approach with caution.  There is no bag-limit when hunting loonies.