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A (controversial) idea for reopening the board

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09:04 / 21.11.03

OK, from the start let me say that I know I'm probably not best placed to be suggesting large scale charges to the workings of Barbelith, being only an occasional poster as I am. That said, I have been reading and observing for a couple of years now, and I would like to think that I am entirely sympathetic to the ideals of the board.

That disclaimer out of the way, here's my idea: Open the board up for outsiders to read, and for new members to register again. But here's the new bit- charge people a token sum to register. A one off payment of something like £10, ie. not insignificant, but not off-putting. £10 seems about right to me, less than two books, three magazines or a CD. This money could be put towards hosting fees.

Now the idea behind this is simple- everytime someone re-registers, ie. if they've been kicked off the board for trolling, or are attempting to register multiple usernames, they rack up an additional £10 charge. So for those honest and fair users who don't abuse the board, the charge will soon be forgotten. For wannabe trolls, the hope is that it soon becomes financially uneconomical for them to keep returning, especially when there are other free boards out there to troll... And should there be a troll who really does insist on throwing what would probably amount to a few hundred pounds at trolling the board, well then at least they're also contributing to the hosting fees and actually doing some good as well.

In terms of everyone already here, assuming that there are no troll aliases still hiding on the board (I'd suggest a mass burning of unused or forgotten suits), I see no reason why any existing users would have to pay the registration fee.

Now, I know that this is far from ideal. After all, charging for access does leave rather a nasty taste in one's mouth. BUT, and this is a big but I feel, if the alternative is to keep the board in a state of lockdown like this, perhaps it's a workable idea.

So, thoughts?

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09:11 / 21.11.03

Obviously with my reference to existing users not paying the fee, if any existing users were kicked off the board and had to re-register, then they would be liable to pay the fee.

11:21 / 21.11.03

I think I'd cautiously say.. yeah.. that sounds like it just might work.. definitely preferable to what we've got now where the frontpage effectively says "piss off and don't come back" to anyone who's not already registered (but that's a discussion for another thread).

Problem is, as the current paypal system has proven, figuring out ways to get money from A to B can be a bit of a headache, especially given the vagaries of anyone, anywhere in the world who might suddenly decide they want to register..

An idea I was thinking on the other day would go along the line's of:

Instead of the current rather unhelpful frontpage for unregistered users, I think it might be nice to at least maybe put up a message explaining the current situation, and, expanding on that, maybe implement a system whereby outsiders could apply for membership to a (large-ish) panel of moderators who would be able to grant it once they were all convinced that the person in question wasn't a troll suit.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

11:58 / 21.11.03

Making people pay is a bad thing, especially as it means we then have to make caps with the Barbelith name on, and a poster of Tom draped suggestively over a server...

I would like it if people could see the board again even if they can't register. Perhaps there could be some sort of system by which moderators can see every suit that's registered in (say) the last 30 days. The new suits are required to post at least (say) ten times in that thirty day period. If they don't then, like Hotmail, their suit gets deleted. This would mean that Calo would have to keep very busy to keep his fictionsuits going the next time he wants to play about. If a new poster is unwiselely displaying trollish tendencies then a mod can flag the user to be kicked, but only an administrator would have the power to do it (ie; a hopefully more automated method of spotting trolls than the current 'Have you PMed Tom yet?' system).

17:08 / 21.11.03

Oh, i like that last one.

Matthew Fluxington

18:52 / 21.11.03

I think that the idea of charging people to read Barbelith in its current state is absolutely hilarious.

I think we desperately need to open up this board so that others can read it *and* freely join the board with zero hassle. We are doing far greater longterm harm to this community by keeping it hermetic than any one troll could ever manage. We need new people, and we won't get many by making it a big hassle, I promise you. It's just not worth it for the prospective members. There are a million places to hang out online, most people have no interest in dealing with the runaround and complications that we've created. They'll just go elsewhere.

If we want to attract new members, we have to make this place accessable, free, and give members more freedoms. I think that part of the amazing success of Ilxor has to do with it's hands-off moderation and somewhat anarchic freedom - smart, creative people are attracted to that, and that's why you've got tons of talented writers flocking to a place like ILM while a lot of our best and brightest eventually lose interest and drift elsewhere.

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21:40 / 21.11.03

Flux - We need new people, and we won't get many by making it a big hassle, I promise you

Well, the idea is to make it less of a hassle than it is now, but more of a hassle than it would be if it were completely open. To balance ease of access against ease of repeated unwanted access. Obviously re: new people, one of the first things to do would be to make the board readable again, and despite the fact that some people seem to be bored and/or disillusioned with the board, I think that there are people out there who would still recognise that Barbelith is somewhat unique in terms of what it has to offer.

Now I should say that other, pretty successful, boards I have been a member of have been the antithesis of the 'lith in terms of the moderation policy, membership etc. But the fact is that Barbelith already has a complex web of institutions and etiquette, so I don't think "hands-off moderation and somewhat anarchic freedom" would work.

Matthew Fluxington

22:14 / 21.11.03

No, I agree, our moderation system (which I think is pretty successful) and our rules of ettiquette are very ingrained right now and I consider them good things. We couldn't just up and change this into Ilxor, that wouldn't work. But I do think that it is important that we open this back up to the internet at large, and that we make joining relatively easy. I strongly believe that we have more to gain from an influx of new members than we have to lose from some trolling. We need to undo some of the damage that months on end of cutting Barbelith off from the internet has done for this community's reputation. I'm more than a little skeptical about how many people would really want to join this place after this whole mess of leaving out new members. I think that sent out a very bad message.

14:28 / 22.11.03

Truth be told, I agree entirely with Flux, although I didn't particularly want to push the issue on my own and risk sparking off gargantuam arguments..

The way we are currently is eventually going to lead to entropy and boredom, at best.

And I really trhink we do make too bigger deal of the whole troll thing - ignore 'em, delete 'em, ban 'em, rinse, repeat. (shrug).

Tryphena Absent

16:54 / 22.11.03

We are doing far greater longterm harm to this community by keeping
it hermetic than any one troll could ever manage.

I agree entirely with this statement. Segregation is never the way forward and we have effectively segregated ourselves from the rest of the Internet. It may seem like a solution but it feels really dodgy to me and I get why it's been done but that doesn't make me feel happy about it.

ONLY NICE THINGS

16:10 / 23.11.03

I think that expecting people to pay is a bit unlikely to work - for £10 you can get porn, so why pay it for a bulletin board. At the moment, certainly, we are losing people without a mechanism to replace them. I have no idea how one would even gauge Barbelith's reputation on the Internet.

However, reopening the board if at all possible as soon as possible is definitely a good idea. One way to do it would be to tie identity to a single thing (most commonly, this is done with a credit card), ensuring that one person cannot register multiple suits. However, this demands that everyone here both has and displays some official existence.

So, option the second is probably to accept that there will possibly be trolling from the boy, assuming he is not too busy with his new career as a top writer, and maybe some of the other tame trolls might lose it again, and evolve a mechanism for dealing with that which does not presuppose that every new entrant *is* a troll until proven otherwise. Easiest way might be to deactivate any suit without a certain number of posts that isn't used for ten days (to make it more difficult to stockpile multiple suits), do the usual IP blocking, and have some sort of "this is a troll" button which a few old hands could have, which would freeze somebody's account and send a message to Tom asking him to investigate the suit ASAP, with reference to the posts that confirmed that opinion. Unfortunate, but as long as we trust the people who can do it to get it substantively right, it means kamikaze spamruns can be halted without having to wait for Tom to log in, and without the need for massive waves of delete post requests...

Matthew Fluxington

17:05 / 23.11.03

Eliminating people for not posting right away (or enough) is crazy. Why should we punish lurkers? A lot of folks lurk for a long time before speaking up. New members may want to feel things out before diving in, and we shouldn't discourage something like that.

I think the credit card id thing is also problematic, because it would make it very difficult for younger and poorer people.

Why can't we just deal with trolling when it comes up? Is that so unreasonable? If someone is trolling, we give them a warning/advice, and if they persist, we delete them. It seems more sensible to do that (even if it keeps happening over and over) than to make joining this board a hassle that a lot of folks may not want to bother with. There's no reason why this can't be really simple and easy. I think that sometimes we collectively make this harder than it has to be.

18:41 / 23.11.03

I agree with Flux. I think the problem is that some trolls are very persistent and any action taken to ban them gets met with accusations of heavy handedness, usually involving tripping Godwin's Law.

I think this needs to be dealt with in a variety of ways. First, we need to decide that there are rules of behaviour. I mean, there remain people who see any moderator action, such as the resizing of an image, as an abuse of power and a clear sign that Barbelith is doomed.

I think we need to be clear that there are boundaries here so that the argument of free speech versus safe saces isn't repeated endlessly. I like the idea of some explicit Terms and Conditions that make the boundaries clear for everyone, enforcers and those subject to enforcement.

Next, I think that the persistent trolling we have could be more easily dealt with if we it wasn't always up to Tom to ban them. The current set up encourages trolling, as far as I can see, because Tom is often too busy to be chasing down trolls and takes most of the burden of it. Spreading that around a bit, as well as seeing banning as an expected occurrence when someone breaks the T&C, would reduce the stress all round, in my opinion. Given how easy it is to re-register (assuming the board reopens) Banning should not be a last resort that we only turn to when someone's behaviour threatens the board.

20:38 / 23.11.03

I agree with that last paragrpah. Sounds OK.

ONLY NICE THINGS

23:14 / 23.11.03

It's a trade-off, basically. If you make it easy to register large numbers of suits, you also have to have decent mechanisms in place for dealing with trolls; a sufficiently lonely fellow could register 10 or 20 suits a day, then launch a sustained assault, which would be very annoying for Tom. So, if we have open registration and no compulsion to "validate" suits, we need as many people as are trusted to do so with the power to suspend trollsuits pending Tom looking at them. That would remove the problem of trolling, although some would protest that those people have too much power. On the other hand, abuses of that power would be blindingly obvious and easy to rectify...

(Oh, and the fact that the board has had to be locked in the first place suggests that "crazy" is not the adjective you might be looking for, Flux. If you cease reflexively to abuse and gainsay any idea that does not agree with your own, people are likely to have more respect for your opinion.)

23:57 / 23.11.03

I think its crazy that the board has been closed for so long. If the idea was to close things up until we decided what was going to be done about the trolling problem then maybe we should be working on that so we can open things back up and get some fresh air in here.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

03:09 / 24.11.03

Point the first: Barbelith is a democratic BBS, so surely whether the board is re-opened should be based on what the board wants- I'd move to open it now. I think most people would.

Point the second: It really isn't that hard to deal with trolls. Delete their posts at first, then ban the shit out of them. It's really not rocket science, and it's what about 3 million messageboards do every day: for example www.portalofevil.com is through it's very nature besieged with the fuckers, and it only has two moderators. We have how many?

Point the third: Unless we re-open, this message board will wither and die. Seriously. Open it and open it today (IMO, of course).

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

03:11 / 24.11.03

Point the fourth: Everyone should have the right to lurk, no one should have the obligation to pay. I wouldn't have joined if it would have cost me money to pay. Half of you wouldn't.

ONLY NICE THINGS

06:00 / 24.11.03

All good points, although:

1) Barbelith is not a democratic forum - at best it functioned by acclamation.

2) Primarily although not exclusively because of the nature of Barbelith and Barbeloids, deleting and banning trolls is more controversial than you'd think. Also, moderators function very differently on Barbelith. Check out the FAQ, which will tell you more about this.portalofevil.com, I suspect, is not a democratic forum, so I'm not sure the comparison holds water.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

08:49 / 24.11.03

Perhaps- but it just about functions, and attracts new poster.

Tryphena Absent

09:07 / 24.11.03

I have no idea how one would even gauge Barbelith's reputation on the Internet.

Erm, I don't think it really has one except with people who have been involved with it at some point or other. I'd never heard of it before I followed a link on a friends site and I've been all over the Internet for years. The 'net after all is a very diverse, disparate and guerilla community, reputation is moving all the time.

I've always thought that banning trolls is really about timing. The majority of people will object if you get the timing wrong. You have to actually give a troll the chance to troll before you can reasonably ban them. Just because you know they're a troll doesn't mean that everyone believes that they are. Innocent until proven guilty should apply and barbelith moderators can be a little prone to jumping the gun.

Matthew Fluxington

12:21 / 24.11.03

Well, gee, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings Haus, but I really do think that effectively punishing lurkers for not posting is a terrible idea, and yeah, I think that closing the board off in the first place was also a pretty bad idea. Should I pretend to feel otherwise?

12:51 / 24.11.03

The situation that we have at the moment goes like this:

1) New members are done by hand, which is killing me, frankly. I can turn that off and let anyone register, but it does allow trolls back in and we don't have a good mechanism for dealing with that, and WHETHER YOU WANT TO BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the whole site DOES go to shit when we start getting under prolonged assault and there aren't an awful lot of other ways to deal with that.

2) I'd love to make the board visible to people again, but unfortunately Cal hard-coded that and so it's trickier to turn it on/off like that. Which is a shame. It's easier for me to let new members in than it is to turn this off.

3)Any solutions that require extra coding are unlikely because Cal and I have had ANOTHER stinking row. It's all very depressing, but there you go.

4) I can't ask people to pay without this effectively becoming a business and I'm not sure I have the infrastructure to be able to maintain that.

So at the moment, I'm thinking of opening up the gates for a while and seeing how we deal with it.

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:06 / 24.11.03

Yes, I think that's a good idea. I think that basically what people have to accept is that if they want a Barbelith that is visible to everyone, easy to sign up to and yet NOT overrun by one or two trolls, they have to be a little more willing to accept action that moderators take collectively to deal with any trolling or otherwise unacceptable behaviour that may occur...

Matthew Fluxington

13:26 / 24.11.03

Eep. Sorry about the Cal stuff, Tom. That complicates everything.

We should try to be optimistic about letting people in, and the trolling issue. If the trolling comes up, we should just delete it and move on just like any other bbs. The more dramatic we are in dealing with trolling, the more we promote it. If we deal with this methodically and with a great deal of nonchalance, it will make things far less fun for the trolling twerps.

13:40 / 24.11.03

That's fine as long as people are actually prepared to let moderators get on with the job of getting shot of idiots this time around, instead of constantly complaining about "overreacting" or how banning "goes against what Barbelith stands for."

13:51 / 24.11.03

Flux - I'm afraid that's the only thing I disagree with you on and I want to make this very clear. Barbelith has NOT been subject to the normal rounds of bland trolling, it has been under systematic and long-term attack by a particularly unpleasant man who is quite prepared to resort to any and all techniques at his disposal to screw this place up - up to and including using other people's user names without their permission, e-mailing old users to get access to the board, sendingpretending to be other users in order to stoke up anxieties about legal attacks and the like. I've been involved in a lot of communities and this is NOT normal behaviour and it is PROFOUNDLY difficult to deal with.

Most of the users of the board haven't had to suffer the full extent of the problems that we've had, and for that I'm profoundly grateful. Most of the moderators too have not had to worry about it. It's simply NOT the case that we can just let them onto the board and handle them easily and without anxiety - even if individually we think that the rest of the board should be able to do so, it's been demonstrated again and again that it does diminish the quality of the conversations that we can have and gets people very very unhappy.

At a certain point, people don't want to be on a board where a long-term annoyance writes about feeding lesbians to alsatians and killing black people with tire irons. And I can't say that I blame them.

So basically I'm prepared - tentatively - to open up new registrations since we've got past the initial problematic period. I'm tempted to have the board open for a week every couple of months so that we minimise the problems, but we'll not do that to start off with and see how it goes. If we find ourselves in the same situation, though, the board WILL go back to no registrations again. Until we can find a way of building in mechanisms to deal with this stuff - or the board manages to easily weather these problems - that's just the way it's got to be. Apologies.

Matthew Fluxington

14:21 / 24.11.03

If we open the board for a week every few months, should we make an effort to promote the board elsewhere to attract new people, or would we just be opening ourselves to whoever just happened to be coming by during that one week? It seems kind of arbitrary, and I'm not sure how many new people we would end up with.

Should there be a Barbelith Recruitment Drive?

14:34 / 24.11.03

My point with that is that we'd be able to deal with the problematic users and the recurrent trouble-makers during that week, giving us a few weeks of down-time every so often.

With regard to a recruitment drive - I'm totally up for that. I'd love us to target some people and invite them to join the community.

ONLY NICE THINGS

17:48 / 24.11.03

You don't offend me, Flux. I think that you make good points but unfortunately have a tendency to throw toys out of pram and scream at the first sign of dissent. It's a bit dull, and it makes it much harder to agree with you without feeling like one is condoning you behaving like a child to get your own way. Also, a little empathy with the people on the receiving end of the behaviour Tom has cited as not the actions of regular trollery would not go amiss; the fact that it has not affected *you* adversely is not really the issue.

(I now have images, btw, of Flux having marshalled 8000 men of Gondor who like the Strokes, and Radiator having marshalled 8000 Uruk-Hai who do not like the Strokes, both ringing the beautiful citadel on the hill waiting for the drawbridge to fall)

We should try to be optimistic about letting people in, and the trolling issue. If the trolling comes up, we should just delete it and move on just like any other bbs.

I agree. Assuming that moderators have the power to act against trolls (at the moment, it takes a large number of moderators to be online at the same time to mount any real kind of defence against a persistent troll deciding to go bug frenzy) and that they will not then be subject to intolerable whinging from trolls, the allies of trolls and concerned "crybabies" (your term, I believe, Flux), setting off yet more fucking navel gazing.

If people are happy with the level of executive power and lack of accountability that portalofevil.com might provide in its moderators, we should be cool. If people are prepared to accept moderators behaving acccording to their good instincts (and I suspect the widening of the franchise already underway will make it very hard to act effectively against devoted and pathological trolls with the current structures, as well-meaning but innocent mods are likely to boycott actions), and broaden their powers accordingly, also good.

We *may* be able to open Barbelith and be fine. Our lonely troll (who is really the issue here, ultimately - low-level trolls are always with us and largely we can just ignore them, or kick them out for a bit then let them back in, or delete their posts if they are off topic, as per) may have found something else to do with his time, which would be lovely.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

20:52 / 24.11.03

(I now have images, btw, of Flux having marshalled 8000 men of Gondor who like the Strokes, and Radiator having marshalled 8000 Uruk-Hai who do not like the Strokes, both ringing the beautiful citadel on the hill waiting for the drawbridge to fall)

Oh god I am so hard right now

21:01 / 24.11.03

You realise that sentences like the last one in the above post are part of the problem, yes? The funny little pot shot comments always escalate because no one ever wants to let some other asshole have the last word. When he finds his way back on the board, and he will, all the little comments that were made about him in his absence are just going to fuel his desire to fuck with the place. Good show.

21:02 / 24.11.03

Damn you, Radiator. Post before last.

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:19 / 24.11.03

Bio, you're a dear sweet boy, but I think your Psych 101 is of low quality. We have done ignoring and we have done indulging, and neither works. Our pet troll's problems extend far beyond anything we could deal with rationally. The fact that you managed to avoid this, because you were not working to keep the board going at the time of his various assaults, is good for you in terms of your enjoyment of Barbelith but bad inasmuch as you are not really getting the hang of the thing. Go back and read Tom's posts.

The troll situation is not about little pot shot comments. It is about a disturbed young man with nothing better to do with his time than desperately seek the company of people who largely and with fair reason despise him. There is quite simply no way that "leaving him alone" will somehow lead him not to fuck around with the board. Fucking around with the board is the only meaningful way he is able to interact with it.

So, although I am glad you are here to back up your friend, I don't think you've picked a terribly good battleground on which to do it, as that battleground is based on the idea that there is some sort of logical procedure here. There is not. If the boy has met a girl or found a peer group that feels something other than contempt for him, he might not have time to attack Barbelith. Otherwise, he will. Fortunately, he has now left a lengthy trail of evidence of harrassing behaviour behind him, along with some other statements and actions of dubious legality and wisdom, which hopefully means he will have the animal cunning not to push. It's a largely forlorn hope, but a hope.

22:12 / 24.11.03

The "dear sweet boy" comments are exactly the type of shit I'm talking about. But I'm sure you know that, you're a smart fellow.

The thing is, Andrew isn't the only troll we've had around here. And I'm fairly sure that you're not the only moderator trying to help out. So why is it that you always seem to be the one involved in a verbal slap fest? For all your intelligence, it seems like you don't know how to back away from a problem without tossing in the last little put down. Its petty, self serving and of no help to the board in the long run. But hey, have at it.

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