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Ok - let me give everyone a little context at this point and explain some of my longer term thoughts on the issue. First a few thoughts around message boards generally and barbelith's place amongst them.
Personally I'm very keen that barbelith is NOT like every other messageboard on the web. In my experience most other messageboards are pretty terrible places. I would argue that what makes barbelith unique and interesting is that it has developed a culture and a set of understandings about how it should operate and function - as well as a surprisingly high level of discourse - that are all things that we want to maintain. Also part of the rationale I see for Barbelith's continuing existence is as an experimental online community. I'm actually now able to put some more time and effort into running this place and building in new mechanisms and hopefully we will be able to start doing some of the other stuff that other boards haven't been able to do. So that's just a bit of context about my aspirations for this place - basically, barbelith's elitist in the sense that it requires you to put in some work to get value out of it and to participate effectively, that this is a good thing and it is open in that anyone is able to put in that work if they want. If they don't like it, then there are infinite other boards out there they can visit and participate in.
Secondly, with regards to the scale of the new membership thing. Basically many of us have been in communities before that got overwhelmed by new posters or one-off posters or cultures of trolls. Many of us were on Usenet or have even been part of barbelith through it's more difficult times. The truth of the matter is - and I don't want to sound too much like David Blunkett here - the best way for a community to function is with a certain proportion of new members to keep things interesting and fresh and a certain proportion of established members to carry forward the lessons of previous problems on the board. Too many new members coming through and leaving results in a board without a culture, that can't learn from the past and can't have in-depth discussions without falling into old fights that are actually 'new' to the most recent wave of new members. A community - on the other hand - that has too few new members ends up stultifying and crawling in upon itself, getting steadily more grouchy until everyone leaves. With regard to new members we need to make sure that we're getting a good flow through the place, but not too many and not too few.
If this all sounds a little creepily like government immigration policy then you're on the right track frankly. Running a community of this scale over five years has given me a newfound respect for a lot of patriarchal fascist bullshit of Home Secretaries over the decades - in at least now I understand the rationale they use to support their policies even if I don't agree with the policies themselves.
Anyway, things have changed on Barbelith recently. The first thing that changed was that I've been working to improve the URLs and move things closer to the front of the site. This has resulted (for the first time) in proper Google-readable URLs that can now be spidered. Hence we now have 20,000 pages of threads that can be indexed and searched for. Google already sends us about TWO PEOPLE A MINUTE, where this time last week it was sending us none. Our page impressions week on week have escalated dramatically with last monday's figures being at around the 8000 page impression mark as opposed to today's figures being at around the 16,000 page impression mark (and the day isn't really over yet in statsland). Much of this traffic is coming from Google. This is GREAT stuff - we need all these users coming in to keep the board fresh - but it's also a problem in that if it contiinues to escalate as I expect it might we could in principle be dealing with a worst case situation of several HUNDRED new users a day most of which coming through from a search and randomly choosing to reply to it. These posts are normally ill-considered, demonstrate no knowledge of the norms of behaviour on the board and often the people concerned NEVER. COME. BACK. that makes it harder for us to do anything about them. A 24-hour pause doesn't stop people who are actively interested in participating (or are really stroppy and want to complain), but it will stop the casual posters who are information gathering from making some half-arsed comment which causes a six page fight which they're not even going to see.
The other question - clearly - is whether we should be putting any filters on the kind of person who joins the board. Now this is a troubling question, but clearly the answer is yes. I say that because we have a couple of examples of individuals we don't want on the board again. Therefore there's a filter there. From that very basic statement we can move on. We are as a board committed to avoiding harrassment and we've had several discussions in the past about users that spam the board or do nothing but troll (ie. making tendentious comments designed to start arguments but little else). These are people that we want to avoid causing problems again, so we have to havea mechanism that makes it harder for them to sign-up again having signed up once. So in the medium term there will be filters of some kind at the front doors. And if we agree that new users should have to pause for a while before posting then that's another kind of filtering as well.
In the long-term I'd like to propose an actually quite draconian system of handling new members in which they are all premoderated by full members in the same way as moderation actions are voted upon. (When they post it doesn't go directly onto the site, but it voted upon by a randomly chosen proportion of existing members and if approved goes onto the site). After a certain number of approvals, the member becomes a full member and can do what they want (as well as vote on junior member posts). It sounds severe but it allows to have the doors open for everyone and for the ENTIRE COMMUNITY (not just a few moderators or admins) to have a say as to what kind of place they want this to be. It also gives us something to bump peopl eback to when they've been annoying. Essentially I just want to say to the people who say that we should just let new members roam around that they're going to get unexpected levels of them over the next few weeks and that we need to have some clear mechanisms for registering public opprobrium.
I'd be interested in what anyone/everyone thinks about this stiff.It's not something that we talk about in any particualrgreat detail onthe whole, but iI think it could be really useful.
PS. The board was closed to new members for a while because we were in the middle of a battle with a long-term troll on the board. The situation was charged then but now it is not so charged. So the rationale for forcing a cool-down period of some kind has now ended. Similarly not letting people read the board from outside was designed to have a similar effect - LET THINGS COOL DOWN. In both cases I'm pretty much happy with the results and will institute those techniques again if a similar problem emerges. |
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