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Can I ask moderators to do some general cleaning please?

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w1rebaby

00:19 / 21.04.04

God, the mods here are such facists.

miss wonderstarr

00:22 / 21.04.04

I apologise. Likesay, I saw your troll troubles and man, they are horrendous. I sympathise with that shit. Bye for now!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:43 / 21.04.04

btw, kovacs, Black Mask, any other TMO people in this thread- afaik, the lock on new members isn't a result of your arrival, before you start getting paranoid.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

One can only suggest endurance or closer proofreading.

i might suggest a spellchecker... if i knew what that entailed. i know blogger has one.
would it be a nightmare to program?
would there be a problem in having to accomodate odd spellings? or american english?

Char Aina

17:16 / 21.04.04

also, if there is cleaning to be done, gimme a shammy.
i am still willing to be a moderator, wherever you need me.

ONLY NICE THINGS

17:21 / 21.04.04

Spellchecking - use word, if I were you, or similar word-pro program, then cut and paste into Barbelith. Simple! If you don't have Word, download OpenOffice.org - it's very good, and entirely free.

w1rebaby

18:54 / 21.04.04

There's a spellchecker plugin for IE called iespell which I hear is quite good.

Olulabelle

07:52 / 22.04.04

It's a weird experience watching Barbelith be discussed to such an extent on another board. Someone there said: Looks interesting, if a little politically predictable in the switchboard section and a bit too new-age everywhere else. The posters also seem quite detached from each other, but I'd probably need to read more to be sure.

Are we really like that? Detached?

miss wonderstarr

10:40 / 22.04.04

With 5000 members how can you not be detached? Just for comparison, I would guess TMO has about 50-100 genuinely active members who post at least once a week. That makes for a tight community, with all the benefits and disadvantages involved. I can understand that some of you here would be able to get to know each other, banter, meet up, recognise each other's style and foibles, but the total number of contributors seems almost ludicrously high.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:45 / 22.04.04

Bear in mind, though, that of the four thousand-odd, only a small proportion actually post. There's a fair few who just read it, and I dare say a majority who just registered then forgot about it.

There's still a lot of regulars... but it's not quite as extreme as it looks.

Grey Area

11:47 / 22.04.04

Kovacs, Barbelith might have nearly 5,000 registered members, but you will notice only about 300 of them post with any regularity (or at all!). That number's a quick, off-top-of-my-head guesstimate, btw. And not everyone posts across the board either, which results in some close-knit communities, especially in the Temple and Comics fora.

The membership number skyrocketed shortly after the board became googleable...most of the people from about 2,500 onwards (someone correct me if I'm wrong) have either:

1) Found us, thought 'this looks nice', registered and never posted.
2) Found us, thought 'this looks nice', registered and posted once or twice, then vanished.
3) Found us, registered, spammed/trolled a thread or two and pissed off.
4) Lurked.

I'd say the detachment level is not nearly as high as some would have you believe...

Grey Area

11:48 / 22.04.04

And the stoat beats me to it...argh.

Char Aina

11:54 / 22.04.04

i think there *is* a tendency to talk to an imaginary audience here rather than to each other.
suits me fine, thats the way i post most of the time too.

some other boards are full of back slapping and 'cameraderie' of the sort that includes all your friends being right all the time and anyone who isnt being wrong.

i prefer detached and objective.

miss wonderstarr

12:07 / 22.04.04

Could you delete the "suits" that have only been used once, or never used? It seems a bit pointless having 4000 members if only 300 ever post.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:19 / 22.04.04

Maybe an automatic thing, that would delete a suit with, say, less than 10 posts after a month... otherwise Tom's gonna be number-crunching for an AWFULLY long time.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:14 / 22.04.04

Possible - we've discussed this before and generally concluded that it's a fair amount of trouble to go to for no effect whatsoever apart from changing the membership number at the top. There are security arguments for doing it also, but the presence of members who don't post or even who no longer read Barbelith doesn't do any particular harm...

Tryphena Absent

14:16 / 22.04.04

It's a bit of an effort to delete all of those suits for the sake of things looking tidier. I mean, generally it's not like they're doing anything.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:22 / 23.04.04

And while some of them are waiting for our Welsh friend to activate them moderators are getting fairly good at spotting him and passing it over to Tom for deletion.

Tom Coates

09:17 / 23.04.04

You shouldn't forget that there's a real range of ways to use a board like this. Some of those people have been posting consistently for the last four years, some came on for a few months or years and left permanently, still more left once and come back or have sporadic presences on the board. And don't forget that for a while you had to be a member of the board in order to be able to read it, so many of that number are people who would normally be lurkers. Last time I did a check (couple of years ago), in the most recent month there were around 450 people who had posted and around 120 new posts a day. I will see if I can go and do a check now because I quite like stats.

Tom Coates

09:41 / 23.04.04

Hm. Latest stats suggest (unless I'm doing this wrong, and I really might be) that there have been 14846 undeleted posts in the last month made by 900 distinct users, with an average of 16 posts each per month or around 1/2 a post each per day. Obviously this suggests that some people aren't posting very much at all and others are posting a fair amount. Still - quite interesting figures.

miss wonderstarr

10:58 / 23.04.04

Yeah, my 50 per day rate must be skewing those figures.

Mazarine

05:05 / 24.04.04

Re: Conversation. Any chance we can start PMing people who start intro threads just for themselves, asking them to please refer to one of the pre-existing intro threads and then delete the topic? No being a perfectly acceptable answer.

grant

05:45 / 24.04.04

Hmm. That seems pushy. I don't know how I would've reacted to that, if I'd done that way back when, no matter how it was phrased.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

09:48 / 24.04.04

Yeah, it's irritating but not exactly world threatening. If it becomes an issue further down the line then I suppose moderators could always cut and paste into the appropriate place.

Olulabelle

14:09 / 25.04.04

900 distinct users? Wow. When we did the barbelith head count nowhere near as many people 'admitted' to posting.

Tom Coates

15:25 / 25.04.04

Well I should point out that i'm currently working on a new way of joining the board that's going to require quite a lot more work by new users anyway, which will include the inability to start new topics at all for a while. Maybe that'll resolve that problem (I'm sure it'll put some other people off the board too).

w1rebaby

18:48 / 25.04.04

That sounds interesting... tell us more?

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