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State of the board at present

  
  

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Tom Coates
06:16 / 16.02.05
That's certainly my point - if we open the doors and shut them again after a week, you might get a hundred or users join the board. Maybe more. Of them, the vast majority will post once in txt speak or start some kind of a fight. That slower engagement with the culture of the board that we hope for simply will not happen.
 
 
Tom Coates
06:22 / 16.02.05
Might be worth me saying that yesterday was the busiest day ever in terms of the number of pages that members of the public downloaded. Got up to 20,000 pages and 13,000 visits.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
07:08 / 16.02.05
To avoid the next three or four pages being 'yes' or 'no's, I've started another thread for voting, though discussions should perhaps be kept here. I've also suggested we make midnight Friday GMT the closing date, just so we can have a decision on this by the weekend.

I hope this meets with everyone's approval?
 
 
Bed Head
07:27 / 16.02.05
But – it’s not really going to take much, is it? Maybe a much finer line than is being assumed, between a manageable/active forum, and a manageable/dead one. There’s surely no need for hundreds of new users, anyway. And, I seem to remember, not too long ago dwight and GGMeme were talking about lining people up. Bloglinks and introductions and recommendations, I think that’s a much, *much* better way of growing a community that actually talks, rather than just letting gazillions of people find us by googleing. Google’s great for lots of things, but maybe, um, meeting nothing but intelligent and interesting people isn’t one of them.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
07:54 / 16.02.05
Bear in mind that there are a lot of people who read the board already, but can't join (Tom's stats would seem to bear this out)- it's not just going to be random Googlers. Yes, there'll be twats. But hopefully there'll also be people who've been reading us for ages, and already have an idea of how the place works. I guess it all comes down to whether you think it's worth letting the twats in if it wins us the good people as well. (The majority of twats probably won't stick around long, anyway...) Personally, I'd say it is, but ymmv.
 
 
Bed Head
07:58 / 16.02.05
Well their writing an email and asking to join won’t be a big deal then, will it? ‘Opening the doors’ means making it a completely automatic process.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:04 / 16.02.05
Dunno about anyone else, but I keep getting emails from people I've never met asking me to put in a good word for them. Christ only knows how many Tom must get...
 
 
Spaniel
08:13 / 16.02.05
Have we ever flung open the doors for longer than a few days, and has anyone ever noticed a real improvement in the state of the board after such a period?

As I've said countless times elsewhere, I'm not opposed to the idea in principle. TBH, I'd love to get some new blood around here, I just think we'll need to have the doors open for longer than a couple of minutes to do it, and the only way to do that is by putting in place the appropriate safeguards.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:18 / 16.02.05
Hmm.

Maybe I've just got an over-romanticised view of things- I stumbled across the place by accident, and signed up, and that was really cool. I'd hate to have missed out on the opportunity for that to happen.
 
 
Bed Head
08:22 / 16.02.05
I keep getting emails from people I've never met asking me to put in a good word for them

Well, okay. I mean, not okay, they shouldn’t be bothering you by email, but why should it be wrong to let those people in first, if we can? It’s a step that they have to go through. It isn’t simply pushing a button. 'Flinging the doors wide' sounds great, it's a lovely image and a very dramatic thing to do, but I don't think it's at all realistic. Tom's offering to take people we recommend, and also email applications.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:27 / 16.02.05
Oh, don't get me wrong, they're not "bothering" me... I don't mind at all. I just don't feel like I can wholeheartedly recommend them while others can't get in, what with not having a fucking clue who they are- to give them priority just because they emailed us seems a little unfair, especially when you consider that the trolls can use email too...

Can I just add that I find it incredibly heartening that this is the most kickin' I've seen P&H in a looong time? Whichever side of the yes/no fence you may fall on, it's good that people care this much.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
08:28 / 16.02.05
Okay, this is starting to annoy me and I don't want to play the blame game or offend you Tom but I'm going to post something now that I wrote yesterday and slept on overnight to make sure I wanted to say it-

This is going to sound rude but I don't want to be dishonest and I've been thinking it for a while, so please don't think I'm attacking you.

We all know you're busy (a lot of us are atm) but you've consistently shown yourself unwilling to let any other member of this community have the ability to ban people. And that's the real power behind any internet board because if you can't ban then you can be overrun by trolls and the board is then taken over by a rebel faction. People have been bringing up this need for that power to be shared out for a long time and we've heard your response but in the end we're looking at a situation that's impractical. You have all the control in your hands alone.

So you have restricted the responsibilities to yourself, set up the hierachy yourself. You sound exasperated by your lack of time to deal with this place but face it, you're probably never going to have any real time. None of us do, that's why secretaries and PAs and receptionists, building managers, consultants etc. exist in the world. You chose to keep it your own problem and didn't appoint anyone and perhaps it might be best to remember that and consider it when you're not as busy. Our community is stagnating. It's mad to quote figures and use them to deny it. I use this board everyday and I can see what's happening- there's very little real conversation going on. You can post and post and not say anything and that's what's happening to a lot of people here.

So are new members really going to help? Well, honestly they probably won't help me because my experience of barbelith is of conversations that cycle round and eat their own tails but will they help the community? I think the answer to that is yes because some new people always inject some life in to any community. Internet boards evolve just like the internet itself.

Please don't take offence but this problem is cyclical too and the only way to drag the board out of it is to change the nature of the board and the best way to do that is to change the power structure.

At the moment we're all feeling the lack of new people, the only way to have a new adventure is to create new users. Last time we opened it we got some good as well as bad, we certainly got some amusing people. The only way we can have new people is to open the board under controlled circumstances and the only way to do that is to stick a time limit on it. I'm sorry but to abbreviate what everyone else has said in to a sentence- this place is just boring or agitating right now and there are two things we can do, open it up or leave individually.
 
 
Ariadne
08:33 / 16.02.05
I think it needs to be open - it's just too restrained to have people 'recommended' and applying - yes, you'll get lots of idiots but most will get bored quickly. Out of that lot, we'll get some gems. It's happened before.
I say this as a mod who's not in conversation and so might be spared the worst of the work but I'm happy to be made a convo mod if I can help.
Obviously it's down to Tom, but I'm glad we're having a vote. First Edinburgh congestion charge, now this - I love referenda! And I've more chance of being on the winning side on this one.
 
 
Ariadne
08:35 / 16.02.05
Nina's right - we need to have the power to ban. Perhaps with the agreement of a few mods, but we need to be able to do it.
 
 
Bed Head
08:45 / 16.02.05
But stoat - you stumbled on the place some 5 years ago. Google didn’t exist then, not the google we have now. And the internet’s more than doubled in size since then. At least. Probably. There’s more and different kinds of people online now, and those people find things in different ways (Once upon a time, it was all University professors around here...). Requiring people to compose an email is one way of stopping those who’ll join a board just to post one thing. Because, y’know, people do.

I mean, there’s never more that a couple of hundred posters here, anyway. That are invested in the place as community, that is, that *interact* with everyone else for more than one or two posts. And you want hundreds more posters? Hundreds haven’t left, man. A few have left, and they’re not part of this debate. But according to the ‘moderators assemble’ thread, many more are still here – but are (possibly) getting a bit bored of just talking to the same old people.

And yeah, you need the power to ban *if* you’re going to fling the doors wide. But if recommendations are actually being accepted for a short period, and email inquiries are being responded to, well, that does sounds like it could be a very good thing to try before anything else. Is what I think. I'll shut up about it now.


Cliches I stopped myself from using in this post: ‘quality, not quantity,’ and ‘evolution, not revolution, maaan.’
 
 
Spaniel
09:11 / 16.02.05
I'd like to second Nina's opinion that power needs to be devolved.
 
 
Smoothly
09:21 / 16.02.05
Much as I'd like to see some fresh blood, and be happy to take a certain amount of risk to get it, I'd vote no to just throwing open to sluice gates for a few days (and it would surely be only for a few days - we've been here before).
I can't help but think of it from the other side of the portcullis - What would trolls want us to do? Offer full and unfettered access to registration for long enough for them to sign up a Saville Row of new suits. Would worthwhile new members care whether we just opened the gates or instead gave them a chance to request access by email? I wouldn't have thought so. We're not expecting them to attach a CV or beg and plead, we just want a unique, unsuspicious email address and the impression that they're not making multiples.
I'm sympathetic to Stoatie's point but that's not too much of a hoop to jump through, is it? Would it have put *you* off?
 
 
Loomis
09:40 / 16.02.05
I have a question:

Does anything technical need to be done to give mods the ability to ban or freeze a suit? Would it require re-coding or could Tom just flick a switch?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:51 / 16.02.05
I don't really understand why you seem to be simultaneously saying that the power to ban has to be extended beyond Tom for the board's unconditional opening to work and that the board should be opened unconditionally even if nobody except Tom has the power to ban.

Just carrying this over from the Reopen the Board thread- didn't really mean to rot it so!

Actually I believe the board should be opened for a week at a time. That is certainly not unconditional, it's a huge condition and one that would hopefully limit the number of people who sign up after the first rush. In the meantime while this was happening and we had a vaguely steady influx of new people (that we could deal with because they were being streamed) power could be devolved allowing us to gain an ability to ban. The board could be opened up permanently without Tom having to worry about time constraints as a result of our abilities.

My second point is that Tom has had ample time to consider extending powers, and I think(?) can play with the number of moderators set up to vote (when have 7 of us ever agreed on anything that wasn't truly serious) so the only thing stopping him is his personal feeling and time constraint. Well he's paying for this place so it's his but I'm no capitalist so perhaps that colours my feelings about this issue- I believe in footpaths- this is a power that would mean we would never have to have this conversation again because we would have to take responsibility for these decisions. It would solve this particular problem absolutely.

I'm saying we need a system, we can have a system, let's institute a system. It seems simple to me.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:54 / 16.02.05
Well apart from any work Tom might have to do (but think of the stress it would save you Tom!) and the NEW and exciting conversations the moderators would have.
 
 
Spaniel
09:58 / 16.02.05
Thread upon wonderful thread.
 
 
illmatic
10:16 / 16.02.05
the board should be opened for a week at a time

Might I suggest that if we institute this, all suits that remained unused after a period get deleted - say under 10 posts after 2 months? Hopefully would stop idiot trolls storing up lots of them. Might also encourage the lurkers to get posting.
 
 
Tom Coates
10:43 / 16.02.05
Frankly I think Anna's comments are both partially fair and partially unfair. Firstly, in the end only one person is responsible for this place legally and that's me. Given that, it's ckear that I can't ever devolve power completely. Alongside that we can't have loads of people hacking around in the code at the same time. So someone has to manage that. And the servers and the billing and whatever maintenance is required. And being the person who handles technical errors on the rare occasions when they turn out. Sorry, but that's the way it is. I'm always going to have more power than the rest of you as long as I'm running the place, and I can assure you it's not something that fills me with enormous happiness.

Secondly, I agree that power should be devolved away from me - that's why we have a distributed moderation system at all. All my plans and projects for this place have been about devolving more and more power away from me. My aspiration for the place is that it should be a structure where the community is in charge, not me (with the above stricture that there are some things that I can't just shed as responsibilities because they are legal responsibilities). So yeah - you're right, power needs to be devolved more. And also you're wrong for giving me a hard time about it - I know and I've tried. I've wanted to push it a hell of a lot further but I'm not technically able to do a lot of that work without someone to work with. And I'm not prepared to risk the board falling over and losing people's posts and work by letting people that I haven't built up a relationship with fuck around in the code. Sorry you don't like that, but I think it's me being responsible. People have put a lot of themselves into writing posts for the site and I'd rather not lose that.

Thirdly, I'm more than comfortable with having moderators ban people from the site. Here are the problems:

(1) It requires technical work that I may not be able to do by myself.
(2) It doesn't stop people signing up dozens of times and making a hassle of themselves anyway.
(3) Are you sure that the moderators want this extra work and would handle it in such a way that wouldn't cause enormously more tensions and arguments?
(4) Traditionally no one on barbelith liked the idea of moderators at all - and so we've always limited their power. I'm prepared to accept that this has changed, but I need people to tell me that stuff, not just expect me to guess.

With regards to the statistics, if you read earlier in the thread people were suggesting incorrectly that no one wanted to join the site. This was clearly not the case. People have also been suggesting that throwing the doors open would result in a small number of nice people joining and the occasional idiot. By saying that 13,000 people a day were coming to the site, I was trying to point out that rather than getting the odd person in, we were much more likely to get an unmanageable load of people joining, and that moderators were unlikely to be able to keep the community on track with such pressures (even with the powers you'd like them to have). I did also state that the board had over three hundred new posts a day, which was there to demonstrate that there still was activity on the board and that the doom-mongers might be over-stating the case, but I'm not denying that things might have got more staid or tedious. I'm just not sure that turning the board into a big fighting ground by adding forty idiots, ten trolls, ten neo-fascists, ten homophobic or racist bastards and about a million one-off posters is going to help things enormously.

Look - it's quite conceivable that maybe Barbelith is finally dying, and I'm prepared to accept right out that the main reason that might be the case is that I'm not able to put in the recurrent work required to keep the structure of the place moving forward. I'm really sorry about this. But I am doing my best with limited time! I'm proposing some rough solutions to keep things ticking over or to pick stuff up in the short-term and I'm prepared to hear alternatives, but what do you expect from me!? I can't even take any time-off before April - my weekends are clogged up with writing papers trying to take the BBC into opening up its data and programming for the benefit of everyone and I sometimes get tired!

As ever - if someone wants to install software and start a parallel community which is more open and dynamic than this one, then I'll not protest. You never know, maybe it'd shame me into getting this place working better. Or if you can find ways to help me out here, then I'm all ears! But please remember - while I may be an impediment, I'm not you're enemy. I only want this place to be good for everyone.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:34 / 16.02.05
Given that, it's ckear that I can't ever devolve power completely

No one's asking you too... well I'm certainly not. I know you're always going to have more power, I'm not asking to play with coding, have rights to the structure of the board or to implement any changes immediately. You're not God, you're stressed and hard working- but then that's my point. What I'm asking you to do is think long and hard about the way to give us these powers as some kind of moderation request and to then implement it so that we can do this. Mostly because we've been talking about this for two years and really it's obvious that it's become the one thing that needs to be done with any urgency at all. No one's expecting it tomorrow but we've been talking about this on and off for two years, it's been brought up and vetoed time and again and it shouldn't be because it's needed more than a stylish facade and an FAQ.
 
 
Tom Coates
11:46 / 16.02.05
Yeah except I actually can do the FAQ and I can do the stylish facade. The moderation request stuff would require a lot more of my time than either of those things given that I'd have to teach myself whole levels of PHP and MySQL from scratch. My point again - I agree in principle that it's a good thing to do. However since I can't do it, it's slightly moot and it doesn't actually solve the other problems of (i) moderators being prepared to do the work (ii) the board being comfortable with this power being in the hands of the moderators and (iii) whether it actually has any effect against people who can just create a new user-name faster than any distributed moderation process could boot them from the board.
 
 
Spaniel
11:57 / 16.02.05
I'm beginning to find this all very disheartening. We really need to find ways around Tom's inability to offer up his time, but it seems that we are very limited in our options until Tom *can* devote a chunk of his life to the board - which will probably be in the distant future.

Nasty, nasty catch 22.

Tom, I urge you to think how you could build workable relationships with those who have the technical skills to put some changes into effect. I appreciate that you have a responsibility to the board - to ensure it doesn't crash, to ensure thread aren't lost, etc - but, as far as I can see, it's the only way out.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:57 / 16.02.05
(iii) whether it actually has any effect against people who can just create a new user-name faster than any distributed moderation process could boot them from the board.

That's key for me, and I'm concerned that people seem to be voting on the vote thread without reading this one...
 
 
The Strobe
11:59 / 16.02.05
I think the problem you really need to bear in mind with banning suits is false positives.

If you give moderators power to ban, they will make mistakes. They will decide that someone's a troll when really they just can't reach the caps lock key and talk gibberish. We ban them, they get upset, perhaps send round some emails.

But then: can you unban someone? Not technically, but ethically - I mean, the moment you do, you've got someone who's pissed at a society because that society made a mistake. Birmingham Six, etcetera.

The more agressively the mods ban what they see as trolls, the more false positives you'll get, and the more unhappy people you'll make. And people are mistaken; large groups of people are often mistaken, but for entirely valid reasons.

Loomis: I'm pretty sure it's not an "enable this!" type feature; it's probably not end-of-the-world hard to code, but nor is it trivial. And there's a whole lot of user data you don't want to fuck up.

As for opening the board, I say nay. This is because I'm a moderator at the moment. I'm not a moderator because I like moderating, I'm a moderator because I care about topics and wish to enhance the conversation on those topics. I'm a reader and a participant, and I happen to have a moderator hat. Saying you want the board open, and you'll happily moderator stuff, does not mean you will not be royally pissed off by just how much moderation you could have to do.

I don't want my visits here to be tarnished with dealing with 20, 30 jobs all the time.

No more for now; I was about to start heading into the old "what do we demand of people here?" argument and also the "what really is a troll?" argument. Not for now; but those are conversations we might have to have again - and reach definite conclusions - if we open the board up again. (Which I don't think is advisable right now).
 
 
grant
12:10 / 16.02.05
Yeah, that seems to be key. I do think with a couple more mods in every forum, we could handle pretty much anything.

I'd also like to emphasize that when I talk about opening the gates for a week, that we use that week to steer people to the site -- in other words, weight the "new entries" against random Google influx. I suspect a lot fewer people will join and post anything than the raw numbers might suggest -- maybe one in a thousand readers, maybe less.

Zapping old, unused suits is also a fine idea. Seems like something that could be coded automatically by someone who knew that stuff and had time.
 
 
grant
12:12 / 16.02.05
(My last after Haus, Paleface snuck in there while typing)
 
 
Tom Coates
12:14 / 16.02.05
To Bobossboy - of course it's disheartening. How do you think I feel? I've been trying to move the technology of the board on for about two or three years. I think we just have to get used to the idea that the speed of technological change around here is going to be very very slow, and that perhaps the answer is going to be cultural instead - ie. done by e-mails and conversations and debates and you guys figuring out how to handle those things, and then at the end of the day giving me nice, clean and easy to undertake tasks.

With regards to establishing relationships with new techies - absolutely. I should do that. I will have time again after the end of March to start thinking about this stuff. Probably. Fridgemagnet is an obvious candidate there, but I'm sure there'll be others. Once we've talked and debated and made sure that we get on and that the work is good work, then I guess you might be able to expect actually new functionality or fixes a few months after we've found each other. So let's assume it takes a couple of months to find em and then a couple of months to do the work - you might get some new stuff in August.

That's clearly a long way off. So in the meantime, you need to find other ways of dealing with the problems. If you guys are all agreed on what needs to be done and show me evidence that you have plans about how to proceed if things go wrong and are aware that I'm not going to be able to pull you out of the fire here by working eight hours on a weekend, then I'm quite happy to do anything that you want.
 
 
Spaniel
12:23 / 16.02.05
Tom, I understand that technology moves slowly around here. I also understand that you'd love to be able to devote more time to the board.

My concern is simply that discussion, debate and imagination will only get us so far. In light of this, your willingness to engage with technically minded board members is heartening.
 
 
Tom Coates
13:01 / 16.02.05
It's worth stating that I've always been in favour of doing that, but have never had time to do it. So it's not necessarily a particularly impressive thing that I'll state that in principle I'm not against doing it. Doesn't mean it'll actually happen.
 
 
Bear
13:08 / 16.02.05
Couldn't the Ignore function come into place here, the gates are opened and people can sign up if someone is obviously a troll you set them to ignore. Someone pm's or emails Tom and he removes the obvious trolls and the end of the week/month/ or when he has the time. That way you get the benefit of seeing new members while ignoring the trolls...

And if everyone agrees to ignore the obvious trolls I'm sure they would leave after awhile, I think a lot of problems arise when people bait the trolls...

I'm not sure I'm basically thinking out loud and trying to think what's possible with the workflow we already have, but I guess this would cause an issue if someone create hundreds of topics a month which would eventually have to be deleted.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
13:11 / 16.02.05
This is something that's been touched on by Stoatie elsewhere in the thread, but I think that's all. If I'm repeating anything, apologies - this debate's been stretched out over just enough threads for me to start losing track of who said what where, now.

The email system that's being proposed is largely similar to what already happens, which is: X wants to join Barbelith, X finds that membership is closed, X contacts Barbelith member off the board, Barbelith member points them to Tom, Tom grants membership.

Am I alone in thinking that this might be quite an effective system as it is? It means that X has presumably questioned their own desire to join the board prior to making a real attempt to do so - I mean, you don't just email a complete stranger without having first spent at least a little time asking yourself if it's worth the (very slight) hassle. This in turn suggests that X may well have more invested in the board when ze does gain membership.

Paraphrasing something that Rizla said way back in the day: I actually like that Barbelith's a little more difficult to find/join than other boards out there, because it means that the people who do end up here are likely to feel more of a commitment to the site or have more to say than somebody who's just clicked a button, ignored a ToS and clicked another button.
 
  

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