| |
|
Well that's the responsibility that the moderators have to take on and a problem that any board has to deal with. There's nothing unusual in this, it's the reason that most public bulletin boards have a banning function that extends to a number of administrators and it's not a good reason to restrict registration so that it's discriminatory and exclusive.
Yes, Nina, except - and this is quite important - we don't have a banning function that extends to a number of administrators and we will not have one until, at the earliest, August. As such, it is not the responsibility that the moderators have to take on, right now - it is something about which the moderators can do nothing. You see? The moderators cannot ban suits. If the board was entirely open, banning woudl be meaningless anyway. The moderators cannot at present stop mass registrations, and neither can anything else. Barbelith's immune system is very weak - it depends on Tom being around, ready to identify or listen to others identifying trolls and prepared to delete suits. If he had time to do that assiduously enough to make a lunatic troll with a hundred spare suits' impact on the board minimal, he would have time to reengineer the board either to give moderators greater power or to add other levels of immune system to Barbelith.
Because Barbelith's immune system is so weak and so dependent on one person, who is not around enough, Barbelith has been placed in an antiseptic environment - the (largely) closed board. If we're now seeing that environment as harmful in itself, is it wise to tear open the bubble and let everything in, or to try to work out a way of providing access to nourishment, sunlight and fresh water, say, without also letting in all the viruses that led to the need for the bubble in the first place.
I don't understand the idea that "we need new blood" tallies directly to "we need to abolish all restrictions on entry to Barbelith, making it massively easier to get onto and act as one wishes in an unregulated fashion than it would be on pretty much any other message board on the Internet". Nor do I understand the idea of "if there is mass trolling, the moderators will just have to deal with it", when they obviously can't without the complicity of everybody else on the board, which it is simply not possible to gather. "I'm happy to deal with any problems" is a lovely statement of commitment, but it doesn't in itself make the mechanisms to be able to deal with problems exist, and nor does it give somebody the right to decide whether everyone else should have to deal with the problems of unrestricted entry as well. Likewise, "We need a policy so that people don't respond to troll posts" is a fine idea, but almost unworkable - have we ever successfully got everyone on Barbelith to agree at a given time that somebody is a troll and should be treated consistently? We've had moderators vetoing requests to delete posts and topics by known trolls before, and arguing for them to be taken back into the fold - what chance do we have of getting everyone on Barbelith to think "ah, it's a troll" simultaneously, and then not respond to it?
There are ways around that - for example, after a month of unrestricted access all the moderators could forward their "keep lists" of people who have contributed without trolling, and every other suit registered since could be deleted, but I suspect it's a lot of legwork and doesn't stop trolling in the interim...
GGM's surgery idea is a good one, though - maybe one day in the month where TC answers questions sent to him that he hasn't been able to respond to in the interim, in a thread in the Policy?
I think we're getting a lot of good ideas here - bring some new people onto the board, start building relationships between Tom and trusted members who can program in PHP and MySQL, consider the role of moderators - all of which can be discussed at greater length with an eye to creating, ultimately, a board which it is pretty easy to join automatically and pretty easy to administrate with or without Tom's day-to-day involvement. IMHO, opening up the board - tearing away the protective covering and letting everything hit the boad, burrow and breed simultaneously is not one of those good ideas, and might massively retard the successful progress of action on them. |
|
|
