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Barbelith’s a much *smaller* community that U75, isn’t it, fridge? I thought that was kinda the point with your ‘forumitis’ thing - that another forum might spread barbelith too thinly. I do think that there’s an argument that a successful forum here won’t look the same as a successful forum there, but I dunno that it can’t work because of the make-up of the constituency here.
Yes, it is, much smaller. I don't think that's the issue though; I think it's more to do with the fact that Barbelith posters don't seem to be crying out (with a few exceptions) for a specific place that they can talk about sex techniques on. There's not just a size difference, there's a constituency difference. That doesn't necessarily mean that it shouldn't be there, but if there are also downsides it becomes more important.
Hm, I think U75 also keeps google out so non-members can’t read it.
Nope - the archives are googlable, even if the actual board pages aren't (to conserve bandwidth and data transfer).
It’s been said before, but mmmaybe easier to talk about certain, private-type aspects of life if something in your post isn’t potentially going to come up as part of some weird dude’s search string, and from which an entire history of everything you’ve ever written on the site can be googled up. So, I dunno, is there anything that can be done about anonymity? Tom’s said it would be a shame to make the *content* of any such forum invisible to google, because it might be a useful read for someone, somewhere. But, really, what about Money$hot’s idea of anonymous suits?
If you post anything on the internet it can be linked to you. A lot of people don't seem to fully appreciate this. But really, any dedicated stalker can track you down if you've posted any sort of personal detail. You can make this easier or harder depending on what you post and how careful you are, but there's a limit. Anonymous suits might help a bit but if you're talking about anything to do with your life outside of the net, you have to accept that somebody may link that to you. I'm sure any long term Livejournaller will know that even keeping posts to friends only doesn't stop it happening.
Anonymous suits certainly wouldn't stop people from being recognised within Barbelith. It's not that hard to identify people if they're not just taking on joke suits that only post in certain defined ways, which wouldn't be the case here. Particularly if you already know/have slept with that person.
I don't think any such forum should be ungooglable; I agree with Tom that if the content is going to be worthwhile at all people should be able to find it and read it. A forum that's just for Barbelith people to talk about their problems with each other seems... I dunno, self-indulgent, masturbatory (possibly quite literally). If you're not prepared to give something else out, even if it's just anonymous advice to somebody in the same position, you're being very selfish to my mind.
Basically what I'm saying here is that the issue of complete anonymity isn't one that I see being solvable. If it's something that would put a lot of people off then that's going to happen - better they know about it beforehand rather than get into stickiness afterwards by accident.
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Oh, and my main objection is still that a forum involving "relationships" would lead to a lot of very whiny threads with no real content and the expectation that there's going to be acceptance and tolerance (read: no nasty challenges to preconceptions or attitudes, lots of hugs and "awww"s). That's not a given but I think 'lithers go too far in that direction at the moment to be honest and I don't see a relationship-related forum helping that in the slightest. Of course, if it turns out that Barbelith grows the hardest-edged, most no-nonsense agony aunt appendage to be found on the net, I'll claim that I thought that would happen all along.
I'm perfectly happy with a "Body" forum. I think that's a good idea. It could have all sorts of stuff to do with sex, health, exercise, the physical aspects of the martial arts, debates about the mind/body dichotomy in modern medicine.... There are a lot of possibilities and I don't think we should just concentrate on what is traditionally considered "intellectual" here. |
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But now I have home internet access and am here much more often.