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How do you tell when something's unacceptable on Barbelith? Changing to become a discussion on the future of Barbelith.

  
  

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Spaniel
13:08 / 26.02.07
All that said, I'm finding myself very much with Randy here.

Tom, if we, as a community, decide that we'd be happy for member x to work on the code, would you still object?
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
16:54 / 26.02.07
Ditto to what Stoats said. But despite all the horrible shitty stuff that's happened to you Tom, isn't it possible for the work being done without people having access to the personal information? I mean, obviously I know diddly squat about these things but shouldn't the 'how the board works' stuff be completely seperate to the 'who everyone is' part? Or is it that because you and Cal assumed you'd be there to make changes forever and ever that it's all together in one big splodgy mess?
 
 
Lurid Archive
18:45 / 26.02.07
I'm really sorry to hear about your situation, Tom, and obviously that makes any kind of structural change pretty difficult in the short to medium term. On the other hand, offers of help have in the past (and more than once) been given by fridgemagnet and paleface who are long standing members who I think could be trusted with sensitive information and with board tinkering. Fridge, iirc, administrates urban45, for instance. (I don't know if fridge or paleface count as sufficiently trustworthy but as Nina suggests, if membership for more than 4 years isn't enough then it starts to be hard to think of any scenario in which devolution would be possible.) I suppose it might also be advisable for any changes to be approved by someone not involved in actually implementing them - I don't know if Haus would be up for that sort of role, but given his level of commitment to and ivolvement with Barbelith its a choice that would make sense. This isn't a particularly imaginative solution I'm suggesting here, nor is it the only way one could address the genuine concerns that Tom has. My point is that I think that change is possible, as is dealing with security and technical issues. While I appreciate the enormous amount of work that has already gone into Barbelith I think that what is really needed is a will to make those changes happen, rather than a vague aspiration in that direction.

In a way, this is all far more critical than I have a right to be, since I haven't put nearly as much effort into the board as others and I'm not sure how reasonable it is to be telling Tom how to run his own board, especially at a time when things aren't going well for him. The reason I'm saying all this is that I think I'm not alone in my reading of the situation, and it may be contributing to a feeling of stagnation on Barbelith.
 
 
Tom Coates
21:23 / 26.02.07
I have been considering taking Paleface outside and shooting him asking for his help on some matters, and yes, clearly it would be possible for me to provide a version of the board somewhere else for him to hack around on, but I still want you guys to be aware how dodgy an enterprise this is. A poorly constructed board is highly susceptible to lots of exploits that might allow people to get at your passwords by posting javascript (for example). I'm not saying that Paleface doesn't know this stuff backwards, just that you have to be aware that these things can be problematic. And while I'm sure many of you may be completely comfortable wtih this stuff, not all of the users on the board may be so comfortable, nor those users who have not psoted for years. Remember, some people use the same passwords on every site they visit, and that means information gathered in one place can be very valuable elsewhere.

Honestly, though, I don't really know what to say. I am massively overwhelmed by stuff at the moment. I'm absolutely miserable, can't sleep and I'm trapped in fight or flight reflexes. The odds of me being able to constructively add another thing to the pile of crap I've got to do is limited.

This is why I've been so keen on you guys building things around the edges. I loved the idea of people writing software to improve the membership process, for example, or using the RSS feed information and the nice URLs and all that stuff to build your own ways of navigating around the board. That's stuff that you guys can do with Barbelith that should improve the experience without being a specific weight on my mind. Good and well built stuff can definitely be linked to around the site. If it's really good then I might be able to incorporate it in some way, or add it to the barbelith.com domain. Let's think of this as an ecosystem rather than a skyscraper. If you can program, you can make the site better by making things around the site.

I'm also interested in seeing if anyone is actually interested in doing these things or not. I mean that's one sure fire way to see if I'm really the only bottleneck!
 
 
Smoothly
22:32 / 26.02.07
Well, that prompts a question that nags at me whenever we have this conversation: "What's keeping people here?". How hard is it to set up a fresh board where more power is devolved in the way people would like?
I'm not proposing a mass exodus to new premises, but a parallel board(s) could be established with links to and from here. Just as an experiment it might be interesting to set up - for example - the putative SBR forum on a dedicated board, with its own approach to moderation, anonymity, Ts&Cs etc, with any existing members of Barbelith who express an interest, invited to join. Previous discussions on BarbCentral could still be referenced and linked to...

I'm not suggesting this in a 'put up or shut-up' way, just that there are ways we can try out different posting/moderating/joining/banning regimes without leaning on Tom, aren't there?
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
14:08 / 27.02.07
I would suggest that the discussions that have been going on and off for at least a year now would suggest that there's people here who want to see Barbelith change but that that is a completely seperate issue to who has the technical nouse Tom. And who has the programming chops has also come up in discussion at least once, though I can't remember which thread that was or how long ago it happened.

Now, whether faced with access whether things would go the way of the barbelith Annotations thread and die on their arse is one thing, but there's certainly a lot of will for change to happen.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
14:23 / 27.02.07
Well, that prompts a question that nags at me whenever we have this conversation: "What's keeping people here?".

What makes you think anything is? The vast majority of people I am in touch with who I first met on Barbelith have either left it entirely or barely ever post here. While this could just be a natural process of moving on in their lives, etc., their testimony indicates that it is not.
 
 
Smoothly
15:28 / 27.02.07
Well, some people are still here; a number of whom seem frustrated by the vanishing probability of certain functional changes being made.

Speaking personally, much as I like the look and feel of this board, and appreciate the approach to moderation, it’s the membership that keeps me coming back, not the software. Now maybe it would be very hard to set up a parallel board that drew its membership from here. Maybe distributed moderation, for example, is impossible with off-the-shelf BB software. I dunno. I’m just saying that we might be able to try some of the suggested improvements (be it Supermoderators, no moderators; strict entry criteria, no entry criteria; Lock outs, time outs, multiple suits, sandboxes etc etc) – and try them out with Barbelith’s current membership – without requiring Tom to do anything with barbelith.com.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:55 / 27.02.07
New people who apply to use this space give random barbelith members their email addresses all the time, often these are work and institutional addresses and you're worried about people responding to a long term member of barbelith who you would personally check out negatively?
 
 
Alex's Grandma
16:08 / 27.02.07
While I don't have any problem with the idea, I'm still not sure if extending moderator powers would necessarily improve the quality of Barbelith on a day-to-day basis. Unless there's going to be a far more aggressive policy about it, ie, one where people get kicked off, or at least suspended from the board just for being stupid, this kind of thing doesn't seem to crop up often enough as an issue for insufficient mod skills to really count as a material cause, in terms of why people feel Barbelith's letting them down, in some way.

If there's a problem, isn't it more due to a lack of interesting posts than anything else? And all right, to do something about that then you have to keep established interesting members happy, while encouraging new ones to join, but I'm not sure if changing the banning process would help much in either case.

Or possibly not, but in the meantime, wouldn't it be better to just go along with the idea that nothing's going to change in the immediate future, and lay off Tom Coates following his fairly eloquent and unambiguous cries of pain above?
 
 
Tom Coates
17:05 / 27.02.07
My sense is that Barbelith has been here for the conversation primarily, and that although it is compromised by the presence or absence of new member restrictions, if there were good enough conversations going on then it would continue to maintain itself.

That people are protesting is understandable to me, and I know that moderation fixes and technological improvements would make the place more interesting, but this isn't and cannot be my job. I already have one of those, and you guys don't pay me enough to be able to give it up. In the meantime, if we've run out of interesting things to say to one another, or the form is boring to people now, I understand that too.

I really understand that things should have moved on, that the board should be more than it is, but I can't see an easy way to make it be like that. People rightly see me as responsible here, but there's a real limit to what I can do. I'm not where I was five years ago, or seven or nine, when we built the board originally. There's only so much I can do by myself and live my life. I'm never going to be able to build you last.fm or flickr or myspace, however much I might wish I could.

However, if the community is stronger than the software and there are people out there who are capable of building things, then for Christ's sake, with all my permission make things for the Barbelith community. Extend this place. Make it the centre of something rather than the be all and end all. We tried that a few years ago with the weblogs and the zines and it was sort of interesting. And if it's not something that you want to fix on the board, maybe it needs to be fixed outside the board - you guys can organise events, real-world gatherings, conversations, speaker-series. All kinds of things.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:16 / 27.02.07
yeah, let's make gross exaggerations and claim that people are laying into Tom. Because that's helpful.

Again, thanks for the clarification on this Tom. If there isn't anybody trustworthy enough, with the technical know-how to take this thing under their belt, who's prepared to take some of this on for a while, then there's obviously no option but for us to keep on with what we've currently got or move on to pastures new. There's a bunch of people here who have some decent ideas about what they'd like to see changed and how those changes would affect the board, but that's not much use without somebody with the skills to pay the bills. And god knows that person isn't me.

The idea mentioned by Smoothly and others, of running a parallel board, is something that I was wondering about. I can see definite problems with it - how do we migrate posts back over to the main board, *do* we migrate posts back over to the main board, how do we keep something like that running smoothly without either having so few active members that it's rendered pointless or so many that it ends up getting more traffic than the main board - but it's an idea that seems practical, in theory, which is more than we've had for a while.

That's if Cal wouldn't have an issue with other people digging into his code - it'd be massively frustrating if we were prevented from being able to move forwards with anything technical because of something like that.

On the topic of security: y'know, I'm really not sure. I suspect most everybody's going to disagree with this statement, but I've been feeling recently that one of the reasons why Barbelith is beginning to stale might be because we've painted ourselves into a corner with the constant worrying about trolls, new members and so on. I know there are good historical reasons as to why we've been so concerned about these things, but is it not time that we eased up a bit? It's as though the (good and noble) desire to become a safe space has seen us losing sight of the line that takes us from that safe space and into a slightly paranoid, frightened one - we've locked the place down, and that's maybe partly to blame for the stifling lack of vitality hereabouts.

As a result, I don't think you should allow concerns about security of personal info prevent you from allowing people to run a Barbelith side-board. The answer might be to have any alt-Barbelith start its memberlist from scratch, allowing people to decide whether or not they want to take the risks that'd be associated with a potentially less secure version of the board without putting their login here at risk.

Even without any technical jiggery-pokery, I'd like to see how we, as a community, would cope with opening membership up properly again. The current system has only really been able to weed out bots, not pillocks, and a second version of the board with open membership and a limited number of moderators with the power of ban would be an interesting experiment, if nothing else.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:21 / 27.02.07
Tom: We tried that a few years ago with the weblogs and the zines and it was sort of interesting.

I have to say I completely appreciate where you're coming from with this. Wasting a short period of my life on a Barbelith side-project that was ignored by the overwhelming majority of the board's userbase hasn't exactly made me want to try again.

Similar to something else we were discussing in P&H a few weeks ago, it's entirely possible that the only people who care about this are those of us talking about it in this thread right now. Which is a depressing thought, but one that seems increasingly likely to be accurate.`
 
 
Alex's Grandma
18:08 / 27.02.07
That's if Cal wouldn't have an issue with other people digging into his code - it'd be massively frustrating if we were prevented from being able to move forwards with anything technical because of something like that.

But it isn't it clear enough that this kind of thing would be a problem?

I wonder how much more explicitly it would have to be stated. It seems to be fairly obvious, to me anyway, not that I've ever met the man or anything, and wouldn't presume to put words in his mouth, beyond what he's already said, that Tom Coates has neither the time nor the energy to think seriously about board functionality at the moment, as much as he might like to, and that accordingly, he doesn't want to make any decisions one way or the other until he feels in a position to go over them properly.

There's nothing wrong with that surely?

And I don't honestly see what the problem is otherwise, given that a serious banning issue hasn't come up for months.

I'm inclined to agree that Barbelith's arguably a bit defensive as a safe space these days, but then I don't suppose it's me that has to read the applications. (Although I wouldn't mind helping out there, if it wasn't too complex on a technical level.)
 
 
Spatula Clarke
18:36 / 27.02.07
But it isn't it clear enough that this kind of thing would be a problem?

Not to me. 'Open source' means that *anybody* can get to see the code and piss around with it however they like, and that's not been proposed here - we're talking about the possibility of particular people getting to try and adapt it, based on their length of service and reputation on the board. That's a significantly different thing.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:28 / 27.02.07
And I don't honestly see what the problem is otherwise, given that a serious banning issue hasn't come up for months.

Last banning was a couple of months ago, yes. This is a direct result of the fact that at present we don't really have an admissions process. There is simply nobody to ban.

If we are not going to get an admissions process, we will not need to change the way we go about things, and we will not need a significantly more sophisticated banning process than we have now.

However, a lot of personal information _is_ available at the back end that I would like to see protected. Some of this information has had to be gathered as a result of the absence of an admissions process, and is sensitive. Some of it has accreted naturally - for example, I have several hundred Private Messages that I need to download and archive before I can confidently shut down my suit.

So. At present, Barbelith is not functional, on some levels. We appear to have established a) that the creators of the board are not able to make changes to it and b) the creators of the board are not prepared to allow others to make changes to it, to protect the confidential data of its users.

Options:

1) Carry on as now, attempting to put together mechanisms to make the places where the board does not work interfere as little as possible with the places where it does.

2) Keep the board running while creating and testing amother board which runs using the same software, but with no data stored and with people being allowed to play with the code, and thus develop mechanisms to allow for things the board at present cannot effectively do. Possibly trial this by using it to run SBR or something. The database to be a clean slate - everyone has to log in anew, but the joining process, and the banning process, is automated and easier than the Barbelith bespoke.

3) Start another board using totally different software, but otherwise as (2) - use Barbelith members as testers, and then eventually set it up as parallel. How much of the Barbelith IP - design, look and feel - is used in this project, and the extent to which it is considered a "Barbelith joint", to be decided by consultation. If it works, people migrate - again, clean slate - and other people join. If it doesn't, it doesn't, in which case we are back to option (1). Or Livejournal, or TMO or whatever.

Tom can in the cases of (2) or (3) adopt a more comfortable role as consultant, spiritual father, server space provider or similar, rather than being repeatedly asked to do things that he has just stated he does not consider are his responsibility.
 
 
illmatic
19:33 / 27.02.07
(Off topic - but I think the summary and title of this thread should be changed. Perhaps "What's Unaccepable on Barbelith? Now: Future of the Board").
 
 
Tryphena Absent
12:18 / 01.03.07
Tom Coates has neither the time nor the energy to think seriously about board functionality at the moment, as much as he might like to, and that accordingly, he doesn't want to make any decisions one way or the other until he feels in a position to go over them properly.

There's nothing wrong with that surely?

If this was the first time we've had this conversation that would be true but we currently have a Barbelith that has remained technically stagnant for a long period of time. There are no plans at all to further the functionality and useability of Barbelith for the reasons that Tom has expressed and that means that specific moderation issues, the problems that we have with making Barbelith accessible to new users and a host of other potential problems cannot be addressed (Haus notes above the issue concerning PMs, which could do with being downloadable). That is not viable and that is what we're trying to tackle here. A space like this should not be left without any form of control over it either technically or in terms of user options for ongoing periods of time because it begins to socially die, that's without the specific problems that are unique to Barbelith.

The problem with your post AG is that underlying it is an inherent assumption that one day Tom will have time to sort these things out but Tom works for Yahoo, has been possibly overloaded with work for a long time now and cannot dedicate time to a project that does not pay him. Tom has basically outlined that the same problem exists with Cal so either we bring other people onboard who understand the aesthetic principle, useability issues and vague purpose of Barbelith and incidentally people we trust to understand confidentiality or we carry on using Barbelith until it is no longer viable, which has already happened or is happening for people now. That means that over time the number of users decreases, including a sharp drop if people are unwilling to engage in the applications process and the technical aspects of the board fall behind the internet standard.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:18 / 01.03.07
On the plus side, however, what was ground-breaking and difficult five years ago is presumably a lot easier now - isn't that how the Internet works? As such, options 2 or 3 might be workable.

Put simply, it does not matter what else is proposed for this set of Barbelith. The code will not be altered by Tom or Cal, and this board will not be opened up to anyone apart from Tom or Cal. So, it becomes a question of whether they are prepared to provide the source code without the member data. If so, (2) is possible. If not, it is not. In which case either we soldier on as best we can (1) - in which case we need to do a number of things, not least take another look at the applications process - or try to get (3) up and running, or both.

Any other options?
 
 
Olulabelle
19:17 / 01.03.07
I think 2 could potentiallly be a really good idea Haus. If Tom makes the code available to us we can set up this new trial board using programmers who volunteer, and the member data here is unaffected. We could try the SBR forum, (although actually I think Justrix came up with a much better name which we should utilize) and see how that ran.

Do you think Tom and Cal would be up for releasing the board code to enable us to do that?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
08:38 / 02.03.07
Tom, are you prepared to provide the source code without the member data?
 
 
Spaniel
09:27 / 02.03.07
Could peple who are following this discussion but not contributing make themselves known?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:35 / 02.03.07
Um, okay.
 
 
Spaniel
09:45 / 02.03.07
Sorry, to make myself clear, upthread folks have expressed anxiety about whether anyone other than those participating really care about this discussion, by getting a show hands I'm trying to see whether that's something we should be looking into or not.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
10:17 / 02.03.07
I'm watching.

I'd be interested to see the board opened up a bit and I'd be interested to see how it works. But I'm not really keen in imposing stressors on people, especially if they're having a difficult time already.

That said, I don't think anyone should have access to the passwords, board owner or not. It's not hard to do a one-way hash of people's passwords, and store the result, and when people log in, hash their input password and compare results (I say not hard, it's difficult to write these things the first time and it might be difficult to integrate, depending on the way the board is constructed, but the principles are well known and I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of open source libraries for just about every web development language to do this). If the personal contents of a suit are encrypted using the same password and some relatively strong encryption algorithm, then a lot of privacy concerns can be removed, because no-one has access to passwords under that circumstance bar the owner.

It does mean you'd need an automated password reset system (and that resetting the password without knowing the old password would mean the contents of the inbox, for instance, would be encrypted forever, or until the person remembered their old password), or bothering an admin to reset it, as no-one could look it up for you, either, but since I think finding a lost password now involves hassling Tom that's probably a good thing to have added anyway.

I really only meant to write "I'm watching". Sorry.
 
 
Evil Scientist
10:42 / 02.03.07
I'm watching too. But I'm unsure what contribution I can really make.

I'd theoretically be in support of Haus's suggestion (2) if nothing further could be done to improve the infrastructure here (and I fully understand why that's not possible Tom and hope the stress-badgers stop nibbling you soon).
 
 
Spaniel
10:52 / 02.03.07
2 appeals to me also
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:55 / 02.03.07
but since I think finding a lost password now involves hassling Tom that's probably a good thing to have added anyway.

No, I think that's automatic. Which is actually one of the security holes we have had in the past... But clean-slating would remove that as an issue, as long as email addresses were never made publicly available, as they would not be.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:01 / 02.03.07
I'm reading too, and overall I like 2). My only concern is that if it is to be trialled by running SBR there, it's only going to be tested by people who would be interested in using SBR. I'm sure there are ways around this (give it its own Convo as well or something), so I don't think it's a deal-breaker.
 
 
Blake Head
12:07 / 02.03.07
I was irked at the thought that only a small group of people care about this. I'm watching/concerned, but a lot of this is dependent on people with practical, website-building abilities stepping forward, and/or Tom being definitive about any possible use of the original code, neither of which I (or I expect a number of other people) are in a position to do anything about.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:09 / 02.03.07
My only concern is that if it is to be trialled by running SBR there, it's only going to be tested by people who would be interested in using SBR.

Actually, I think it would have to be tested for a long time by a small number of long-term posters. SBR would possibly act as the Beta test, but that would be a fair while in the future. Even if somebody started now, you might be advised to find another way to do SBR topics if you want to talk about them now.
 
 
nighthawk
12:18 / 02.03.07
I've been following this too, although I don't have anything to add. I'm keen on anything that stops Barbelith stagnating further. Option 2 seems a good idea of Cal doesn't mind giving someone the code.
 
 
electric monk
12:24 / 02.03.07
I'm following along, but unsure what I can add at this point. It's all got me thinking tho...
 
 
Sniv
12:54 / 02.03.07
I'm reading too, but don't have anything to add. Keep at it though, you'll cut this knot soon enough!
 
 
Quantum
14:25 / 02.03.07
*shows hand*

Interesting suggestion by Tom to spin off extra stuff. Does the idea of a Barbelith budding baby board have any merit, which we could gradually migrate to with code we could access etc.? Like Barbelith:TNG, and keep this place as archive for all of it's ace material and fab discussions, which we could continue on the new board.
 
  

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