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XK: In answer to your question, I posited about four possible change states elsewhere:
Which, I think, gives us our two points. At one end, you've got Mist and Keggers in the petition thread - who use Barbelith basically as a chat room, and don't really have any investment in whether the bits which are not being used for chat are being used as a hate rally but would like to continue to have access to the parts of it they like. This is a convenient place for them to hang out and talk, and, you know, that is a valuable facility offered by this and other message boards. There are people here who would certainly be more isolated and unhappy without the Internet. The question possibly being where Barbelith sits in that - how necessary is it? Could that function be fulfilled by Livejournal or Facebook or, indeed, Liminal Nation?
From there you have two options, really. One is to set up an autoreply so that everyone who emails the Barbelith application email gets instructions on how to create a login, or we just put it in the wiki or the discussion thread. No more barriers to entry, no more possibility of banning, really - anyone who wants in gets in. It becomes a place with no control, little or no functional moderation, and so on.
The other is to stop applications and just have it as a kind of old folks' home - a legacy board where those who got in can stay if they want to, or can go at a time and in a method of their choosing. That's the model we basically have at the moment - a slow descent with some degree of control, but with no way of dealing with outbreaks of racism, sexism and unpleasantness that we used to have some sort of at least consensus condemnation. Once Randy and I go, there's not much in the way of immune system and less in the way of moderation.
Next along, which I think is what the petition is basically asking for, is an end to posting. That involves Tom turning a spigot. In that model, ideally, people could still log in, read and over time download their PMs, read the discussions but there would no longer be any way to contribute to threads.
And, at the far end, there's shutting the whole thing down, closing the board, either booting everyone out of their logins or just taking the whole thing offline.
Some of these options are more possible than others - the first two are actually quite easy, but they do involve basically giving up on the community as a place it is worthwhile to occupy, or the past of which it is worth trying to preserve. Which is a position, and maybe a healthy one. To make any of those the annointed status quo I think I'd probably want to get Tom's opinion. However, he's got a lot of stuff going on at present, and I don't think Barbelith is much of a pressing issue for him.
I thought of a fifth option, where Grant Morrison buys the domain name and sets up a proper fan forum, which actually would be sort of excellent but is a bit hard to make happen.
It's pretty clear that Randy and I aren't going to be able to stick the current state for much longer - it's just too tiring - and if we go then I think moderation of most of the fora starts looking much more difficult, so (3) may well involve moderating becoming slowly or quickly less effective also. |
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