Quantum Tea

Thoughts

Communities Online: After the Fall

11 March 2002
We took the Christian Depression Pages message boards offline today, much to my relief. One user was threatening to sue another, two were having a very public shouting match, and who knows what was going on behind the scenes in private messages, but I got a message from one user who hadn't even posted recently, apologising for her part in the whole mess. In theory, we'll bring the whole thing back up when we've finished working on the rest of the site, however many months that'll take. In theory.

It is so peaceful now, I don't have to wonder what the users have been doing overnight, don't have to break apart any more fights, don't have to listen to more false accusations, rumours and lies. And this is all from people who say they're Christians.

There were several people I'll miss, we didn't want to have to take such a radical step. The boards were a good thing, helping many people. There were users who actually thanked us for the boards, recognised that it took effort, and that the reason we did it was out of concern for people with clinical depression. There are users I want to stay in touch with. And there are other users I want to ban for life.

Grace, love, forgiveness, mercy, all were absent in the last days of the message boards. One user reacted to discipline as if it was a personal attack, and started spreading rumours and lies, threatening suicide, and painting the admin as evil winged demons out to get her. Another user was tossing out accusations of power-mongering. These are all people who say they are Christians. What went wrong?

Rules and regulations

We didn't want a lot of rules. We thought that people would have the common sense and basic courtesy to know that you have to play nice. Boy, was that ever wrong! The new message boards will require each user to agree to an acceptable behaviour statement, saying such revolutionary things as:

Be polite
Don't lie
Don't gossip, and don't spread rumours
If you have a problem with someone, talk to them FIRST
Give people the benefit of the doubt
One account per user.
In the case of MPD/DID, only the core personality/alter can post
Don't flood the boards with posts
Think twice before posting

With rules, come consequences for breaking those rules. phpBB gives you the ability to ban users and IP addresses for anything from seconds, to years, to permanently. We need to extend that to ban by domain name, to deal with the shifting IP addresses handed out by Internet service providers.

The role of the Moderators

In a nuclear fission reactor, a moderator is a rod of boron, or a similar substance, that is lowered into the reactor core to mop up excess neutrons, slow the reactions, and cool things down. The Chernobyl meltdown was caused by people removing the moderator rods and not being able to put them back in time. The reactor went critical, there was a big boom, and many people died.

The role of a message board moderator is to ensure the system runs smoothly. We cool things down and prevent the kind of meltdown that led to us closing the boards today. Our role is not that of counsellor, or therapist, or psychiatrist, or lawyer, or mother, or school teacher. We are the janitors, hopefully unseen, quietly doing our job. We will have to be seen more when there are rules to enforce, which I'm not happy about.

The message board is not about the moderators. It's about the users, connecting people to each other for support and prayer. It's not an ego trip for the admin (seen that elsewhere, very messy, that community looks to be down for good). In helping someone else, you share knowledge, you look away from your own problems for a while, and you feel better too. That was the whole point.

Solutions

We did manage to avoid the problems of Soncrest BBS. There was no kissing up to the admin to get a moderator role, because there were no non-admin moderators. The admin weren't on a power trip, lording it over the users, because we deliberately kept quiet.

What got to us were unforseen problems: users who dominate the boards and refuse to shut up, users building personality cliques around themselves, users who react to discipline by spreading lies, users who abuse anonymous posting to make it look as if they have a big crowd of supporters, users who abuse anonymous posting to attack others, users who threaten suicide to get what they want, users who abuse private user-to-user messages, and more.

No more Anonymous posting
One obvious solution is to do away with anonymous posting altogether. Everyone must stand behind their own words, public and private. You own your words, and you are responsible for the consequences of saying them. No more hiding.

This also has the useful side effect that we can guarantee every user is either over 14, or willing to lie that they're over 14 when they register, which satisfies the requirements on the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Enforced posting quotas
This can be done by the message board software. No-one posts more than, say 5% of the total posts for that month. No-one will be able to post 40% and thinks that's OK, or that reducing to a mere 17% (or 330 posts in one month) is just peachy. Quieter users won't get drowned out, louder ones will be forced to pipe down.

Flaming get you banned
No more public slanging matches. Heated discussions, so long as they stay civil, are fine. Any public flaming, and the flamer gets banned for a week. The flamee, if they respond in similar vein, will also get banned. No question, no quarter, no hesitation, no argument.

Repeated flaming, or gossip, or lying, get you banned
For longer than a week. Maybe permanently. These things poison all communities. If someone can't be civil, or they like to spread lies, say bye bye, and they're banned.

I have a nasty feeling the banned users list will get to be rather long. Why can't responsible adults behave like responsible adults? You learn all the basic behaviour in kindergarten or nursery school, how does it get forgotten so quickly?

Feelings on the meltdown

I'm really surprised it got this nasty in only a handful of days. We didn't shut the boards down just because we could (as one accusation implied), but because they were well and truly dead. Very little of what we intended the boards to be survived this latest round of viciousness. There was no point in keeping them open. It would have just got worse.

I think we will bring them back eventually, but right now we need a break. After two years solid of watching the boards, we're finally getting a vacation. There's a lot of work to do on the rest of the site that's been neglected in favour of fire fighting on the boards.

We have learnt a lot through the message board experiment, and will do things differently if there is a next time. My trust in people's voluntary ability to act decently is gone, we won't make that mistake again. We hoped that we could do this without a big list of rules, that hope is gone.

Right now, I'm glad the boards are down. Sad that it ended this way, but still glad.