Forum Moderators: rogerd
The problem now is that it is being taken over by religious fanatics and extremists that want to use it as a vehicle for their propaganda. There are too many posts per day to manage and members often become very abusive towards each other (and sometimes me as I will not take sides).
The problem is controlling it (as members ignore our TOS) and deleting posts/banning people. There are lines to be drawn and members often go to the lengths of re-registering using a different ISP once their IP has been blocked ... these people are hardcore.
The only thing I can think of is make it pay per account say $5 per month. Then the serious and sensible posters will stay and the abusive ones will leave. Does anyone have any other suggestions?
First, try identifying some current posters who might be mod material. Look for consistent participipation, a lengthy history of stable posting, and a friendly attititude. This is essential as your volume grows.
Second, make your expectations for behavior clear. Some gentle public editing might be one solution, or even a permanent post or announcement in the forum.
Third, keep banning the troublemakers and remove their posts. Sometimes, changing up the banning method helps - a user ban one time, an IP ban the next... vBB has "Coventry", which allows a member to keep posting even though others can't see the posts. That can chew up quite a bit of troublemaker time. Mass-pruning of posts is a great way to wipe out hours of posting effort in a few seconds. Eventually, the pests get tired and go away.
Good luck!
My bbs is of my own construction, and as a long-time programmer, I have quite an arsenal at my disposal compared, perhaps, to the casual phpbb rent-a-site. Here are some of the tactics I've deployed over the years and how effective they were (1=poor, 4=excellent):
Removing individual posts: 2
Removing an entire thread: 3
Banning a cookie: 2
Banning an IP from posting: 2
Banning an IP from viewing: 3
Community based moderating: 3
Abusive post fading: 2
Showing partially masked IP of each post: 3
Exposing anonymous proxy users: 4
Showing country and ISP info of each post: 3
Adding IWG links to my menus: 4
Coventry-style (aka cloaking) ploys: 2
Troll userid mapping: 3
To explain further:
Cookie banning is very effective on unsophisticated computer users; useless on the savvy.
IP banning is fairly effective on static IPs; useless (and sometimes off-target!) on AOL, Earthlink, etc. Banned static IPs (DSL and cable) usually just access from their office.
Community-based moderating, based loosely on craigslist.org's post flagging method, allows members to vote on the merit of each post.
Abusive Post Fading changes a post's text from black towards white as more negative ratings pile up (5 is the max). Positive ratings are subtracted from the negatives. Mods get emailed when two Flag Moderator votes accumulate on a post.
I show the poster's IP in each post with the C and D blocks obfuscated.
I make heavy use of countrycheck.com to identify access via anonymous proxies and to show each member's ISP, country and sometimes city in each post.
Links to IWG (http://members.aol.com/intwg) particularly the sections on Flame Wars (http://members.aol.com/intwg/flamewars.htm) and Trolls (http://members.aol.com/intwg/trolls.htm), were added right to our menus with great effect. It really does come down to Education.
My Coventry-style ploy was 100% effective against a career troll until he figured out what was going on (a few days); then it was useless. Great fun while it lasted!
I once mapped a troll's username -- wherever it appeared, in old posts or incoming -- to a silly name like foo. This was beyond funny and galvanized the community against the troll.
My site is in its 9th year and gets 200K visits per month serving a sports/hobby SIG. It uses a flat forum format and has never required member logins. I've made it policy to *never* edit posts; they either stay or go. Moderating is swift.
That's pretty cool... do members ever gang up on someone who's not really an abuser but they don't like?
When I introduced CBM there was some gaming like that -- tug of wars over a particular post -- but it only lasted a few months. With my site's trolls gone and the Asian cross-posters squashed by countrycheck.com, CBM is used far less, mainly by members flagging Best Of Site posts and using Flag Moderator when something egregious gets through our normal lines of defense.
I like the idea of displaying users country and IP addy also, it may make them feel a little vulnerable and maybe calm them down a little.
I dont think the self voting thing would work, can you imagine the mayhem if Indians and Pakistanis can give each other bad points!
Might this get to a point, white on white text for example, where some search engines consider it cloaking and penalize you for it?
The solution to a successful political forum is to ban liberals. :)
I've found it to be quite effective to ban all political conversations on political forums. Once that rubbish is out of the way the community can focus on more important things, like Linsey Lohan's dramatic weight loss.
like Linsey Lohan's dramatic weight loss.
Its a political forum so banning political discussions would be kinda futile! its the hardcore religious nuts that are dragging it down and a again if you ban on one site you have to ban on the other .... its like being the Administrator for the planet .... not an easy job.
Recently I added a pieces of code allowing users to 'report this post' ( I think there's something similar here at ww). I have been most impressed by the results.
Basically in the first couple of weeks there were a lot of reports, and it became very easy to find the abusive threads, rather than having to trawl the whole forum every day.
Then members quickly became aware of the fact that any abuse was quickly delt with and gave up posting abuse in the first place. I now get maybe one or two threads a day that I need to deal with.
I hightly recommend it as a way forward!
I've no idea who this Linsay person is either, not a Fox News star is she?!
Its a political forum so banning political discussions would be kinda futile!
Something tells me roldar maybe was being a little sarcastic... ;)
As you probably suspected there was a big problem with people crossing over from board to board to harass the other side, as well as general URL spam, so here was the solution I came up with.
First, you make two categories in the "General": MODERATED and UNMODERATED. In the unmoderated, anything goes as far as conversation (your profanity filters would still be on though) but no links or images can be posted. This gives you a place where your most annoying members can go annoy each other without it affecting other members. Technically it would still be "moderated" because you would want to check for advertisements and crap like that, but as far as political discussion goes let them be as annoying as they want there.
Second, for new members, make them have a number of posts before they can post a URL or image - something high like 50 or 100, and use one of those image recognition things (Where you have to type a funny looking word like when you log in at Overture or GoDaddy) when they post - this way for a new user's first 50/100 posts they can't run a bot to fill up their limit and start spamming your board.
Last but not least, for the individual Republican/Democrat boards, there are a few ways you can handle this. Ideally you want to restrict these boards so only party members can talk to each other without being annoyed by the other side. There are two ways to do it, you can make it impossible to post on these boards until a certain number of people "invite" them to post there, thus letting the community decide who is real and who isn't instead of one moderator or an automated process. The other option is just to make it so that once you post on one of them, you can't post on the other - if you post on the Republican board it would set some flag in the system and any attempts to post on the Democrat board would be deleted.
The post only as a D or R is an interesting idea, but I'd expect the more aggressive debaters to establish two screen names, one for each forum.
Sometimes people do, but if you have a forum dedicated to "peaceful" debate AND a forum dedicated to "anything goes" what would the point be? Besides, if you're doing the D/R forums as invite-only then someone wouldn't be able to sneak their way in unless they had a history of saying positive things about the party they hate and were able to fool however many members you require to vote them in. That, combined with email validation to register and IP address checking, should do the trick. All of this stuff can be built into the code or automated. For the IP address checking you can have a daily email go out to all of the mods that shows any posts made from the same IP address by different users. While sometimes this would be normal (ie; AOL, proxy servers, etc.) if it keeps happening with the same users and their writing styles are similar, it's a good bet they're the same person.
But even still, by having separate R/D forums, most people will respect the boundaries and appreciate having a place where they can communicate with their fellow-wingers without interruption from the other side.
What if you had one in which nobody had names. Would anybody post?
Do the decent people post only when there is respect to be earned?
Do the trolls and flamers only get satisfaction when they know it was sallysue84 that received the brunt of the attack?
Or do most people visit forums to have real discussions? Of course it is hard to have an ongoing discussion on some topics when you don't know who it is you're talking to, but for general politics discussions it seems somewhat irrelevant who is doing the talking.
This one is more of an Asian geo-political board with very opinionated and religious people on there. It actually does nothing for our site or revenue so I've even considered simply turning it off.
Technology wise we're quite limited as we are on moderators (I'm the only one). I think the "pay for play" option may work. We cant have an unmoderated area full of filth as we are a respected news publication.
It has calmed down a little now since I banned a few people. I also find turning off new registrations over the weekend when I dont check it helps.
Now I wish there was a way to generate some revenue out of it!
Something I've wondered is how important recognition/usernames are on a forum.
Very good question; and one I'm grappling with now. A forum I'm administering allows everything in between anonymous posting to fully developed profiles. Stats show that registered users account for about a third of all posts, pretty constant across all topics, and there is little qualitative difference in posts from registered and unregistered users. Registration has not improved the amount or quality of content. Since we're an open, non-commercial forum, I'm just wondering whether at the end of the day registration is entirely a matter of useability.
That said, there are contrary arguments on this very site concerning anonymous posting.
Another way of looking at it is from the marketing side where you can offer ads on an active forum with #*$!x registered users.
