Arantor

Afternoon all! Today is most definitely Monday. It has that Monday-ish smell that ambushes you and drags you into that sense of “oh no, not again”. Rather like a very specific bowl of petunias I can think of.

A forum I used to be staff on frequently did annual t-shirt runs for the team. One year there was also a little key ring torch (branded). I think there were other annual things but I forget what.

It can be pricy if you’re not hosting it yourself, definitely.

If you gamify content creation, you will generally end up with whatever content maximises reward while minimising effort, It’s inevitably not the best route for good content in practice. Best I’ve seen really is to lead by example, so that you normalise making good content, and people will naturally trend towards following what is normal.

I think there is a lot to unpack on the front of AI. Without getting into the details, a lot of folks are rightfully concerned that they’re going to get replaced - not by better replacements, not even by replacements up to the standard, but the great race to the bottom for the cheapest acceptable alternative. This fear goes across many, many industries but do notice that it’s never the execs that fear replacement. The other major concern really is the focus of it: automation should replace the tedious stuff that humans get wrong, and should replace the stuff that is boring so humans can be free to do the stuff that really needs a human to do it. As in, we used to think the machines would come to save us from housework so we’d have time to be creative, but they’re coming to save us from being creative so we have time to do housework. Which isn’t really what anyone wants.

This is one of those 'if you know you know' moments. I'm sure you know exactly who I'm talking about. But I'd rather not get into the specifics; it doesn't and shouldn't matter. The general thesis is whether you engage with troublemakers on some or any level and what's appropriate (and, tacitly, whether some moderation behaviour without communication is acceptable and/or appropriate)

I've recently joined a closed community, and when I say it's closed, it's closed to the point that even joining isn't free. Virtually all of the content is behind the paywall, which is $10/month. In fact that particular example is fascinating in a variety of interesting ways because I don't think it could work for any reason other than who it is running it and why they started it. Or indeed anything about it. I'll just link you to its about page because that is public and I find it very interesting as to the mission: https://www.patreon.com/thejoepage/about Yes, it's on Patreon. It's regular posts on Patreon being threads, so mechanically it's less a traditional forum and slightly more leaning into a social medium, but it's a different kind of community than I think I've ever seen. If you read his piece there, it's clear why he feels this is a venture that might work out for this - and specifically the vibe he calls out that used to be there and has gone.

You'd honestly think so, right? But this week I witnessed this play out. I found it darkly amusing on multiple levels but I don't want to say why because the site in question deserves more than naming and shaming. But only just.

I have seen a great many wild, wild takes on themes over the years. Probably the wildest I've seen is the segment of people who get absolutely butthurt that a theme maker dares to sell their themes at $100 or more apiece for non-exclusive themes, without understanding that this is a niche where the number of people who will use such a theme is terrifyingly small, and that the effort that goes in to making such things is disproportionately high. Apparently 'how dare you charge money for people who are just having a hobby' is a wild critical take. Mind you this is a genre of site where aesthetics are everything and the actual content/substance is... limited. One thing I will note though, and this is especially true for Invision sites, and slightly less true for XF sites: there is a surprising amount of sites that stay on or close to the default theme with colour changes only. This of course limits the amount of theme related maintenance one must do, maximises plugin compatibility (which for XF owners in particular tends to matter), and the fact that people don't seem to mind is suggestive that as long as the colours are thematically appropriate, people care more about the content than the presentation.

I often do. Partially it means that if I'm not focusing on something explicitly I can still glance over and understand what's been going on if I've tuned out the actual words (one of the reasons I don't do audiobooks is because I tune out the audio more often than not) But also because modern TV has such weird biases in recording. In the same way 'dark' is the new 'brightly lit' in cinematography, 'whisper' is the new 'volume' in TV - and it's not because I have auditory processing issues. I have old TV series on iTunes - stuff from the 1960s and 1970s, and stuff from this decade, and the audio balances are off, and the lighting etc makes everything darker for no good reason.

This to me sounds like a very healthy way to deal with it because people have bad days and once they cool off, they deal with it. But I think the most important key here is that your first step is that you tell them what you've done. For context, after I got some posts deleted, I got partially banned - all posts were moderated, no access to post at all in the off-topic areas, and no new PMs. (Though I could participate if someone PM'd me). But no communication from the staff that they were doing this, nor communication after the fact. I only even discovered the restrictions were lifted by explicitly checking a couple of days later.

Yeah but it's one thing to have kids, it's another to inflict them on other people :P

Let me tell you a story. Imagine a forum. A decently sized forum, mostly ticking along reasonably happily. There's a few malcontents but nothing too serious. They also have a healthy collection of active participants who will be fairly shouty against the malcontents for daring not to be faithful. In other words, a typical fairly large forum. Now imagine that you have a member that is mostly dormant, but occasionally pokes their head over the parapet, throws out the odd observation. They don't say much but what they do say is generally positively received. Now imagine that person is having a bad day or two. They end up making a series of posts that are increasingly negative in tone, and that tone becomes more negative precisely because of the reaction they're getting to the earlier posts - specifically from the management, rather than the regulars. Comments about poor choices of communication, comments about not doing obvious things for the good of the forum. You've seen these a million times before, no doubt. And you delete some of the posts. You might even bother to tell the person that you've deleted posts as off-topic. The first question: do you issue that person a warning? Do you reach out to them and go 'are you OK' because clearly they're not. Now, you know as well as I do that you as staff on a forum aren't someone's therapist, and they're acting out and giving you work to do. The second question: if you do decide to issue a warning, do you actually tell them you've issued them a warning? The third question: if the person is upset, and clearly part of their problem is the lack of communication from staff, do you think it's appropriate to double down on that? (Obvious disclaimer is obvious: this is a true story and I will fully accept that I as the truculent forumite am at least partially to blame for letting my temper get the better of me. But I'd like to understand if my reaction to this is normal. Names have been otherwise censored to protect the possibly-innocent.)

The answer is 'probably'. It mostly depends on the community and more widely on the intent of monetisation. If the intent is to simply make a little money, maybe cover hosting and addons and stuff, the advertising will be light touch, it will be reasonably unobtrusive and likely the ads will be fairly well curated as to be things the members will actually care about and might even click on. Result: the ads are not fundamentally against the integrity of the community. The problem begins when trying to make primarily a profit with the community as a vehicle for this, and in particular where the community is thrown under the bus in favour of profit. a.k.a what happens on social media. You'll see ads mixed in with regular content, and done so subtly enough to imply that the paid-for content is on par with non-paid-for content. You tend to see this in forums as an ad that pretends to be a post - though thankfully most of them are tellingly obvious - but this is the point where the integrity is compromised. The moment you stop putting the community first and make it about the money first, the integrity is compromised.

I'm currently listening to the collection of small kids upstairs that have too much energy. You see, when we bought this place, we didn't realise that the guy upstairs lets out his part semi-regularly as as AirBnB. Most of the time it's fine but because we're central and near the train station, it's not at all unheard of that the place above ends up being booked by a smallish family. And because it's an old property, running and stomping and generally being enthusiastic like that is definitely audible downstairs. And they've been awake since 7am - they were quiet for a bit, I assume mummy and/or daddy had taken them out of the house for a bit, but now they're back and ohgodtheyhaveinfiniteyouthenergy I wish I were that age again when I had infinite youth energy and no responsibilities.

You can’t realistically challenge Facebook on its terms. Neither X, Bluesky or any of the others. Or Reddit for that matter. Simple reason, they have spaces for every kind of discussion under the sun. Same reason that a mom & pop shop, as you could call one, can’t compete with Walmart on range of goods because Walmart has everything. And it would be a mistake to try because you can only spread yourself so thin without serious backing which none of us have. So the question becomes how you combat that. In an age where we are surrounded by Walmarts and Amazons, the only winning strategy is to offer something they don’t. Pick a subject, a niche to specialise in. Have information, resources etc that the Walmarts and the Amazons don’t. (Or, I suppose, the Facebooks and the Reddits.) Case in point, I’m a member of a Discord that generally focuses on the adventure games by Sierra back in the day. We have, as a collective resource, the accumulated knowledge of some fiercely knowledgeable people, and we collectively know things that are largely unknown elsewhere. It is a community rich in lore that you cannot find elsewhere. Unfortunately its on Discord. When I say this, let me give you an example. Someone for giggles found the engine that lets you run, say, Space Quest I on the Game Boy Advance, and played it, and found a few bugs. The bugs were in the “huh, that’s interesting” category. Within a few days the community had gone over the 20-year-old GBAGI engine, found the bugs and patched them. Mostly for no reason other than because they could. You’ll never find that kind of interaction on Facebook because the odds of getting the cumulative level of knowledge together in one place in a medium designed for transient engagement are simply too low.

I think it depends what it is, what they did and how meaningful it is to tell the community. Which also means it depends on the community. If they’ve been an obvious disruption, getting rid requires no communication - just as we wouldn’t notify the community about banning a spammer. (We might, if we’d had a particularly bad run of spammers, announce we’d taken new measures to combat spam, though.) Similarly the more public the rule breaking, the less communication it needs - people will be able to see for themselves if someone is no longer posting because there’s been a wild explosion or meltdown. You lock the topic, you move on. If you gave that person a timeout, you can let them explain it on their return (since someone going rogue doesn’t have to be a banning offence, it can be a “go home, you’re drunk” moment) The real test, I think, is if you announce it and people didn’t know about it. That does breed tension. Also if you do a knee jerk rule change with massive and sweeping consequences, it can feel like a rug pull. Basically, a forum is for talking about things. If the forum itself is the topic of conversation, something has wrong wrong, and that’s really a criteria for whether you need to make a change.

If your staff policy says “no x”, whether or not that’s legitimate in context, it’s pretty unethical for someone to see that and not go “um, hey, about that”. That’s the policy. (It gets fuzzier if the policy is intentionally discriminatory without reason, but a staff position on a forum is a position of power, will have access to some amount of personal data and “no felons” seems like a criteria for everyone’s safety. Discriminating on the usual protected categories is of course much fuzzier.) I don’t think you should regret it - what happened sounded like a bad time lead by a guy who doesn’t care that he made a mistake in the eyes of the law, and presumably would do it again if the same situation arose. Which is indeed not a good candidate for a position of authority. But as ever it’s easy to write a policy that has unintended consequences. There are also levels of being a criminal, which is really my point, and precisely which laws get violated speaks to the character of the individual. (I am not a driver so whatever my thoughts on that law are, are irrelevant.) But driving a little too fast isn’t comparable to theft, just as theft isn’t comparable to murder. Ultimately it’s a question of trust. How much do you ever really know about someone? How much do you trust them? A lot of newer forum owners trust too easily and get burned, a lot of older ones do not trust easily and if they do find their trust violated it hits harder. It’s also interesting in a forum-as-business fashion. Would you vet them the way you would a regular employee, with background checks? What if they’re not in the same country? (How would you even do a background check?)

Huh, it's like it's autodetected the forum language for the usual UI stuff (the stuff you'd normally get translated if you switched languages) and it jars because everything else is in English as expected.

Huh, that's interesting - didn't know about that but I only speak three languages, two of which no browser autotranslates.

I have used it, quite extensively for a while. It was self hosted (this is an option) rather than their hosting, and it was a community of obscenely technical people (including from whom some of the NodeBB code ultimately came, because that community took issue with the use of MongoDB as a database, and wrote a layer for using Postgres instead which was later adopted by NodeBB) As for ease of use, it's alright. The community in question was pushed onto Discourse at one point and spent 2 years thumbing their nose at Jeff Atwood and taking great sport in finding ways to break it, and eventually the decision was to move off Discourse to something else. NodeBB was picked because it had enough of the things people liked - the live streaming of updates as you're reading, opt-in infinite scrolling - without too many of the downsides. The most interesting aspects to contemplate for us traditional folks: theming is very minimal, just like Discourse, making the content more prominent there isn't the same scale of plugin ecosystem as there is for other platforms because most people run it out of the box or with very light customisation the whole Markdown/HTML with occasional bbcode does throw a few people But for many communities, it's perfectly serviceable and modern feeling.

Interesting lesson I’ve seen elsewhere: have a board of mostly historical threads, wait for people to reply because they found it through search, then berate them for reopening old topics. (They should all be locked. Personally I’d archive the board entirely too but there is a legitimate trickle of people coming through as it’s the board for an old version of something and there is legitimate traffic in “how do I update to <newer version>” though for me I’d put that in the newer board… The other time to really lock is when a conversation is done but people keep picking at it, like those people who can’t leave a scab alone, where the answer is pretty final but inconvenient, so there’s a need to “we’re done here, move along”.

I find the “registered sex offender” one complicated. Before y’all get pitchforks and torches on me, this is not a unilateral defence. The fact is, people get added to that register, sometimes debatably unfairly owing to more or less strict interpretations of the law. The obvious example: assume a jurisdiction with age of consent as 18. Imagine an 18 year old and a 17 year old one day short of their birthday and they indulge in certain things. The 18 year old, potentially, now faces such a registration for life for the crime of being essentially stupid and impatient. Young (but not too young, if you get my meaning), stupid and horny is a particular cause of a lot of trouble. Some jurisdictions allow for nuance in these cases, others don’t. Should they in that situation, and specifically ones like it, still be tarred and feathered the same? My point is that “being on the register” is not always an equivalent offence. That said, many on it should indeed be treated with extreme care. Does that mean you shouldn’t have done what you did? No, you were perfectly within your rights to do so and no one would blame you for doing it. (I think I even know who that was.) Just saying, when hit by something like that, getting some context can make or break. I also think they should possibly have come forward the minute staffing was on the table with something akin to, “thanks for the offer, there’s something you should know” and discuss if/how it is relevant. This is not within the remit of “due diligence” on your part, and not volunteering this up front doesn’t exactly speak to either the narrative of “I made a stupid mistake when I was a teenager” or “this happened to me and I’m taking these steps to move forward”. The wider question of “would you ban someone from staff for being a criminal?” I’d say it depends on the crime - fraud and the like, obviously not a contender for staff. Theft, ditto, But, say, a DUI from years ago when they were younger? Especially if having expressed remorse and taken positive action in their life? I find it hard to contemplate damning someone permanently over what might have been a poor choice in the past, especially if they’ve obviously learned from it.

I think that’s symptomatic of the schism of Invision Community’s user base. It has the vocal minority for whom customisation is important, even vital, and it has the core functionality that is perfectly adequate for the rest of their user base. Funny thing is, both sides see the others as “you’re using it wrong”.