Re: Moderation
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jul 15, 2016
- 2961 views
In response to http://openeuphoria.org/forum/m/130049.wc :
And I would be deeply saddened if Andreas' quick defense of my post and any responses to his post were to somehow impact his most valuable input, which I greatly appreciate.
There is now an appearance that this is indeed the case. (Though I secretly harbor different suspicions.)
andi49 last logged in at Jul 12, 2016 18:22:58 EDT (before any responses to his post were made).
However, he appears to be reading posts from another forum account, as I received an email from his registered email address asking to remove his account.
It is no secret that the number of active participants has diminished and that OE would be better served if the numbers were incremented.
One thing I've noticed with the email validation is that, when the new forum went up back in 2008, there were a lot of accounts with fake email addresses created. I haven't counted, but it feels like we have had far more forum accounts back then than we did participants in the Topica email list.
Some of these accounts became very active participants. Many of the later performed actions which today would violate the CodeOfConduct.
Adopting and enforcing the CodeOfConduct got rid of the worst violators though, and adopting the current email validation system also stopped most of those fake forum accounts. The owner of which made no attempt to reregister them, except for a small handful.
Do you know what really caused the forum to go quiet? When I contacted one of these accounts and asked the owner about the owner's real identity. Suddenly forum activity dropped. It's stayed low ever since.
While I agree with the sentiment that it'd be great to have more users join this forum, if I had to choose I'd pick the small, low-volume/low-activity forum over a large and noisy forum that was mostly full of insults, personal attacks, and other messages of the same type.
I feel that andi49's account has fit into a certain pattern here - a friendly and helpful user who at first posts useful information, then goes on to post some minor controversial stuff/minor criticisms and ignores the responses, then goes on to an uncharacteristic post majorly insulting someone. This isn't the first time that something like this has happened, but it appears that these attacks are getting more and more elaborate.
However, they are also coming in more infrequently. I imagine it's getting harder to do these kind of things on this forum. So I think we should stay the course - the evidence suggests that the current approach to this kind of behavior is indeed working.
