Spliff
Admin
845
Jan. 2003
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(Note: this message was also < posted > on the < official forums >)
Dear There Community,
Forgive us as this is a bit lengthy, but we’ve had this on our minds for a while now and it is time to make a statement. Many of you are already familiar with me (and my co-admin bobita228) in the There community (I go by the nickname Spliff) and know of our There fan site at ThereUniverse.com (tU for short). I started this site in January 2003 and it was the very first There fan site ever built. Soon after bobita228 joined me in helping to build this into thriving community of over 2000 members it is today. We are proud of what we have accomplished and are pleased to have provided a fun and useful place for everyone to enjoy over the past year, and look forward to many more years to come!
For a few months now there has been a growing sentiment among a small portion of the community that There Universe has become primarily a hotbed for drama and popularity contests – this part is true to some extent. While drama can sometimes lead to personal attacks, it can also remain lighthearted fun. While there are informative posts, there will always be posts that cause drama, which tends to attract the most attention, as it is like gossip. However, overall tU has a lot to offer both serious and fun. When it does become more than just fun, and personal attacks ensue, that is where bobita228 and I step in to protect others through moderation. I’ve participated on several other forums in my day, and discovered what I loved best about certain forums. The primary factor that compelled me to keep coming back to a forum was the lack of moderation on some of them. I never liked nosey admins with too much time on their hands that tried to moderate every single thing you typed. On forums discussing a new product, I’ve actually had my posts completely deleted and even banned because I voiced a criticism against it! To me this kind of moderation is unacceptable and I have attempted to use these experiences to create the kind of forum environment where people can freely discuss there opinions, both pro and con, and not have to worry about an admin with no life getting on their case all the time.
Now to the point of this message… Even with all my attempts to facilitate an open discussion on our forum, we have recently received very harsh criticism and even untruths about the way we run the forum. A new forum that began in November called the So There Forum recently had an ad running with Pulse Radio that never named us specifically but referred to another major fan site forum (hmm, wonder who that could be?) that had an admin that was like “Hitler” and “deleted posts” indiscriminately. The ad went something like this: “Are you tired of having your posts deleted by an admin who is the Second Coming of Hitler? Then try out the So There forum…” You may have heard this ad while listening to Levi’s State of There address a few weeks ago which was reported to be the highest trafficked There radio broadcast in the history of There.
Now at first bobita228 and I laughed this off, but after a while we found it upsetting, because while the majority of veteran There members know us to be fair with our moderation, there are many newbies who don’t have a clue who we are yet. We believe that advertisements such as this are unfair and (more importantly) untrue attacks against us and will give newbies the wrong message about our site. In addition I have visited as a guest to the So There forum, and have noticed that several members spend quite a bit of time over there badmouthing us and saying things that are simply untrue about our moderations, despite the fact that bobita228 and I have NEVER badmouthed anyone or organization in the community. We can’t see how all this is helping to enrich the There community and feel that as a result it has probably hurt the community.
Let me explain a little better the history of moderation at tU. When we began a year ago, there were basically no rules at all except to respect each other, and that was the way we intended to keep it with little to no moderation. As tU’s membership grew steadily, more and more members started complaining about the lack of rules and regulations on the forum and IRC chat. People voiced concerns about the level of profanity, and personal attacks were rampant. To address the profanity issue we turned on the forum’s automatic “swear filter” (changes cussing words to ####), as we didn’t see the benefit in allowing cuss words to be visible on our pages. People were saying all kinds of offensive things, which caused people to complain to us. One of the most frequent complaints from a large portion of the community was that people were not respecting homosexual people. To respond to that we created a rule that does not allow any negative remarks about homosexual people – this is one of the key ways to get in trouble on our forum or chat.
In one instance, people were so upset about the lack of moderation on the IRC chat that they threatened to leave and form other There channels – some of them actually did. Gradually, in an effort to protect members who were getting genuinely hurt as a result of our site, we created rules to address each one of these complaints in addition to our generic TOS policy. We also welcomed the addition of more channel operators (ops) to the IRC chat, because there were just not enough ops to watch over the channel for the number of users that frequented it. We listened to our members and made specific rules in their behalf.
Furthermore, as new features of our site were developed, new rules had to be created to ensure proper functionality of those features. Take the Rant or Rave area for example… the vision for that area is to allow only serious reviews about There avatars. Each person is only allowed to review a specific avatar twice and vote one time. I think it is easy to see why this area needed to be moderated often to keep personal attacks and casual conversation to a minimum. For a long time we had no way of keeping the Rant/Rave area in order aside from warnings and manually moderating posts. We always informed users when they are warned or their posts are deleted/edited. This Rant or Rave area is not a normal part of our forum, and special rules as described above are posted conspicuously. As a result of complaints about heavy moderation in this area, we have recently made the process of posting in this forum more automated, because it shouldn’t allow you to exceed the posting limits of the area by DEFAULT. It took time to create this custom feature, but once again we listened to our members, and made changes – and will continue to make improvements as needed in the future.
The rest of the forum is moderated very little, if at all. This is mostly because neither bobita228 nor I have enough time to read every post. Bobita228 works a full-time job, and my full-time job is finding a job (hehe) – although I spend a significant amount of time trying to upgrade the site/forum. Truthfully, because of my lack of time, and the number of users on our forum, the extent of my regular “policing” of the forums as an admin is doing nothing more than moving topics to the appropriate forum – and sometimes I don’t even have time to do that. We enjoy running a forum that is fair and has very little admin intervention as we believe this creates the best environment for open discussion; however, we don’t support personal attacks and other abuse, and have always warned users and edited posts when we notice such acts occur.
We don’t enjoy warning users and moderating posts at all, but in order to keep the abuse of others to a minimum we have no other choice. If anything at all, we might be at fault in not telling the person that is being moderated that a tU member specifically reported them to us. Hence our direct actions might have been misinterpreted as us actively seeking out to micro-manage the forum. In almost every instance, a member of the tU community alerts us to such abuse. From now on we will tell them that they were reported (but not by whom of course). This is done through a button on the posts called “Report this post to a moderator”. Every time we receive one of these reports, we carefully analyze the situation and decide what the best action would be. Sometimes we do nothing to the post at all, but we always make it a point of responding to the reporter to let them know we appreciate the time they took in reporting the post. We always attempt to err on the side of moderating too little, rather than too much. I’m sure over the past year we have made mistakes here and there (who doesn’t) and sparked controversy over our administrative decisions i.e. Renea situation (which has been debated ad nauseum even though that turned out to be a hoax). But overall, we have attempted to be fair in all our interventions, and we have grown a lot from our experiences.
We have been criticized for not being more involved in There and were suggested to “pass the torch,” but why would we do that? We don’t feel it is necessary for us to shove it down our members throats that we are active members of There, when we obviously put so much time and energy in maintaining and improving tU behind the scenes. Ultimately, we are just like any other Therians; just two members of There that go about exploring, chit chatting, attending events and basically doing our own thing in There that makes it fun for us as time permits. There Universe is a great place for us to share our experiences in There just like any other There citizen.
In summary, we’ve added rules and regulations; added irc chat rules; added chat room ops; moderated posts and improved forum features ALL based on member requests. Essentially, we care about our members A LOT. And above all, we have never attacked or bad mouthed any member or organization of the There Community and only aim to IMPROVE the community by providing a healthy (not always drama free *wink*) forum to express themselves while trying to stay as hands off as we can. We would just like to thank all the members who have supported us over this past year and have ignored the negative propaganda against our site. Now, we call upon the entire There community to take the negative propaganda about our moderating with a grain of salt, because it just simply isn’t true. And the only way to be sure is to see for yourself. We hope to see you at tU!
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Best Wishes,
Spliff and Bobita228
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