Nice People Thread No. 15, a Cyber Summer

silvercar

There was another MSE thread that was shut down over one weekend, someone found somewhere to hang out temporarily that worked. I will look into how easy it is.

A closed, secret facebook would work, but not sure how many of us are on facebook.

In the meantime Gen can't see this board.

silvercar

michaels your inbox is full.

SingleSue

GDB2222 wrote: »

Forums are often funded from the adverts, so no payment required.

The cost isn't in the hosting or bandwidth. It's the moderation that's expensive, unless people volunteer for the job. Or so I have heard. I've never run a forum, but Sue has practical experience.

The cost is zero with the right site, Proboards is one to think about. Moderation need not cost anything either, certainly doesn't cost me anything and my site has 10000 members plus thousands more who visit but have not registered (approx 3-4 million page views per month).

Tweaking etc is not really needed on Proboards, they do all that with their upgrades and you can have them as plain or as bells and whistles as you like...I have always preferred plain because that is also easier for those with visual difficulties or those who are not technically minded.

So a forum can be had for no cost apart from time and if kept small, no real hard work. My main costs in relation to the site is marketing material and telecomminications (texts and calls to the rest of us!)

SingleSue

GDB2222 wrote: »

What you are doing requires effort. And caring. It's a lot easier just to ban people who appear on the radar.

I've found it to be more successful if you put in the effort and care otherwise the site just gets a bad reputation for banning people, accusations of large egos become rife and it can cause even more work and upset in the long run.

SingleSue

PasturesNew wrote: »

As GDB says - the financial cost to do it is peanuts. Think in terms of £10-20/year MAX.

What IS a pain in the butt is all the time to do upgrades, fixes, fiddle about with layouts/designs .... then keeping the spammers at bay and sorting out any spats, etc ... and just "dealing with the people".

While it could bobble along happily for months, one morning you wake up and there've been 1000 spam attacks overnight and ISIS have hacked your front forum page redirecting all site visitors to their "Page of Doom" with viruses.... and, even though you'd planned to go to the Farmers' Market.... you know you can't leave it like that, but (right now) really have no idea where to start... but you DO know it'll chew up your weekend.



Time.... is the cost. Who has the time/motivation/dedication to check at least daily that "all's well"...

We operate an admin ok to sign ups, I then check out their IP addresses to make sure they are not spammers before allowing them entry. I've also inserted some code into the bare bones of the site to stop the worse of the spam crap if they do happen to get through.

For the more private areas of our site, I have these restricted to only those with certain posting ranks but there is also an option in a general section to password protect and only allow access that way.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

There's a concerted effort from someone at the moment to report posts that are coming from a certain political perspective.

Gen's posts were obviously being reported consistently, as have many of mine, and I've just had another two reported last night between midnight and 8am when the abuse team looked at them (and thankfully did nothing other than edit format, no content change, warnings or pm's.)

But it only happens to me on Brexit/EU/Immigration posts.

I view it as a compliment that they're so worried about what I'm posting they'd try to get me banned - but I'm also careful to word my arguments and quotes in a way that stays exactly within the site rules.

If someone was even a fraction less careful it'd be incredibly easy to get on the wrong side of the processes and end up PPR'd when you've got an active group of posters reporting you for political reasons.

But.... If you do stay exactly within the rules the mods seem to show some reason and don't ban or delete.....

We can only trust that eventually it will backfire on those making the spurious reports as the mods realise what they're up to - and I believe this has happened previously in DT a fair bit.

PasturesNew

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

....

What I've seen a lot of in recent years, with social media, etc, is "people with money/people on a mission" can set up petitions and round up unknowing people in a frenzy .... to further their own ends.

"They" do say that some "shadowy group" were trying to overturn the whole vote ... etc etc ... and, if so, then there's possibly a team working to this end on such posts here.

What side of the fence were the owners of this site on?

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

PN I doubt it's that sophisticated.

There are a number of fairly fanatical posters on this topic who just want to silence any opposing viewpoint.

It happens on forums all the time on a multitude of topics.

What's funny is they make it so easy to spot.... They trawl threads looking for the slimmest of excuses to report posts that they disagree with - while leaving egregious violations of the rules in posts that they agree with completely unreported - if I was a lesser person I could hit the report button 100 times in the next hour very legitimately and we'd end up with a lot fewer people around to argue with.

But I'll continue to take the high road....

SingleSue

Niceness can be found....you only need to ask.

michaels

Now I am very concerned, afaik none of my posts have been referred for moderation

I have sorted out my PM box so if anyone wants to contact me than can do so quickly before PN fills it with unsolicited innuendo again.