funrecdiver
Contributor
Yes, I understand your management model.
For the record:
1. There is little culturally unique about the Thailand forum except it is dominated by foreign English speaking dive center operators and independent foreign English speaking dive professionals who are trying to make a living in a country where it is quite hard for foreigners to make a living. Because of this, a number of posters are fiercely protective of their business interests and they will attack anyone who has an opinion that could effect them. Most are civil but a handful, enough to cause trouble, are very aggressive.
2. While your forum model to enforce your TOS is based mostly on user reporting; most other forums consider user reporting the last step, not the first. In other words, if you simply permitted others with a lot of forum experience and no financial interest (required income) from diving (school, center, local instructor, agent, etc) to moderate, then the Thailand forums, already famous for flame wars, would be a better place. I don't think it is 100 percent fair to place user reporting as the foundation for moderation. Many, if not most, forums rely on user reporting as the "last resort". We at The UNIX and Linux Forums, for example, would consider it a failure if our moderation relied on user reporting. We don't want our users to be the forum police and TOS violation police. That is the role of a moderator!
Honestly, I find it odd that you are so reluctant to add more moderators so the kind of abuse we forum and dive customers see in the Thailand forum, is stopped.
At our forums, technology not dive related, we consider customer feedback very important and we do not dismiss it quite as quickly and off-handedly as you have with our suggestions for improvement and stopping TOS abuse here.
Added:
Also, since this forum and our forum both uses vBulletin software. I kindly suggest that you, at a minimum, install the vB plug-in that detects multiple logins from a single computer. In the thread which is the genesis for this part of the discussion, the poster who began the serious TOS violations was a brand new user who created a new SB user id to stage their attacks. In our forums, we use cookie-based checks to flag all logins that appear to come from the same user (computer). Although not prefect nor fool proof, it is very good to have your moderation team see a flag of potential abuse when someone from a single computer is posting as multiple user IDs. In the case we are discussing, it is obvious to all in our forum that someone did not agree with my trip report, created a new SB user id, and then used that user id to launch very personal attacks. In our forums we run cookie based checks and have, for a long time, resolved the problem of users creating new ids to launch attacks; which is moot anyway, because if anyone in our forums called someone a "dork" or "stupid" or other insults, we would ban them immediately for a serious TOS violation. We do not tolerate personal attacks on others in our forums by anyone. When it goes unchecked, it creates an unhealthy atmosphere for all. These are our forum rules, FYI:
RULES OF THE UNIX AND LINUX FORUMS
We do not tolerate any flame wars, insults, personal attacks.... One attack on a personal basis is grounds for an immediate ban.
OBTW, just for quick forum-to-forum on-line user comparisons (not very significant, just for discussion):
We have different user demographics, as we consider our forums a knowledge base (repository) for professional people searching for answers to a (work related) problem. SB is more of an interactive community. At the moment of this post, you had 5 times more registered users posting, but we had 3 times more guests on site searching for answers. On the other hand, we have 20 to 25 active moderators (currently only around 20). Not sure how many active mods SB had.... but I would guess you would need around 5 to 10 times the number that we have to moderate as well as we do (100 to 200 moderators globally). Perhaps that is why you try to rely (mostly) on user reporting? I think you should consider more mods.
SB has 10 times more posts than we do. Part of the reason for this is that we do not permit flame wars, insults, etc. Since folks tend to gravitate toward conflict (the theme of most successful movies and books), our forum tends to have less members on line and less posts, but the posts are of high quality (low signal to noise ratio).
We can certainly learn from each other. There are many things about SB I think are great. The moderation, however, is not one of them, sorry.
Cheers.
For the record:
1. There is little culturally unique about the Thailand forum except it is dominated by foreign English speaking dive center operators and independent foreign English speaking dive professionals who are trying to make a living in a country where it is quite hard for foreigners to make a living. Because of this, a number of posters are fiercely protective of their business interests and they will attack anyone who has an opinion that could effect them. Most are civil but a handful, enough to cause trouble, are very aggressive.
2. While your forum model to enforce your TOS is based mostly on user reporting; most other forums consider user reporting the last step, not the first. In other words, if you simply permitted others with a lot of forum experience and no financial interest (required income) from diving (school, center, local instructor, agent, etc) to moderate, then the Thailand forums, already famous for flame wars, would be a better place. I don't think it is 100 percent fair to place user reporting as the foundation for moderation. Many, if not most, forums rely on user reporting as the "last resort". We at The UNIX and Linux Forums, for example, would consider it a failure if our moderation relied on user reporting. We don't want our users to be the forum police and TOS violation police. That is the role of a moderator!
Honestly, I find it odd that you are so reluctant to add more moderators so the kind of abuse we forum and dive customers see in the Thailand forum, is stopped.
At our forums, technology not dive related, we consider customer feedback very important and we do not dismiss it quite as quickly and off-handedly as you have with our suggestions for improvement and stopping TOS abuse here.
Added:
Also, since this forum and our forum both uses vBulletin software. I kindly suggest that you, at a minimum, install the vB plug-in that detects multiple logins from a single computer. In the thread which is the genesis for this part of the discussion, the poster who began the serious TOS violations was a brand new user who created a new SB user id to stage their attacks. In our forums, we use cookie-based checks to flag all logins that appear to come from the same user (computer). Although not prefect nor fool proof, it is very good to have your moderation team see a flag of potential abuse when someone from a single computer is posting as multiple user IDs. In the case we are discussing, it is obvious to all in our forum that someone did not agree with my trip report, created a new SB user id, and then used that user id to launch very personal attacks. In our forums we run cookie based checks and have, for a long time, resolved the problem of users creating new ids to launch attacks; which is moot anyway, because if anyone in our forums called someone a "dork" or "stupid" or other insults, we would ban them immediately for a serious TOS violation. We do not tolerate personal attacks on others in our forums by anyone. When it goes unchecked, it creates an unhealthy atmosphere for all. These are our forum rules, FYI:
RULES OF THE UNIX AND LINUX FORUMS
We do not tolerate any flame wars, insults, personal attacks.... One attack on a personal basis is grounds for an immediate ban.
OBTW, just for quick forum-to-forum on-line user comparisons (not very significant, just for discussion):
We have different user demographics, as we consider our forums a knowledge base (repository) for professional people searching for answers to a (work related) problem. SB is more of an interactive community. At the moment of this post, you had 5 times more registered users posting, but we had 3 times more guests on site searching for answers. On the other hand, we have 20 to 25 active moderators (currently only around 20). Not sure how many active mods SB had.... but I would guess you would need around 5 to 10 times the number that we have to moderate as well as we do (100 to 200 moderators globally). Perhaps that is why you try to rely (mostly) on user reporting? I think you should consider more mods.
SB has 10 times more posts than we do. Part of the reason for this is that we do not permit flame wars, insults, etc. Since folks tend to gravitate toward conflict (the theme of most successful movies and books), our forum tends to have less members on line and less posts, but the posts are of high quality (low signal to noise ratio).
We can certainly learn from each other. There are many things about SB I think are great. The moderation, however, is not one of them, sorry.
Cheers.
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