There comes a time for change

[exploited]

[Philly]

I'm down with whatever really. It should just work for the community of active posters and the rules are consistent. The no rules forum could be very helpful in this, because it's gotten to the point where we wanna say things like "Galt is an autistic weirdo whose wife couldn't be blamed for cheating on him" but then you make similar comments to someone else and you're banned. Anything goes forum lets you say all that stuff and respectful debate for the rest of the site is pretty clear cut.

[exploited]

[Southern Dad]

I have a bit of experience with both out of control forums and forums shutting down. I work for a company that owns newspapers. Newspapers are always trying to find a way to get community involvement. Two of our newspapers started a forum. Anyone could post. We were quickly inundated with SPAM so we made adjustments. Soon we had lively and interesting conversation. Unfortunately, that led to name calling and insults. Before long, we realized that some users had multiple accounts. They were using these ghost accounts to really beat down other users. Eventually this led to the closing of the forums. We didn't want to have a full time forum moderator, this was supposed to be an easy project.

Fast forward a couple of years and we enabled commenting on news stories. It was sort of a forum type atmosphere but with an attached subject. We found that there were many posters again using multiple usernames and posting hateful comments. This was in a different market than the first issue, so it was not the same people. We knew we had to make changes when we were named as a party in the lawsuit brought by a school administrator who had untrue claims made about her. Obviously, we were protected by the First Amendment being a newspaper but none-the-less we want to write the news, not be the news. Our solution has been that we now require Facebook posting. I'm sure a few people have multiple names but it isn't as common as it used to be.

Yes, I'm a bit long winded but what I'm saying is that in an anonymous environment people feel free to say a lot of things that they would not say in person. This isn't going to happen with the users who have been here a long time and built up a reputation but the new users? If they ruin their reputation, they just change their name and come back.

[Philly]

[exploited]

NAB, Winchester, Non, Menson... These are the only nice guys left. The rest of us are pricks and love it.

[Philly]

Winchester is a dick too. But so are we and I still like us.

[Southern Dad]

[spacemonkey]

[Saz]