{"id":19016,"date":"2013-03-10T11:47:08","date_gmt":"2013-03-10T16:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=19016"},"modified":"2013-03-10T11:47:08","modified_gmt":"2013-03-10T16:47:08","slug":"thinking-about-forums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=19016","title":{"rendered":"Thinking About Forums"},"content":{"rendered":"

splash_frustrated.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

This blog is a very unusual beast. I don’t say this to brag. It’s unusually big for a WordPress blog. (Once sites get this busy, they often move away from blogging software.) There’s an unusual level of “engagement” for a personality-driven blog. (If you’ve got a big blog based around a single person, it’s common to have the comments aimed not at the subject matter of the post itself, but at the author.) But here we’ve got long, detailed discussions between people on all sorts of topics. The comments are busy enough to be interesting but not so busy that you feel like you’re shouting into a hurricane. On top of all this, the whole thing is shockingly civil for an open-comment discussion thread where anyone can join without creating an account.<\/p>\n

The point is: We have some sort of delicately balanced ideal here, and I’ve been slow to change things because I don’t want to disturb the mysterious alchemy we have. For years people have been asking me to create forums, and I’ve resisted because I don’t want to harm the blog or make it less fun. This blog has been a big part of my routine for 7.5 years now. It works well and I’m very reluctant to mess with it in a way that might make the thing less fun.<\/p>\n

But Shamus, why can’t we have some optional side-forum, just for people who want to talk about other stuff?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That seems like a perfectly reasonable question. Months ago Krellen<\/a> expressed an interest in running a play-by-post game with some of the other folks here. And last month some people actually went to all the trouble of setting up unofficial Twenty-Sided forum. These two events lead me to believe that:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. There are good, worthwhile things that you can do in forums that you can’t do here on the blog.\n
  2. There is a non-trivial demand for forums and thus a reasonable number of people would benefit from them.\n<\/ol>\n

    So I’m considering it. <\/p>\n

    My concerns:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Site load. You may remember my blog was slow and laggy for over half a year because of a bad plugin. (Ironically, a plugin designed to make it faster.) That’s all fixed now<\/a>, aside from figuring out why cookies aren’t working for some people. But if forums begin devouring resources then we could end up right back where we started, performance-wise.\n
    2. I don’t want to cannibalize the blog. The blog comments are for discussing the blog posts, and I’m worried that if we have a forum that some of the discussion will move from here to there.\n
    3. I don’t want the community to become too insular. The is related to the previous item, but I don’t want us to have this ugly divide between “members” and “pubbers”. Over time, the names I see in the comments turn over. Some people lose interest in the site and move on. Others discover the site for the first time and join the conversation. If the community is dominated by the forums, then the outflow will continue and the inflow will slow. (I don’t create forum accounts unless I really, REALLY love a site or have something super-important to say. Account creation is just too much hassle.) We could end up with a much smaller community of long-time members. Communities that undergo this sort of thing generally become sort of rigid, elitist, isolated, and prone to hipster-esque posturing about who was here first. While that’s hard to imagine it happening here, it’s still a concern to take seriously.\n
    4. I don’t want to overburden myself. I can spare a bit more time in the day to tend another garden (which is how I think of running a community) but forums take a good bit of time and I would most likely need help. For help with administration and moderation, I’ve reached out to some people who are gentle, reasonable, and thoughtful. I also asked Josh.\n
    5. I don’t want to disturb the tone of the community. Part of why this place is friendly is that I run a very unorthodox moderation system. When you join a typical forum you usually have to agree to a bunch of rules that should be obvious to anyone that isn’t a sadistic sociopath. I don’t tell people not to post hateful things about other people. I let them do it and then silently ban them and nuke the offending comment.\n

      But Shamus, what if they sneak back in under another name and then write only civil comments so you can’t tell it’s them?<\/em> Well, mission accomplished<\/a>. I don’t moderate based on post content, I moderate based on personality, demeanor, diplomacy, and integrity. I’m aiming less at what is said and more at what people have going on in their hearts. I’ve culled people from the site who, while not directly insulting or offending others, seemed to have a lot of pent-up anger or an ax to grind. They didn’t have a single post that I could point to and say, “This was unacceptable”. Instead, they had a pattern of agitating people, testing people’s patience, and generally making discussions less fun.<\/p>\n

      The drawback to this system is that it’s capricious. If you have nice, fair, clearly-stated rules, then you’ve either broken the rules or you haven’t. But our moderation is run on the whims of a supreme dictator for life who strives for benevolence. But sometimes I’m grouchy, or I take something wrong, and react with overdue harshness. You can add more dictators to mitigate this, but then there’s the question of who will mitigate conflicts between THEM, and what happens if THAT person is having a bad day, etc.<\/p>\n

      The point is, I don’t know if this moderation style will work on a forum, particularly if there’s a team of moderators. On the other hand, I’m not interested in running a “HERE ARE THE RULES AND BY POSTING HERE YOU AGREE TO ABIDE BY THEM” kind of place.\n<\/ol>\n

      Those are my concerns with a forum. Having said all this, I’m still open to creating one. I’m doing this very slowly. I talked it over with a small number of trusted friends, then a few more, and so on, gradually widening the circle and gathering everyone’s views and concerns. Now I’ve come far enough that I’m willing to discuss it publicly. <\/p>\n

      If at any time it looks like the forum project will harm the blog, I’ll scuttle the whole thing. <\/p>\n

      Facts known about the forum so far:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. It will run on phpBB, and be hosted on this domain. Actually, I might make it a subdomain, assuming I don’t bungle it.\n
      2. Religion, politics, and other holy war topics will still be verboten.\n
      3. The only category I KNOW will be there is play-by-post. The rest is negotiable. (But probably involve videogames, tabletop games, etc. Coding and genre fiction might also show up.)\n
      4. The color scheme will be red text on a lime green background.\n
      5. I’ve got my mods in mind, although I’ve only recruited two of them so far and only in a sort of informal, non-committal manner.\n
      6. One of these facts is a lie.\n<\/ol>\n

        Now is time for the feedback, concerns, thoughts, suggestions, and offhanded comments about how I’m looking younger and thinner lately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        This blog is a very unusual beast. I don’t say this to brag. It’s unusually big for a WordPress blog. (Once sites get this busy, they often move away from blogging software.) There’s an unusual level of “engagement” for a personality-driven blog. (If you’ve got a big blog based around a single person, it’s common […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}