Taking care of business

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Bushman
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Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2010 5:29 am
Location: Pacific Northwest

Taking care of business

Post by Bushman »

I just recently returned from vacation and wanted to send a general message to the members regarding recent events. I belong to multiple forums that deal with distillation as do many of our members. Usually the forums are set up with guidelines and rules that all members are asked to adhere too. If the rules are broken then appropriate action is taken for the continued success and healthy environment in which we are able to share ideas.

One of the forums that I belong to took off like crazy and I thought it was a great place to be and belong. I made a lot of contributions at the beginning as did many members. Along the way a member was burned by another member on something they had purchased but not received, this created bad feelings as it got very heated and both members were part of the administrative team which complicated matters even more. The result was a mass exiting of the forum by members on one side of the fence. This created a problem as all of their posts were deleted upon request and that left threads that no longer made sense. Today I am lucky if I visit the forum once a week and even then it seems like there is nothing new to catch up on.

HD has a set of rules that were created well before I was a member by Uncle Jess or maybe even Tony Ackland. The rules have been updated and added to since the beginning of the forum as deemed needed by an agreement of staff. When a rule has been added it was to stop a problem from happing again. We have had, what I would call, close calls with what could have turned into huge problems for the forum, with members selling items and creating or targeting members for their businesses on the forum. We have very strict rules for selling, how and where you advertise, and also guidelines if what you are selling to members does not fulfill the promises made. This is in place to protect our members.

One issue is a forum becomes a close knit family and even if we don't meet each other face to face we create bonds or friendships. An administrative team member also creates friendships with members but they have an unpaid responsibility to the members to make sure the information on the forum is correct and that all members are treated fairly and with respect. This job (did I mention without pay) is very time consuming and with a forum as large as HD it takes multiple people to make it run properly. This group of volunteers discuss and decide what is the best way to handle situations that arise and is not always just the comments made by the person handling the situation that decides the course of action taken.

At this point I would like to review the structure of a forum:
Before a prospective member joins a group and makes posts to others, he or she is usually required to register. The prospective member must usually agree to follow certain online rules, sometimes called netiquette, such as to respect other members and refrain from using profanity. When rules are set, it is up to an administrative team to make sure we all live by those rules for the health and continued success of the forum. The administrative team is usually made up with the following:
Administrator(s)
The administrators (short form: "admin") manage the technical details required for running the site. As such, they may promote (and demote) members to/from moderators, manage the rules, create sections and sub-sections, as well as perform any database operations (database backup etc.). Administrators often also act as moderators. Administrators may also make forum-wide announcements, or change the appearance (known as the skin) of a forum.
Moderators
Essentially, it is the duty of the moderator to manage the day-to-day affairs of a forum or board as it applies to the stream of user contributions and interactions. The relative effectiveness of this user management directly impacts the quality of a forum in general, its appeal, and its usefulness as a community of interrelated users.

We recently had a thread that started as most threads in the right direction but a few members took it upon themselves to attack one of the administrative members for doing their job as outlined above. The attack should not have been made, but when made, should have been directed to the administrative team as a whole as we were all discussing on the forum moderator thread how to best handle a potential costly situation for many of our members (did I mention we have had past experience with money lost by members). At the same time we were all concerned that there might be a good reason why we hadn't heard back for a month as we were trying to solve the situation. The action that was taken was slow by the team but followed the rules that we are tasked to enforce.
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