I used to run a very successful (and busy) website that had a forum solution that I built.
In the end, the trouble makers caused me to shut the site down, but we did all kinds of tricks to make things more "flexible" for paying members;
1. Some forums were member only.
2. The person who started a thread was the "owner" of the thread. As "owner" they could remove entries - but it only flagged them as removed - meaning that you could see (as a visitor) that an entry had been there, and that the thread owner had chopped it...
The big problem with member only forums is you get tale-telling. The second thing though - allowing thread starters to moderate their thread but show traces of their moderation - worked very well.
Human nature is a funny thing.
When I was a young guy I used to play this thing called "Correspondence Chess". It sorta worked like this site, where you'd get a move in the post, think about your reply, and then post one off. It was slow, expensive, and painful. Computer cheating was rife in the 1980's.
Back then, I couldn't have dreamed of sites like this. Where you could play chess with people all over the world, talk with them in real time, post messages in forums about chess and anything you wanted pretty much, etc. The internet is truly revolutionary.
It came about, basically, for US Defence reasons. That's clear enough. But you or I aren't involved in defence. The reason we can do what we're doing here today, is because some VISIONARY guy gave it to us for FREE! His name is Tim Berners-Lee, and if you haven't heard of him or what he was hoping to achieve with the World Wide Web, then perhaps you'd like to ask Dr Google and sort yourself out.
For those old enough to remember the early days of the Web, it was pretty anarchic. And esoteric. The so called "ordinary people" weren't around that much. But thanks to Berners-Lee's ethos, that eventually changed. And here we are now. Playing chess, chatting freely, being a little anarchic some of the time.
However, nothing stays the same. Almost immediately the Web was in existence there were those who saw it as just another commercial opportunity. Pawn sites were legion, socks being a human preoccupation. And in the last decade in particular we've seen the rise of the "controllers".
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Righto, this post has been deemed "innappropriate" and I have no idea why. I'll try to send it in two parts and see what happens. Standby .......
And here's the rest ..................
Essentially, it seems that some among us are simply afraid of freedom. Of course, they'd never abuse it themselves. It's always some OTHER idiots that want to infect people with malware, waste their time with stupid posts, pollute the kids with socks sites, promote hate crime, make bombs, etc.
What is needed, they propose, is CONTROL. Be it in the form of moderation, or financial, or if you're a government, the right to invade your computer and control what is published. Controllers want the world, and probably the Universe, to be the way THEY want it. When they talk about money, they are simply saying that if possible they'd pay to have the world the way they want it.
It's time to get a grip. The world is OURS. All of ours. Some things in it we don't like. Some posts we don't want to read. Boo Frickety Hoo. How can anyone moan about something as trivial as that, when they have a site like RHP to play on at all? Whatever the financial model used to provide the site, it must be working. The "make them pay to post" argument is not about money, it's about control.
Never take things for granted, sure. That includes the internet as a whole, and the freedom it's giving humankind. Freedoom. Thanks to a man called Tim Berners-Lee and the gift he gave you, you have the opportunity to pay a little money and pay chess online. How much do you think you should pay him for that? Funnily enough, he doesn't want your money. He wants you to experience freedom. Enjoy it, and stop trying to take it away from others.
Lecture over, my head hurts.
Originally posted by Vandalizerbut is some level of control not needed, otherwise a minority can easily make a forum a place where no one wants to be, thereby destroying them? Obvious examples might be somone opening hundreds of spam threads knocking all other threads off page 1, or people posting links to malicious sites under false pretenses.
What is needed, they propose, is CONTROL.
<edit> just to make it clear, I do not support stopping non-subscribers from posting!!
Originally posted by VandalizerRHP is a subscription site.
And here's the rest ..................
Essentially, it seems that some among us are simply afraid of freedom. Of course, they'd never abuse it themselves. It's always some OTHER idiots that want to infect people with malware, waste their time with stupid posts, pollute the kids with socks sites, promote hate crime, make bombs, etc.
What is needed ...[text shortened]... freedom. Enjoy it, and stop trying to take it away from others.
Lecture over, my head hurts.
If you want freedom, subscribe.
Join a couple clans, enter a couple tournaments, post anything you think people may want to read.
Be part of the RHP community.