Build a better forum

Arise 7 months ago

There’s been a lot of chat recently about what’s wrong with this forum. So let’s see if we can turn that into a positive and come up with how we would like a new forum to work. I’m not suggesting at this stage that I or anyone else will actually build such a forum. That might happen. But a lot of things would need to be agreed upon first before building a new forum would be worthwhile.

In my experience as a software and hardware engineer of many years, such a thing would not be trivial. It will take a lot of planning, discussion and thrashing out of ideas before we even put finger to keyboard. Figuring out what to build is often harder than building and testing it.

Let’s have positive ideas noted down here. Negatives are not welcome. Talk about what you want, not what you don’t want. Think about how your idea would actually work before you post so that we don’t have to wade through too many infeasible ideas.

I will start by saying that I think this current forum starts from a good place, with great volunteers and some good rules. Execution isn’t great, but that’s not the fault of the people running it. More, I suspect, the technology and those providing it. So I think the current principles and rules are sound and therefore let me start with some basic suggestions based on those. These are for discussion. They’re not absolutes.

1. Privacy first

Users may not disclose any personally identifying information. Accounts will be linked to an email address for practical reasons but this will not be displayed. A nickname will be shown instead. An avatar can be used but it cannot contain identifying imagery. Messages cannot contain phone numbers. Other media cannot be uploaded. No urls or other external info. The forum is for discussion only. That might need some work, especially around urls.

2. Moderation

Full moderation destroys the immediacy of chat and isn’t welcome. The downside to that is that bad content will appear at some point. We probably need to use an automatic scoring system that flags accounts with markers which causes a human moderator to notified if a threshold is breached. The odd misdemeanour can pass without comment but regularly repeated triggers of the automated scanning requires the attention of a human. Accounts can be marked for pre-moderation if deemed necessary for a while, or even blocked as a severe penalty.

3. Reputation

Lots of problem free posts together with likes can drive up a reputation score for each account. Perhaps a high reputation feeds into the moderation threshold. Perhaps it allows the use or urls etc.

4. Right to be forgotten

Don’t keep discussions forever. Most stuff is just chat that can be destroyed after a few months and probably should be. Mods can be requested to lock an important discussion or make it sticky for a while or keep it indefinitely

5. Keep it simple

Initially go for just a basic text chat. Markdown but no major formatting. Chat group categories for organisation. Other features can be added later.

Let the specification begin!

Parents

ArchaeC 7 months ago

Thank you for doing this Arise. You have made a good, positive start to the idea of a a new forum.

I like the idea of 1. Privacy first and I agree that

2. Moderation - of some form, is essential.

I haven’t the knowledge to suggest how this may be done effectively. I expect it is a philosophical argument over the rights of vulnerable people to protection from reading harmful material v. the right to post our choice of content freely. Is there a right or wrong answer?

4. Right to be forgotten would keep the forum fresh and easier to navigate for new people and I am in favour of that. Sometimes it can be hard for we autistic people to let go of something, so can old threads be accommodated in a separate section or would the forum become too messy?

Reply

ArchaeC 7 months ago

Thank you for doing this Arise. You have made a good, positive start to the idea of a a new forum.

I like the idea of 1. Privacy first and I agree that

2. Moderation - of some form, is essential.

I haven’t the knowledge to suggest how this may be done effectively. I expect it is a philosophical argument over the rights of vulnerable people to protection from reading harmful material v. the right to post our choice of content freely. Is there a right or wrong answer?

4. Right to be forgotten would keep the forum fresh and easier to navigate for new people and I am in favour of that. Sometimes it can be hard for we autistic people to let go of something, so can old threads be accommodated in a separate section or would the forum become too messy?

Children

Arise 7 months ago in reply to ArchaeC

Good points, ArchaeC.

Because moderation is labour intensive it's normal to have some level of automated process. But get this wrong, as this forum often does, and people are blocked for no good reason which causes arguably more stress than the content that moderation is trying to prevent.

I think the idea of reputation might help with this. Each account starts with a base reputation score - give people the benefit of the doubt - and this score is reduced each time the auto-moderator is triggered by bad content. Once reputation drops to zero, the account is flagged for pre-moderation.

Pre-moderation means that all posts from that user a first checked by a human and after a sufficient number of good postings, the reputation can be manually reset by a moderator.

Accounts would be given feedback as they lose reputation points - and crucially why they have lost points - so that they can self moderate. Negative scores would be "forgiven" over time so if people do learn and self moderate their output, their reputation will recover. Only persistent offenders end up being flagged for human intervention.

It would be possible to "game' such a simple algorithm but I think a few extra checks and balances should make it a little more robust. The most important feature is that people don't just fall off a cliff edge - they are given clear feedback as to why their content is objectionable and can the opportunity to improve.

For right to be forgotten, we would let old threads die out. Dead threads would vanish from view but remain available for recovery for a short period by moderators - say 6 months. After that they are destroyed. So they're really forgotten, for good.

Some thought would need to be given as to how this affects data backup, but that can be handled.

Moderators would be able to mark a thread as "keep" so that it doesn't die, if deemed useful. And users would be able to request a thread be kept. Maybe a simple voting system could be implemented, 1 vote per account, which triggers a thread to be kept if a threshold is reached.