| |
|
Well, to be honest, Tom, nothing we haven't already talked about. The applications process is labour-intensive, and while it does its job of excluding a specific strain of malicious troll attempting to get in under multiple false identities it probably also leads to a fair few people either not being able to get in or losing the impetus to post. However, fixing the applications process would be time-consuming and probably not currently within your gift.
Banning is a long-winded process, at present, although actually the mechanical part of that is not the only issue. However, it is the only obviously and purely negative part. We have basically just addressed this - the problem is that you do not have time to read the banning threads and context in their entirety. The solution is to outsource that knowledge. I'd suggest that after a banning thread appears to have run its course, Randy or I, or whoever else is nominated, email you, copying in the other party - that way, if the other party thinks that the decision to ban has _not_ been made conclusively, they can challenge it and we can sort it out on the board. An email saying "we have agreed to ban (user number) does not count unless copied to the other party, nor does such an email not coming from the recognised email address of one of the people trusted to report this). It's not a perfect solution, but a solution involving giving people other than you the power to ban or suspend does not appear to be on the table. While such a solution is not on the table, we can't really speed up the applications process, either, because we cannot quickly arrest the activities of people intent on causing disruption.
As I understand it, we now have imperfect fixes in place for these two problems. However, the fixes remain imperfect and consequently people are unhappy with the impaired functionality. If fixes cannot be made available, then we need to talk frankly about how what is good about Barbelith can be moved to another platform, one perhaps hosted on your servers and with you as consultant in its creation and implementation, but which does not have the current issues from the software not being designed to deal with the current situation of the board.
At present, people are moving off to other bulletin boards or other social tools, such as LiveJournal. People are talking about setting up new boards, which may or may not succeed. What Barbelith has is, for better or worse, brand equity and also a place in many people's bookmark folders. So, a discussion of what might realistically be done, if not in terms of fixing the current code then replacing the entire set of code, might also be worth having. |
|
|
