Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Social aspects of Web 2.0 - troublemakers

So you have a troublemaker on your forum. They're rude and offensive, and you've warned them to clean up their act but they don't. You'd like to ban them, but they love an audience, and so they would be right back under a different user name. What to do? Use the "bozo" feature. Some forum software is starting to include a bozo feature. This feature is similar to automatically blocking the bozo for all other users. The bozo still sees their posts, but no one else does. The bozo doesn't get the attention they seek, and eventually leave. There's an article here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/01/the-bozo-feature
The discussion about the article is interesting also.

A longer term solution is "Saving the internet with hate":
http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/

2 comments:

wincoder said...

A good idea I suppose but isn;t keeping your bozo list up to date about the same as running a moderated forum?

Lyr Lobo said...

Good topic - I have not seen a bozo filter. *grins* but I am an advocate of moderation in all things... *tips her hat to wincoder*

Which is in direct conflict with another favorite adage. "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing." (Mick Jagger is credited, but my father, Jeremiah William Robinson III, said it in 1981; very hard to cite with confidence).

Another question is how to identify the line between dissenting opinions, useless content and griefing on a website. I've seen some very polite posts that distracted our attention from the focus of the discussion.

In gaming forums, we also recognize the Boardies. These are folks who love to post for less useful reasons, and they artificially increase their volume of posts and gain in status.

While I love the idea of recognition for contribution (It sounds so Starship Troopers...Service earns citizenship!), it has a dark side.

Evaluating and including content that provides a well-rounded look at the topic is important.