Gah. Some people.
What the hell is up with everyone being so quick to take offence these days?
It’s kinda a long story, but please bear with me.
I belong to a forum for independent women small business owners. It’s a great resource, and we can all share advice and experiences. This forum has a “private” area, that’s only accessable by members, and not, say, Google or random customers. The point of having it is to be able to have discussion about ‘sensitive’ issues, without worrying about customers reading it. Issues that involve things like how much it actually costs to produce some products, discussions of future plans for the business, and the occasional rant someone posts about how an annoying customer has emailed them 47zillion times.
Lately there’s been some drama regarding who’s “allowed” to access the provate forums, originally stemming from one person copy/pasting posts from there and sending them to someone outside that forum, who then caused a big stink. Same ol’, same ol’.
So there began a discussion about how to make the private forums more secure Currently all you need to be given access is to provide your business number OR website address to the Admin. Since anyone and their dog can have a website, this was causing a few minor problems. Anyone and their dog can still have access to the public forum.
During the discussion, it was suggested that maybe also having a time/post count limit to join as well, because we’ve had instances of people joining the private forums only to snag all our personal info (which granted, isn’t all that personal: website address, maybe email) and then spammed everyone “advertising” their services. They have a “registered business”, but that’s not what the private forums are for, so someone thought maybe requiring members to have X number of posts, and/or have been a member for X length of time before they can apply to the private forums, to weed out the spammers and whatnot. I was one of the ones who voiced an amount of support for that idea, since I’ve seen it work quite well on other boards. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it requires that anyone new actuallyinteract with other members, and everyone can get to know them for a little while before they get to jump right in to reading more personal information.
Well.
You’d think anyone who supported that idea had asked for a human sacrifice. People started going on and on about how it’s soooo unfair to new people to exclude them just because you don’t know a thing about them. Or how what we’re really saying is that some of us think we’re better than everyone else because we have more posts (which is obviously the only reason we support such an idea, of course).
OMG, call the whaaaambulance! It’s an emo-gency!
The thing that gets me is that these are all GROWN WOMEN! Business owners! More specifically, grown women business owners who run online businesses. You’d think they’d never been online before, what with being so shocked that anyone might disagree with them.
Here’s a system for you:
Introduce a moderation system. When a person first joins the public forum, they can apply for private forum access. Their application is submitted to a pool of moderators. X number of moderators must review the application and approve it before they are accepted to the private forum. If an insufficent number of people approve the person, then after Y number of posts in the public forum they can apply again and be accepted.
This generates a solution to the whining. If people are concerned that people aren’t being given a chance than give them a task to help correct the problem. What will happen is that most people probably can’t be bothered to do the moderating.
A penalty system could also be introduced whereby if Person A approves Z people who all end up getting banned, then Person A is warned, then later banned as appropriate.
Yeah, something like that was actually suggested, but people didn’t want the mods (I’m a mod) to have so much “power” over other people, ’cause mods could vote down someone for personal reasons or something.
You’d think that if enough mods hated someone enough to vote to deny them access to the private forum, it would indicate that there was a problem with the person, not the mods, but whatever.
It ended up being decided that starting in the new year the private forum members would be wiped, and in order to gain (or regain) access you had to submit forms in writing to the site Admin, and you have to have an actual business registered, and not just a website.