June 24, 2005

• *starts looking for the hidden MoFi elite board*
• There is no Cabal.
• All you do is upgrade the longer term original crew to admin or some other status above ordinary user, give 'em a members only forum. Basically, you can't avoid a certain amount of caste on message boards. You don't give them a hidden board, you just give access to it for people who are 'advanced' members or whatever you want to call it.
• ha ha..n00b
• Your situation is certainly not unique, rolypolyman, and I'm not sure that there is any administrative solution that will please everybody. Any division/segregation is going to piss people off. That being said, money is the bottom line. Could you perhaps set up a "registered members only" forum? If the "experienced members" are that frustrated maybe they'll be willing to pay for a more private club. Still, there will be flames. Good luck.
• On one of the computer graphics groups I know there are an "advanced users" forum and a "new users" forum. It doesn't prevent newbies from being flamed once in a while, but on the whole it seems to work. On another CG group there is a "sandbox" forum that is the only place where new members can post until their status is upgraded after a few posts). Some (very advanced) members of this group also funded a separate, per invitation only, website forum for the professional members. However the messages on this forum remain visible to anyone.
• I am curious whether you all have had experiences with elitism and "inner circles" within any online communities. Yes. But also within every offline community I've ever been a part of.
• TotalMoFi.
• The first rule of online cliques is that we do not discuss online cliques.
• Funny, we were discussing this only the other day on the secret Justified Ancients of MoFi boards*, and we- Oh, shit. Didn't mean to say that. Er. Nothing. Forget I spoke. Basically, it's nothing to do with the architecture of the site, the internet, or anything. Just as old friends at a party will often congregate together, and people who haven't known them as long would feel totally left out and not getting the in-jokes and everything. It's human nature. But just as with a party, you've got to go with your original intentions. If you've invited everybody you've ever met over to your house for a huge piss-up, staying in the kitchen the whole time with all your old friends is not only impolite, it's foolish. You're likely to find that someone's vomited in your bed at the end of the night, and your coffee table's been broken because people were dancing on it. If you only wanted to see your old friends, you should only have invited them. So (to drag myself away from that increasingly unstable metaphor), a hidden, "elders only" area within the an open-membership site is a bad idea. If they want something like that, get them to take it offsite (eg, eg). Within the site, it would lead to jealousy, snarkery, and leave the main part of the site filled with broken coffee tables and vomit.
• *I was actually going to set this up at one point, when it looked like loads of the old crowd were leaving MoFi for various reasons. I was going to call it "The Apes of Wrath"...
• Seconding what everyone else is saying. I was in an offshoot board - a private invite only offsite - at one time & then when the inevitable - implosion at private board, people getting pissed off, taking it back to public board - happened it was a HUGE mess. Everyone's latent paranoia came screaming to the front and we were accused of all kinds of ridiculous crimes. I like the open advanced users only forum, because that way you can make it there given time & persistence, no cliquey invite only thing at all. *looks around, waits patiently for secret mofi clique board invite*
• This happens in any community that has a non-trivial amount of membership growth. This is especially prominent in online groups where turnover is high and relationships are more anonymous. It has been my experience (as flashboy said) that setting up internal special groups only makes things worse. The members who feel that quality is going down, yahta yahta, should probably take it upon themselves to set an example, not by splitting off into their own group.
• I didn't want to be part of your group anyways, you filthy, blackballing bastards! ... Sorry, I was a little on edge just then. I'd give anything to be a secret MoFi member. I'd stay in the corner and not get in anyone's way.
• I've been on both sides of this, as a new member and as one of the old guard. In my experience, no matter how annoying the new members may be it's best to just suck it up and stick with the original format. I got all excited when I was sent an invite to the elitist board (I'm in! They like me! Screw the newbies!) only to discover that it was insanely dull, and like rats in too small a cage there was a lot of sniping and backbiting. People just weren't as fun and interesting once isolated in a sterile environment. As flashboy says, if they want it badly enough they can create their own retreat offsite, I doubt very much that would mean they won't still come to your site.
• I've never administered a board myself, but I've read several posts by long time admins about the pitfalls. One common piece of advice was that admins have to accept that the board will change and evolve, or cycle, as new members come in and old members get fed up. That's simply the nature of community if you want to remain dedicated to the subject of the board, rather than loyal to a particular group of members, no matter how comfortable they are.
• There was this club in D.C. where friends and I use to frequent. There was the "mysterious" secret area which overlooked the space. Invite only of course. The peon below would look at it in admiration *wishing* they too would one day be given access. One of my good friends made his way into the inner-circle of the club. Great, now we could finally see what the secret room was all about. Well, just as is usually the case in such "elite" environments, it was boring as hell. The real fun is where everyone is at - new, old, and everything inbetween... /bad analogy
• Ban them all and let god decide
• You mean, you dont no teh secrit handshake? Before the [more inside], the first thing that came to my mind was MeFi. To differentiate, though, you can give either charge a nominal fee for increased functionality (including posting access to some boards, although I think they should be universally readable), or you can give the bonus functionality to people with high post counts (meaning that only the people who've been around a while can get there). If there are certain individuals who you know would be disruptive on the power clique boards, ban them before they post the requisite number of posts. If they re-up with a new name, their post total initializes back at zero. I would say the minimum number of posts for this should be something like 1000 or maybe even something higher. Not something a troll could earn in a few days, but something that takes several months. If someone is a troll, that gives admins a significant period to decide to ban them.
• I'm a member of a large cycling community forum that manages to maintain a fairly high quality of post, overall. It may be the nature of the activity itself that allows the forum to be broken up into separate "rooms," i.e. roadies, BMX, mountainbikers, tandem riders, touring bikes, commuters, advocacy, etc., but the result is that people tend to frequent the areas that interest them. Of course, there are always jerks in any community, on or offline, but the arrangement seems to work really well. The community seems to put smart-asses and trolls in their place pretty quickly. The only "private" areas are one for vendors and cylcle shop owners and one for women to discuss things they would otherwise be embarrassed to discuss in one of the other topical forums.
• I, personally, am totally against any sort of member only private boards within a larger community. I think that not only is it the equivelent of living in a gated community, but when those who AREN"T in the gated community find out, they will be pissed not only because it is exclusionary, it will seem arbitrary and very often private message boards devolve into if someone is worthy or not to be one of the golden children. Things like moderation or limiting posting rights is a lot better than setting up secret societies.I think behing heavy handed on the bannination is better than a gated community. I wouldn't want to be a part of a secret forum or a website that made you pay five dollars to join. I see it as not only elitist, but snobbish as well as undemocratic. Of course now the Illuminatti will try to revolk my membership!!!
• In any public message board, there's a cyclic influx of trolls, wackos and clueless newbies. The moon phases, college terms, elections; who knows what lures them, but sometimes the noise ratio can get on old hand's nerves. But that's what helps boards grow and evolve. The tide can bring interesting people, spark active debates, new outlooks on old ideas. I've been in a couple technical ones were you have to earn access via posting and validation by admins. Elitist, but that and FAQs helps ease everybody's nerves. And the invite-only, inner circle thing can be difficult to handle. Tension can run higher when you know some poster beyond his/her handle and posts carry a haevier weight. But it can also be gratifying, if the group happens to really get along.
• Monkeyfilter: I wouldn't want to be a part of a secret forum or a website that made you pay five dollars to join
• Heh. Rolypolyman = Mathowie
• Sandspider, is that a second-hand apron?
• It is indeed, StoryBored!
• Thanks all for the great info! And no, I'm not mathowie, but I'll take your $5.
• Of course there should be a VIP area. Where else can you go to do lines when a song you don't like comes on?
• In any public message board, there's a cyclic influx of trolls, wackos and clueless newbies. Hey! Lay off, will ya!
• That's funny, JJ.
• Those elite areas in clubs are where the people hang out who only want to hang out with people just like them. The only upside is that there's usually real elbow room there, since all the people who only want to hang out with people just like them don't all show up to hang out at the same time.
• "If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people. In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus. No, the dream is a big house, off alone somewhere. A penthouse, like Howard Hughes. Or a mountaintop castle, like William Randolph Hearst. Some lovel isolated nest were you can invite only the rabble you like. An environment you can control, free from conflict and pain. Where you rule. Whether it's a ranch in Montana or a basement apartment with ten thousand DVDs and high-speed Internet access, it never fails. We get there, and we're alone. And we're lonely. After we're miserable enough-- like the narrator in his Fight Club condo, or the narrator isolated by her own beatiful face in Invisible Monsters-- we destroy our lovely nest and force ourselves back into the larger world." Good old Chuck Palahniuk.
• "I'm an admin on a very large discussion board catering to an outdoor hobby." I might be just stirring the pot but suppose the outdoor hobby were mountain climbing and the n00bcomer to the discussion board were Reinhold Messner.
• If you must differentiate between the newbies and the experienced, I would suggest some sort of ranking system based upon number of posts (or comments), like other people have suggested. The more posts (or comments), the higher the rank. At this point, you could go one of two ways: 1) either just leave it at that, with the rank of the poster easily identifiable so that everyone knows at a glance or 2) give more privileges to people based on rank, with a siginificant amount of time/posts between ranks and a careful use of the banhammer so that trolls can't get too highly ranked.
• a basement apartment with ten thousand DVDs and high-speed Internet access Chuck Palahniuk must be stalking me.
• Or maybe the fact that elite groups are "boring" is just what the real elite groups want you to think. Quick! Everyone act boring, so these new "elite members" will go back to the masses where they belong, and tell all those other smelly people they don't even want to be here. (e.g. "the greatest trick God ever pulled, was convincing us Heaven didn't exist") But seriously, the real question seems to be: how can you create a place where the people you don't want there don't want to come? You could always just name it the "techinical discussion" forum, but there should be plenty of creative ways to screen people. What if you had a week- or month-long delay between registration and being able to access the forum? Or if you could find someone apolitical enough with enough time of their hands who could filter "applications". E.g. you could have to write a paragraph why you should be admitted. Probably few who takes this seriously and write the paragraph are going to be the typical annoying newbies. Also important: is the group that wants the private forum (and that would be admitted to the forum) ALL of the older users? Or is it a subset of the older users that is annoyed by another subset of older users + the newbies? The former should be much easier to deal with, just devise a system where equal opportunity to participate is given to anyone who expresses satisfactory interest or commitment. If it's the latter, tell them to set up their own board.
• You could go the Television Without Pity / Fametracker route and get a few totalitarian mods to enforce strict rules. Both those sites maintain a high level for discussion. If you do that, a lot of people will: 1) get banned; 2) get annoyed and leave. Whedonesque does this as well, but it's enough to kill pretty much every interesting conversation/argument on the site, so you have to be careful.
• I am involved to varying degrees on many boards, and have seen this many times. K5 (kuro5hin.org) is the best example. The site became more and more popular and shifted focus from member contributed news and interest stories to user diaries and the like. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course. But the site admin took a very hands-off approach, and the new users, trolls, trollbiters and crapflooders began to own the site. Things did not in fact return to normalcy. The strong and loyal user base felt abandoned. Cabals evolved and offshoot sites were created. I still post at two of them. One is a private "gated community" if you will, and the other is a public scoop site that for the most part is made up of the original, and forgive my arrogance, most intelligent and contributing users. These days, K5 is a shitbox, with posts dominated by trolls, skilled and otherwise, and the morons that bite on the trolls. It is my strong opinion that a sandbox for new users to get their feet wet, a public area for all, and an advanced area where only quality senior contributors can post provides the best quality control and lets you retain focus and decorum in the public section, which really is the most important section. Ruling with either an iron fist or an anemic "please.." won't work. Fairness and degrees of separation and mobility provides the groundwork for the best communities. Of course, this is just my opinion.
• Well, that raises the question of who is, or what makes one a quality senior member? I'm monkey #208, does that make me more senior and more quality than user #2080 (whoever that may be)? I'm user #104532 over at slashdot, while I see user numbers as high as 708952. Even though I have "excellent" karma over there, is someone in the hundred thousands senior enough? At another website I'm user 656 or something and even though I don't post very often, I would be pissed as hell if I found out there was a forum on that site I wasn't able to at least read. I know that there are people at certain websites that joined after I did and spend more time there, but does that make them better or worse than me? My point is that once you start making up special clubs, the only thing it is going to do is alienate people further. I would be better to close the site to the outside world entirely, than to close part of it to "undesirables." Honestly, I've seen more than one web community become full of "trolls" and while some survived and others didn't, none of them were the communities they were beforehand. Some were better, some were worse, but they were never the same. Change is inevitable!
• Anything you morons say in my abscence couldn't possibly have any value.
• I would form a special "Premiere Membership" for your site. To get a Premiere Membership, one would have to pay 50 or 100 dollars. You would be absolutely clear that the only way in is to pay the fee. Then you secretly invite and control who you want in. Set the fee where you know no one will pay it. If anyone does go to the trouble of paying 50 or 100 dollars, you will probably not have much difficulty tolerating their costly presence.
• I just don't get any of this. If it's cool, it automatically becomez passe.
• ummmm....just so you guys know...there IS an elite area on MoFi...it's the deleted post area. much fun abounds there... maybe you could try something like that... a 'garbage dump' area or something mislabeled somehow...but laying around in plain sight. a thorough search of the site (such as one a more experienced user might perform in times of boredom) would easily turn it up, but it would mostly be overlooked by the casual user... if you look at the threads in this area, you'll see that the first couple of posts are by a pretty random cross-section of the population. But, if you look a little further down (ie...after they got deleted), you'll see that the proportion of older/more active members goes way up... now if you added a widget (say waaaaay at the bottom of the fpp form page) that would allow you to 'delete' your own post (at the time of posting or later) then you'd have something... btw, how many members does your site have at this point?
• if it's cool, it automatically becomez passe It's cool when discussions and ideas flow freely and everyone involved is having fun. The moment one gets all self-conscious and starts getting serious and establishes rules and laws, it's over. Like everything else in life. When you try to grasp the moment, it is gone. /hangover, not much sleep last night
• OK, I'm all aboot grasping whatever. Sign me up.
• Hey, man, I've been thrown out of way better places than this.