Vorstand - Comité PPS

Again we have issues with the behavior of members in the forum. Instead of treating this as a technical or legal issue, we could instead treat it as a political challenge. What should we do with the forum?

1. Don't change anything

That did work so well the last time around (sarcasm). Even I have to agree, that we have to do something.

Pros: not a lot of work in the short term
Cons: not a solution, we will have the same argument again

2. Shut down the forum

The proven Hosni Mubarak solution! Those fools continue to bicker and troll in the forum? Lets just turn it off.

Except that the members will start to find other outlets. Already I see a lot of noise on twitter (even though I don't even use it that actively) and also Facebook, Google+, Reddit, and many more establish themselves quickly as the alternative to the forums. But there we have no easy way of moderating troll posts.

Pros: Frees up resources in the AG DI and for the moderation
Cons: We loose a unified platform for communication, the trolling will move to other communication systems that we cannot so easily moderate

3. Treat it as a social problem

This takes a lot of discipline to pull off and I am not sure if this works for every community. In the newsgroups users that disturbed were labeled with a derogative (troll is the most known) and every user was disciplined by other users, simply not to answer these posts (don't feed them, feed them red herrings, banning of flamewars, invoking Godwin's law, posting pony pictures), so they quickly fall to the bottom of the list.

Pros: No special technical resources needed
Cons: Takes a lot of dedicated users

4. Treat it as a technical problem

There are different takes on this. Maybe we just want the users to use certain features more often. We could enforce the option to hide unliked content (but this could lead to widespread sock puppet use to hide unliked opinions of others). We could add a link to put people to the ignore list next to the users profiles so that the newsgroup style "plonking" is used more often (but this only works for existing members, newcomers are still flooded with all kinds of posts).

We could also switch from a classic webforum to some other community system that has completely different mechanisms build in. If for example such a software enforced personal and public spaces, every user could write with great liberty in the personal pages (similar to facebook), but on public spaces there is moderation enforced by that spaces owner (the board, a workgroup, a section, etc.). New users in such systems usually only see the most popular posts by default and can add contacts or become members of groups to get additional content for their newsfeeds.

Pros: Could lead to completely new mechanisms and less difficulties for the moderation
Cons: A technical challenge more for AG DI, depending on the new solution it could be very difficult to migrate the existing content exept as a static archive.

Do we want to change anything regarding the forum?

• Yes ()
• No ()
• Abstention ()

If yes, which solution should we go for?

• 2. ()
• 3. ()
• 4. ()