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At which point can a forum lose its sense of community?

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,096
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
First off, this is 100% unrelated to this forum or any other computer forum you might see me on. This is more a debate I just want to measure what others think because if I directly pressed this on the community I'm going to refer to without a name, it would very swiftly be dealt with.
While I'm sure the moderators of vcfed can agree I can be a pain in the butt at times, you are all considerably nicer than many of our alternatives. ;)

We know that forums can have life cycles. They start up, they have their run of popularity and as users age, mature or the core reason the forum exists becomes redundant or obsolete it dies off before being shutdown entirely. Some forums however remain perpetual. As long as there will be computers, the context of "vintage" will always be in the air. There will always be cult classics in film and television. Car enthusiasts will likewise exist long after we are all dead. You get the idea.
This particular community grew up around interests and television inspiration. A fan site. The first iteration of the forum appeared as far back as 2005 and I entered into the scene as far back as 2007. At that point there multiple fan sites operating on multiple platforms such as Yahoo! groups and Geocities running on whatever flavor of forum software was hip at the time, usually vBulletin. I was a moderator on one of them. There's the people who show up and communicate and there's the power-users who you see across multiple forums, usually making a dozen or so posts on each daily. Time drags on, Geocities shuts down, Yahoo! boards become increasingly unpopular compared to more traditional forums here in the West and you see some of the smaller fansites close and the userbases migrate to one or two larger forums. Smaller webspaces which mostly contain pages of information, images, notes and side-groups merge and become hard-linked to by one major site which starts acting as a hub to the forums, resources and news. Finally in 2012 in the transition from HTTP to HTTPS everything merges into a single server hosting all the pages and a new forum. All the while these constantly active users you've seen posting for the last five years are making their way up the ranks from regular user, to super user to moderator and finally to the site administration team. You know these people from outside the community (be it games or IRC chats or something) and you know that as they spent increasingly larger amounts of time on one site or another they develop a bit of a superiority complex. You start to see really weird decisions get made that exit the control of other senior users.
For example I find a video that provides a great behind-the-scenes on something and post it. It's deleted. No externally hosted videos are allowed to be posted for copyright reasons. Well, okay but you don't provide a means internally to host videos. Eventually youtube videos are allowed to be posted but they must strictly be on-topic and free of copyrighted material and you probably ask why the moderation team wishes to manage that when Youtube is capable of doing that itself. You begin to notice trends. Videos being one example but if you aren't regularly in the forum you are missing a lot. You can enter into a thread that started that morning and has 11 posts, then return four hours later and now it only has 8 and the photos from another have been removed. You work on your own personal projects and propose ideas on how others can make it as well and get grilled because you are making unofficial, possibly counterfeit merchandise. I mean, it's a fan site. When you get older are you going to grill your kids for drawings they put on the fridge because they are not officially endorsed?
Incidentally around the same time, the popularity of the site has finally attracted the attention of the subject's official proprietor and agree to become the "unofficial" english-speaking source of news, gossip and sneak-peeks on new things coming up and internationally. At the same time the proprietor never directs anyone at the community site, rather instead towards their own official news feeds. At that point there you begin to see a serious shift of the moderation. To your knowledge the forums and the entire site is funded by donations and those maintaining the order still have full-time jobs to pay the rent, yet you find that everything now falls under the microscope. Sure, the on-topic areas remain as such but with razor-sharp moderation. You do anything outside of the context of the discussion and you see your post vanish or the little "[Moderator edited]" tag and that post can no longer be edited. But it goes beyond that. It starts creeping into the more casual and more off-topic areas. It feels a lot more like anything that you post must be approved before it goes anywhere near the name of the proprietor, even if it's in the lounge and we are still talking about an unofficial fansite. We're not talking politics. We're not talking personal life issues. Even just discussing a vacation or a public meetup gets heavily redacted. A few weeks after COVID became the big news topic everywhere I carefully evaluated the room and made a soft "So we're all stuck at home and this virus is everywhere. How are you passing the time? lmao" type of thread. Deleted. The topic was determined by the moderation team was too distressing and in future I was asked not to make threads like this again unless I reviewed it with a moderator. Without actually starting said discussion the thread appeared in verbatim several days later, posted by the same moderator. So I wasn't allowed to make a thread like that, but they were.
Lastly was the one that bothered me enough to stop being a regular contributor to this community which was when I got the impression it wasn't just the forums being screened but your PM's as well. That's not a new thing and forums do routinely screen automatically for malicious activities within PM's but when it's something like trying to discuss trades and exchanges in PM's and between that you get notifications by email of a PM and that PM disappears from your inbox before you can reach it that you get concerned this is not automated filtering but people are manually looking at your mail. Normally when that happened you could still see the bulk of the message in the email because it was previewed in that, but eventually that was disabled so you'd get notifications of PM's, you'd go look and there was nothing. You report it to administration and they'd just say "PM's are actively screened for unacceptable behavior. Repeated violations will have you removed from the forum."
Okay, sure I can see where they are going with that but when it's something as simple as "hey I saw you mentioned you backed [X's] site up before he died can you send me a copy because it's not on Wayback?" and you're getting told from above that you illegally sharing files (???) is prohibited and the message was deleted, like get the hell out of my inbox. You can't post it publicly. You can't post it privately. You tell people to email you off-site (in PM's!) and they put you in the corner for a week.
Fine, so the site has either become a mouthpiece for the owner of the IP much like you see with official community forums like you see from EA for example and are making sure absolutely nothing happens while its under their ownership to the point it's excessively sterile, or the same kids you saw posting daily all those years back have grown up and became absolute control freaks to a point it's scary. So go so a side-community where it's better. Go to a different Discord server. What happens if you start looking around and they are everywhere? They organize events. They moderate subreddits. They operate all of the active discord servers and you start to wonder if this IS their paying full-time job. You piss them off in one place and they almost exclusively have the ability to boot you out of the entire community from any direction because they and only they do not like you? I can't easily say it's the toxicity of a whole community when it's a group of people you can count with one hand who essentially dictate everything below the tier of the official organization, their employees and their legal team but what do you when regardless how new or senior you are to a community you can't defend other users and your contributions can't be seen? I know there are other good people in this community that I can socialize with but we have to do it privately, fearing the wrath of them. That's not a community at that point.
 
Mods can make or break a community. There's a certain purple forum to which I no longer contribute due to the erratic enforcement of "rules", and I know others have left as well.
 
And sometimes the interest just fades. I'm dealing with one such forum that was established around Steorn (for the purpose of debunking). Steorn has been debunked and the world has moved on. Just a few old friends post now at the rate of maybe 2-3 new posts a day, if tat.
 
As a point to consider, if a forum is free to use by its members, then its members have zero ownership over anything on it. I don't necessarily agree with this, but I learned this fairly early on when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons by post on a few different sites. One in particular was a paid site, where members did retain ownership of their writing to some degree. Basically, someone couldn't steal your game posts and write a book from them. Since Play-By-Post style games are largely narrative driven, this attracts a lot of budding writers, so you can see where the concern lies. Free sites that offer Play-By-Post experience don't make any guarantees about protecting your content from poaching authors. This example is just being used to illustrate that if a site is free, members should not expect ownership or protection of anything on it (Facebook is an example of this writ large).

I find that forums tend to "lose their sense of community" when the community simply gets too large. We humans tend to be tribal, which means hooked into smaller groups on the global scale, and the advent of the Internet proper instantly connected us to more people than we ever though possible. Our biases, prejudices, preferences and sense of belonging all got mashed together before we were psychologically ready for it when technology started moving faster than we could evolve mentally and emotionally. Small conflict suddenly gets magnified tenfold with semi-permanent text, illusory privacy, and new groups forming giving rise to what I call Otherness, or this idea that "Group X over there is full of crazy people, and we are not like them" type thinking.

Reddit is a good example of this. The site is massive, easily one of the biggest in terms of global users, and yet it's divided into thousands of groups, some of which are regularly at each others' throats. I can't imaging being a mod in that situation, and to wit, I am the moderator of a subreddit for the small town I live in and was a former moderator of a larger subreddit, r/MUD for those Multi-User Dungeons we all know and love. Even as small as r/MUD's readership was (I think about 7000 people at the time of my moderatorship) there was a clear division; those who hated the pay-to-win games versus those who preferred to support the independently run games.

My point is that the community itself has just as much responsibility to maintain the community as the moderators do, and this applies to any forum. We've all been on a smaller forums, were things are pretty self-policing, but as that community grows, we start to notice changes, or an influx of new ideas and opinions that we do not necessarily agree with. We become resistant to that change, sometimes going so far as to rail against it, but it persists none the less, we deem the community dead, and make our exit. I'm not immune to this, myself.

None of this is to say that moderators aren't sometimes to blame. We've all seen that happen too, mods whipping themselves into a frenzy in a power trip over some seemingly innocuous thing that turned out to be a mountain made from a mole hill. Other times it might be the moderators going against the wishes of the community completely, and changing things in a divisive way. Perhaps sometimes we forget that the moderators are not there to serve us, the members, but more to be a guide on how to conduct ourselves within said community, since each community will have its own decorum and rules of engagement. Perhaps still, some moderators forget that they are not here to lord over us, either. There's a balance to be had, you see, and as soon as that balance is lost, the community typically starts to crumble.

Having been a member on a variety of BBSs, forums, and even in-person groups over the last 30+ years, I have learned that it is best to be the new guy who comes in, sits down, and shuts up for a bit. This way you can just read, listen or watch the other members. How are the typically affairs conducted? What does this group expect from its members? What's the lingo, what's taboo, what's considered funny? All of this is learned by observation, and not so much participation, and if I encounter things I don't like or agree with during this time of observation, I know the group is not for me, and quietly make my exit. That is the best advice I can give to anyone who is having a bad time figuring out where they belong, or seeking other like-minded folks.

However, we also have to keep in mind that any group we join, we are just one voice among many, and in typical human fashion, majority tends to rule. The Internet Engineers have gotten pretty good at figuring out how to make different groups feel like a majority by only showing them curated content, but that's a whole other post in and of itself. The point here is that as a singular voice, we continually choose to either be part of change or deny change, though change tends to happen regardless. Sometimes that change happens internally, as we see a lot on a site like Reddit, and sometimes it happens externally, for which I point to things like general attitudes toward censorship and content moderation. This is always a difficult subject to approach, but it tends to be driven by what's happening outside of a given forum and on the Internet proper. Nobody likes being told what they can't say or share, especially if they're not making any money off of it, or their efforts are well-intentioned. Here's where the stickiness of interpretation comes in, and we go back to over-zealous moderators or a mob-mentality community stepping hard on the gas in some misguided act of defiance or restoration of "order."

Forums, in a way, are a microcosm of society, and we demand cohesion within our little groups, but it is an irrational demand at best, because we humans are terribly irrational, ourselves. That's the nut of the whole thing, really; irrationality. We approach expecting a rational order to things, and for a time, we may actually get it, but eventually, it cracks at the seams and starts to break free. The reason why forums tend to lose their sense of community is, in short, an existential problem.

Alright, who needs a drink?
 
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It is sad that key people that have greatly supported retrocomputing are restricted in providing hard to find, if not imposible to find data that alows others to repair early technology that the world has pass on from and deleted references to elsewhere. If it wasn't for the few that thought, hey, maybe someone will need this information some day, let me keep it, where would the retro computer community be today. Rather than deleting posts, why not attach a warning statement that some data contained may be copyrighted and is provided solely for personal use and not to violate any copyrights.
 
It is sad that key people that have greatly supported retrocomputing are restricted in providing hard to find, if not imposible to find data that alows others to repair early technology that the world has pass on from and deleted references to elsewhere. If it wasn't for the few that thought, hey, maybe someone will need this information some day, let me keep it, where would the retro computer community be today. Rather than deleting posts, why not attach a warning statement that some data contained may be copyrighted and is provided solely for personal use and not to violate any copyrights.
This is definitely something I've been on about for years, with particular regard to manuals. For those who do not realize it, the "rights" to manuals for old technology are being bought up at an alarming rate, and then being sold anywhere from $10USD - $20USD a pop by services like OlderManuals.com, et al.

I feel that there is something fundamentally wrong about being charged for a PDF copy of a manual so that I can attempt to repair a decades old piece of technology from a company that doesn't even exist anymore. Ludicrous, if you ask me. It's one thing if I'm buying an original manual from somebody on eBay for a few bucks to complete a book collection around a specific product, but scans of said manuals should absolutely be free, maybe with a donation option for the website to help with server costs.

Archive.org does exactly this, even going so far as to offer the copies in multiple formats sometimes, when possible. I contribute manuals I have that aren't already there whenever I come across them, and perhaps that might be a point of consideration regarding what keeps a community going as a community; a common and continuous goal.

With that in mind, perhaps it's time for the vintage computing community to collectively stand up and demand better? After all, being complacent in restricting information is just as bad as bad as being the person who is imposing the restriction.
 
There are at least a couple of places in mind you could go, sign up and be a member for a little while to gain trust, and then create these little "subreddit" like enclaves within the site. You could in theory start your new fan club gathering place at one of these sites, and not be bothered by overzealous moderators. The whole point of these places is that you're free to say what you want, so long as no U.S. laws are being broken. The trouble for some people, however, is that other people are free to say what they want. Personally, I love the concept.

If you're the owner of one of these subs, you do have some level of moderation ability. But... the big "but" is... heavy-handed moderation will instantly land you in hot water with the community at large.

Suppose I should mention that these are NOT chans... there's mostly normal blue-collar people populating these two places I know of... and also a couple of us old computer people too.

Anyway, feel free to send me a message if you want directions to make your way there and check it out.
 
It's happening everywhere, not just forums - any place where you can leave a comment. Sometimes your post just gets deleted - no reason, no notice - it just disappears, no way to debate it. I'm talking about innocent logical truthful posts, with no personal attacks, "hate" or "misinformation".

"Some people" don't want certain things being said - and they can monitor everything now. It really picked up during Covid.
(even casually using that keyword "Covid" makes me feel like a "seek and destroy" target has been placed on me)
 
This is definitely something I've been on about for years, with particular regard to manuals. For those who do not realize it, the "rights" to manuals for old technology are being bought up at an alarming rate, and then being sold anywhere from $10USD - $20USD a pop by services like OlderManuals.com, et al.

I feel that there is something fundamentally wrong about being charged for a PDF copy of a manual so that I can attempt to repair a decades old piece of technology from a company that doesn't even exist anymore. Ludicrous, if you ask me. It's one thing if I'm buying an original manual from somebody on eBay for a few bucks to complete a book collection around a specific product, but scans of said manuals should absolutely be free, maybe with a donation option for the website to help with server costs.

Archive.org does exactly this, even going so far as to offer the copies in multiple formats sometimes, when possible. I contribute manuals I have that aren't already there whenever I come across them, and perhaps that might be a point of consideration regarding what keeps a community going as a community; a common and continuous goal.

With that in mind, perhaps it's time for the vintage computing community to collectively stand up and demand better? After all, being complacent in restricting information is just as bad as bad as being the person who is imposing the restriction.

Personally I consider those places that sell scans to be pirates. They are, after all, selling something is not theirs. Manuals having rights at all (other than the manufacturer's) is a symptom of a fault... the information any of it may contain is neither a literature work nor created for the manual per se, it describes the inner workings of devices of which they have no rights.

In my humble opinion, that's not everything that's wrong/broken nowadays. The world wide web exposed us to an insane amount of information but at the same time corporate power also grew insanely. This power has taken the form of control... never before was the IP control so brutally effective than now. In the past was much easier to do derivative works (or at least inspired on something that already existed), I think that brought a very positive influx of both technical and cultural development. With the current control, every company just redoes past things because they don't have the imagination to do anything new, at the same time they don't allow other people to create new or improved things.

Companies don't want users to mess with the innards of their systems, that's logic at first but when the thing breaks and needs repairs many of them don't offer the technical support more time than the mandatory. We all grew complacent regarding our computers to a point that more sooner than later we won't even own them. People doesn't seem to react... the future does not look good.

At the end of the day, everyone should know what his/her goal is; mine is protecting culture, including parts of the history of my profession. Many people with that very same purpose is what I do consider a healthy Retro Computer Community.

Regards
 
I am a relative newcomer to this forum, so am not qualified to comment on the moderation of it ... but ... coming back to the topic of sense of community, I have to say that I really appreciate the way that folks pitch in to help each other here. Yes, of course there is the odd misunderstanding (sarkiness I think it's called) but then this is a forum and like all written forms of "communication" it is impossible to completely understand the writers' emotions and what exactly he/she meant when writing a post. I do, however, also see that members seem to get things back on track before it escalates into a slanging match. Obviously, software (unless it is true abandonware) is a really sensitive topic here, so I can totally understand when a moderator steps in to correct or clarify a request for (e.g.) a "copy" of a software package.

So, I will defer to the opinion of the longtime members how this community has changed, but I can only say again that I think this is a great gathering of folks willing to pitch in and help each other out, and I am proud to be part of it (y)
 
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Mods can make or break a community. There's a certain purple forum to which I no longer contribute due to the erratic enforcement of "rules", and I know others have left as well.
Agreed' Or favour other member who blatently break the rules and bully other members that who break the rules least often or correct someone whose post is blatently false.
 
Personally I consider those places that sell scans to be pirates. They are, after all, selling something is not theirs. Manuals having rights at all (other than the manufacturer's) is a symptom of a fault... the information any of it may contain is neither a literature work nor created for the manual per se, it describes the inner workings of devices of which they have no rights.

In my humble opinion, that's not everything that's wrong/broken nowadays. The world wide web exposed us to an insane amount of information but at the same time corporate power also grew insanely. This power has taken the form of control... never before was the IP control so brutally effective than now. In the past was much easier to do derivative works (or at least inspired on something that already existed), I think that brought a very positive influx of both technical and cultural development. With the current control, every company just redoes past things because they don't have the imagination to do anything new, at the same time they don't allow other people to create new or improved things.

Companies don't want users to mess with the innards of their systems, that's logic at first but when the thing breaks and needs repairs many of them don't offer the technical support more time than the mandatory. We all grew complacent regarding our computers to a point that more sooner than later we won't even own them. People doesn't seem to react... the future does not look good.

At the end of the day, everyone should know what his/her goal is; mine is protecting culture, including parts of the history of my profession. Many people with that very same purpose is what I do consider a healthy Retro Computer Community.

Regards
Agreed. I joined a Generator Forum and the Admin was pushing me to buy his PDF manuals on the forum (so were other long time users which may have been admins as well I dont know); however a quick google search and I found the PDF files for free. I mean its a file. ITs not a tangible document. If they were selling printed manuals ok sure, alot of us prefer paper.. But this was just a file they did not even create. \

I agree that people selling PDF files like this are in fact Pirates.
 
I've been on many car and motorcycle forums for decades.
When they were privately owned, they were great. When corporations bought them out, they become overgrown to the point they suck.

Example would be a motorcycle forum I joined back in 1992. It was basically for a niche Honda that was produced from 1978 to 1983...the forum was sort of like a usenet format. Over the years it changed owners and improved each time by adding a few needed forums, such as For Sale, General Chat, etc.
Several years ago, XenForo took over and now there are 31 forums, and many have sub-forums on top of that. About 95% is unused, which does nothing but confuse new members. Many pick a dead area, think they're being ignored and never come back.
Another XenForo bike forum I belong to (for one model) has 64 forums. That one has turned into a ghost town of its former self.
I will say moderators on XenForo has been excellent.

Internet Brands now owns a few car forums I belong to and there's a weirdness with the moderation on all of them. There's a Porsche forum that recently had many of its moderators banned...including the original founder of that forum! YEARS worth of very informative posts, by the people who made that forum what is, DELETED. And the top dog doesn't want it discussed. Type in the word Norton (even in a private message) and it automatically gets censored.
About 2 years ago someone started a private forum for one particular car and many of the gurus have moved to it. I can see that happening more and more.
 
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