[thelist] How to keep a forum good and clean

[Magnus Østergaard]

I've been asked to implement a forum/comment system on a website I work
on.

I will try to leave my personal openion about comments on webpages out
of this, but I see a few problems I'd like to avoid. The main being how
to avoid abuse.

I guess there are people on this list, that have been fighting the
community beast before me, and I would like to read your openion.
Possibly learning from your experiences ;-)

Lately I've seen several websites close or 'loose it' as their forum or
comment features have been abused. What it boils down to is, comments
are nice, but we can't spent any time watching over the comments all the
time.

The comment option is only needed for a few ~10 ish pages. The people
responsible for these pages think e-mail is too complicated, so they
want the option of viewers adding comments directly onto the page(s).
Saves them the cut-n-paste I guess.

Now we have a member system, but really the community is dead. I suspect
a lot signed up because of a contest we had. The manager agrees that a
online community is not really what we need. So this has been put on
hold. But the option of adding comment on pages is something we are
missing I've been told. We had this before, but have realised our place
is more a "This is how we do it", to prove it can be done, while "These
other people are much better at helping you". (Hope this makes sense).

To me it seems silly that people should sign up in order to leave a
comment. When it is likely they will never return.

The reason I'm saying this is that the pages are install instructions,
once people have installed what ever it is, they'll move on. Thats okay,
as we are not really looking for a community thing anyways, but how do
we then try to controle the comment?

My idea is to have the original page include a comment page, and each
time someone post a message, it is mailed to the staff. (I plan to write
this in PHP.)

The site is about Linux, highly technical, targeting university students
and sysadmins so the audience should be mature. Oh and it is a
government site.

Any ideas of how to best maintain controle of what is being posted? Am I
just being paranoid, and should I just write the darn thing and see how
it goes?


Thank you,

// Magnus