[thelist] How to keep a forum good and clean

[Ed Shuck]

Hi Magnus,

First, I have a forum on my site and the problem is getting anyone to visit
the darn thing.

I use vBulletin and the package has a means of stopping posts from a given
user or URL (and lots of other features)

peace and the best of luck with the forum.
----- Original Message -----
From: Magnus Østergaard <magnus at slackware.adsl.dk>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2002 6:49 PM
Subject: [thelist] How to keep a forum good and clean


> 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
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