Blogs, Forums and bloggers...

For those who can spare the time, several blogs and forums have appeared around the Llandudno area in the past year or so. This, of course, is one of them, but we started this one specifically to try to avoid the issues which have plagued others.

Many folk are not too sure what the difference is between a Blog and a Forum, so here's the guide....

A Forum (the name - fora - originated in Latin about 2000 years ago and meant a public square or marketplace used for judicial and other business) is literally a 'meeting place' and is seen by many as a critical start to the truly democratic process of the Western world.

A Blog is a sort of diary, often written by more than one person, which tends to have a theme, such as a geographical area, a hobby or interest, or a profession, for instance.

What's the main difference?

A Blog consists of the articles written by the Blog's owners, and comments submitted by the readers of the Blog. These comments usually have to be approved by the Blog owner prior to their publication and do not normally appear on the blog page until 'summoned'. A Blog is also a single or group perspective on things.

A forum is an online discussion board (it developed from the traditional bulletin board, and is a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system in days of yore) and provides a medium through which anyone can discuss anything that the forum owner(s) permit. The big difference here is that a forum is a vibrant, online cyber-community.

Okay, so that's pretty boring. What else is there to know?

This is where it gets interesting. The web has one characteristic which is both a blessing and a curse. Anonymity. Most forums and Blogs allow their members to post under pseudonyms. The rationale for this is the very public nature of anything posted on the internet, so it makes sense to have as little about yourself and your privacy exposed to world wide onlookers as you can. And there's a lot of those. However, it's this very shroud of secrecy that also allows the more irrational or disruptive to post things they wouldn't normally say out loud, and certainly to someone's face, and this is where the problems start.

Certain individuals or groups of individuals delight in creating mayhem on forums; it's much harder to do on Blogs, since the Blog owner moderates comments posted and can simply delete those they don't deem suitable. However - and this is the big difference between Forums and Blogs - a forum consists of actual cyber-conversations between real people, so deletion in that medium is much more noticeable.

So, why do some people get their comments deleted?

The internet community has developed (actually, mainly adapted) words to describe unacceptable behaviour in forums. There are three main ones:

Troll
Sock Puppet
Spammer

A Troll is simply an antagonist, someone who posts deliberately to create a response from others and is often rude, sometimes even obscene, and disruptive. A Gravedigger Troll deliberately posts in old topics, simply to revive an all but dead topic.

Sock puppets are the bane of forum administrators. Where the Troll is at least up-front, the Sock Puppet registers many times under different pseudonyms, so they can post entire topics and conversations supporting their own points of view, which appear as apparently different members. There is no reliable way to combat this, despite some people having an unfounded reliance on IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. IP addresses only reveal the ISP used, and not the individual address of the person registering.

Spammers are people who simply try to flood a forum with the same phrase or word, often related to a product they're trying to sell. To avoid this, some forums require administrator-approval for registration, which can reduce, although not always eliminate, SPAM.

Er yes, but deleting posts?

In a forum, the aim is to have an enthusiastic, intelligent discussion venue for those with similar or common interests. This ambition can quickly degenerate if the forum becomes the playground of the disruptive. So two classes of people in a forum police the place. They're known as administrators (admins) and moderators (mods). Admins are all powerful, and can delete or change anything and anyone. Mods have their powers prescribed by admins, and usually help out, rather than take executive decisions.


Here's the big problem.

Every forum depends on the quality of its Admins for its success. The admins ought to be a coherent team of individuals who are - at least - possessed of similar belief, honesty, intelligence and experience if any forum is to work. Admins should also post under a name and not a capricious pseudonym. In fact, members of forums should also be encouraged to post under a true first name (not a surname) as this generally inspires a stronger community sense within the group. Forums fail because the Admin team is either weak, inexperienced, lacking in judgement or dishonest; that latter aspect will ensure a forum's eventual demise.

That's enough for this one -'onest!