One of the most common charges levelled at this forum (and others) is the amount of bitching and cattiness between members. You may wish to know, therefore, that there is another way:
Generally, if a forum is well moderated with a clear set of rules, there isn't really any problems. Take Digital Spy for example, it's a massive community yet is still kept in order thanks to it's moderation team. Sometimes the mods are a bit heavy handed, and will normally ban people and delete threads without notice, but with a forum of that size they have to be otherwise it will become unruly very quickly. Sure, DS's moderation isn't perfect as there are somethings they should deal with but don't, but at least it's there and working well.
The problem is, this is a forum about the TV/Media industry which as you'll know if you work in it is absolutely full of massive egos. So if somebody posts something which has even an ounce of incorrectness about it, the egos will jump in and immediately correct them. The egos of the people who originally posted said misinformation will then have a bruised ego, arguments will start and you know the rest.
I think this forum and as previously mentioned DS are run well and there's no problems. You get the occasional numpty, but they are mostly banned or warned or whatever, so i don't see a problem here
Egos aren't something that are uniquely the preserve of inside the TV industry of course, bearing in mind TV Forum is predominantly frequented by the fans(!) However I would not be so conceited as to absolve myself of any guilt in this direction - believe it or not I do take on board what it said to me...
I needed a lot of convincing to start the GH forum. My main concerns were in view of my experiences on TVF at the time - that it would all descend into one giant catfight and I wouldn't be able to stay in control. In the end, we had a predominantly very happy community who could talk about what they liked about Grange Hill - and other things - without fear of getting ribbed or belittled by others. Obviously no community is perfect, there were some attempts to disrupt the atmosphere but these were swiftly dealt with.
The most significant thing is that I managed to do this without being "headmasterish" as many people here might have expected. Indeed, one of the outgoing moderators has thanked me for allowing him to do his job using his own discretion and without any "guidance" of any kind from myself.
Why is the forum closing then, you may ask? Again, the reasons are fully explained in the links but the crux of it is the forum outgrew the site. These are not there to allow me to pat myself on the back - you know what I think of such self-congratulation - but to give you an idea of what can be achieved.
I remember a forum that I used to visit - everything was very nice - until the mods turned on the admin, leaving the whole forum in a terrible state. It's fine now, though. It seems this happened because there were too many mods on the forum.
Then you get the other end of the scale - the Weebls Stuff forum. That's where the absolute filth are. This forum is tame compared to this one - the boards are practically uncensored. 99% of the veterans there just post blatherskite all over the boards. You cannot say anything without a massive row over it. And, to say there are a vast amount of people on there, few ever get banned.
If people think this board's bad, send them over to there and in just a month they will re-emerge depressed and suicidal.
This is probably one of the better boards I have visited - the debates are heated with some injections of banter to make the board that bit nicer.
I'm merely saying that it is possible to stop the hurling of insults, if the forum admins have a mind to. The way some people speak to each other here simply would not have been tolerated on The Blackboard.
But in fairness to Asa, as I have discovered there is far more to running a forum than simply its day to day maintenance and moderation so for that he has my utmost respect. For one, you have to know about databases, keeping the phpBB up to date etc; my knowledge of these areas is negligable. Where I had tried "fixing things" in the past I ended up making the forum vulnerable to attack from spambots and it wasn't a situation I knew how to get myself out of. Luckily, we now have a programming wizard on the admin team who has fixed many of these issues during the past month or so.
Nevertheless, it was felt the forum was still requiring too much attention and was keeping me away from maintaining the main site so we decided to end things on a high.
